SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #634 (1), Tuesday, January 9, 2001
**************************************************************************


TITLE: Record Temperatures Sweep Over Far East
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - A cold wave severe even by Russians' hardy standards has settled in over western Siberia and the Far East, sending temperatures down as low as minus 70 degrees Celsius, news media reported on Saturday. 


The temperature, a 30-year record, was recorded in the Ke merovo Region about 3,000 kilometers east of Moscow, while temperatures in much of the rest of Russia east of the Urals were around minus 40. 

The cold wave, which is expected to last several more days, has put a strain on Russia's power plants and heating stations, which often suffer from poor maintenance and slim fuel supplies. 

In Barnaul, 288 kilometers west of Kemerovo, hospital patients were evacuated to sanitariums and other facilities outside the city because of poor heating supplies, the news agency Itar-Tass said. There were no immediate reports of deaths due to the cold. 

In many of the city's apartment blocks, elevators were turned off because of concerns that the low temperatures would cause the lifts' lubricants to freeze, the report said. 

Orthodox Christmas Eve celebrations for children were postponed in the city, but in Omsk, temperatures of minus 40 didn't dissuade some people from recreation. More than 200 runners took part in the city's traditional Christmas Eve half-marathon race, the television network ORT reported.

TITLE: Ecologists Fearing for Lake Baikal
AUTHOR: By Daniel Mclaughlin
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LISTVYANKA, Siberia - Shimmering between the Siberian taiga and the mountainous Mongolian border, Lake Baikal is a crescent-shaped jewel in Russia's rusting ecological crown.


The world's deepest, oldest major lake is home to hundreds of animal and plant species found nowhere else on earth, but campaigners say a hunt for the more marketable assets of natural gas and fur is threatening to cloud its turquoise waters.

Conservation group Greenpeace also says Russia's failure to cut pollution in the 365 rivers flowing into Baikal is a symptom of state neglect presided over by President Vladimir Putin. Last spring he ordered the Ministry of Natural Resources to absorb the once-independent Environmental Protection Commission.

Without the commission's protection, Greenpeace fears a devastating effect on Baikal's 1.6-kilometer-deep waters and 1,500 animal species. In response, the group asked UNESCO last month to transfer the 25-million-year-old lake to its list of endangered World Heritage sites.

Some 80 percent of Baikal's fauna is unique to the lake, making it particularly sensitive to changes in water quality, said Roman Pukalov, Greenpeace's Baikal Campaign coordinator.

But Valentin Brovchak, deputy head of Russia's Department for Environmental Analysis, said decisions were being taken on how to clean up Baikal's tributaries, and disagreed with Greenpeace that the lake's eco-system was in danger.

"I've worked on Baikal since 1992 ... and while there has not been any sharp improvement in its situation, it has not worsened, either. It's been stable for at least eight years," Brov chak said. 

Pukalov said uncontrolled hunting was biting deep into one of Baikal's most famous natural attractions.

"The population of nerpa seal in the lake has fallen over the last six years by 30 percent at least. Hunters are allowed 6,000 a year, but illegal hunting claims twice that many."

He said amateur hunters injured three seals for every one they killed with nets and guns, trying to satisfy a growing demand for skins in northern China and Mongolia.

Pukalov said he also feared the impact on Baikal of test drilling for gas in the delta of the Selenga river and mineral exploration close to the lake, which holds a fifth of the world's flowing fresh water.

"These are some of the biggest problems for Baikal and should not be allowed on World Heritage Sites," he said. "This is why we want UNESCO to put pressure on the government."

Brovchak said he had not heard of any mineral exploration near Baikal and that a resolution he expected to go before parliament early next year should outlaw oil and gas exploration close to Baikal.

"It says in the resolution that exploitation of new deposits is to be banned in the central ecological zone around Baikal. Already the reserve is probably one of the most strictly protected regions in the world," he said, "You can hardly even pick mushrooms there."

Baikal survived decades of Soviet industrialization relatively unscathed while Russia put its natural resources to work in break-neck economic pursuit of the West, sparing little thought for the environmental damage being wreaked.

The late-1980s perestroika policies of Mikhail Gorbachev lifted ecological issues off the bottom of the Kremlin priority list, but campaigners say Putin is reversing the process.

He enraged campaigners in May when he decreed that the Ministry for Natural Resources absorb the State Environmental Protection Committee and the Forestry Commission.

The government said it was to cut costs but groups like Greenpeace and Baikal Environmental Wave (BEW) said it cleared the way for unchecked exploitation of Russia's overworked environment.

"I think Putin made a very grave error. With one hand [the ministry] is now exploiting natural resources while it is supposed to be protecting them with the other," BEW's Jennie Sutton told Reuters.

"If the decree was to cut down on bureaucrats then it would be a good thing, but it also means enterprises like gas exploration are not going to be monitored and held within some degree of state control."

Greenpeace said it collected more than the two million signatures needed to force a state referendum on the restoration of independent environmental and forestry agencies and a ban on imports of nuclear waste to Russia.

But election authorities threw out 600,000 of the signatures as illegitimate in December, prompting another furious response from environmentalists and Greenpeace to threaten action in Russia's Supreme Court.

Brovchak denied that there was any government wrongdoing over the referendum and said the merged ministry was working well.

"It's a lot easier now. If before certain structures involved departments in different ministries it was very complicated to make ecological decisions which related to all of them. There are still problems, but it is still taking shape."

"I have not seen conflicts of interest or contradictions yet and if there are we will sort them out," he said.

Russia's economic problems have often forced the government to push environmental concerns into the shadows, but Brovchak said Baikal was just as precious to politicians as it was to the rest of Russia.

"It is only Baikal that has a specially decreed status, not the Caspian sea or the River Volga. There's so much there: the mythology, history, not to mention the economic significance of tourism and natural beauty," he said.

"Baikal is unique. It is a unique phenomenon for the whole world."

TITLE: Russia: Baltic Region Still Nuke-Free
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW - U.S. claims that Russia has moved short-range nuclear weapons to its naval base on the Baltic Sea have caused a stir, but the Russian military last week insisted the reports are wrong, and Russian analysts said such a deployment would be senseless.


Senior officials in President Bill Clinton's administration confirmed Wednesday's report in The Washington Times that tactical nuclear weapons have been transferred to Kaliningrad, a Russian port city separated from the rest of the country by Lithuania. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity.

"Over the last six months there has been some movement of tactical nuclear weapons into Kaliningrad - we don't know how many, we don't know what type and we don't know why," one U.S. official said. 

Such an action would be in conflict with Moscow's stated policy of keeping the Baltic region free of nuclear weapons, though it would not appear to violate any legally binding arms control agreement, the U.S. officials said.

While Russia's motives are unclear, the placement of battlefield nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad could be a response to NATO's expansion and an attempt to compensate for the decline of Russia's conventional military might, the officials said.

U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said he could not comment on specifics, but expected the topic to be raised with Moscow.

"It's an issue that we want to take up, that we want to discuss with them," he said. "It's something that we follow carefully, and that's about as far as I go."

Under informal agreements reached in 1991 and 1992 by President Geor ge Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gor bachev, Russia withdrew its tactical nuclear weapons from the former Warsaw Pact states in Eastern Europe and promised to place them in "central storage facilities."

The agreements, which never were turned into a treaty, did not specify the storage sites. But U.S. intelligence sources said Wednesday that Kaliningrad, the headquarters of the Baltic Fleet, became a depot for tactical nuclear weapons removed by the Russian navy from its ships.

It was unclear whether the warheads that have been moved to Kaliningrad were sea-based or land-based weapons. Some U.S. defense officials speculated that they were for use on a new short-range missile known as the Toka, which was test-fired on April 18 in Kaliningrad and has a range of about 70 kilometers.

The Russian Defense Ministry said the supposed weapons movement "does not conform with reality" and that Russia's tactical nuclear warheads are at their "permanent stationing sites and have not been transferred anywhere."

But the ministry's statement did not clarify whether Kaliningrad is considered a permanent stationing site.

Anatoly Lobsky, a spokesman for the commander of the Baltic Fleet, said, "The Baltic Sea is a nuclear-free zone, and Russia's Baltic Fleet scrupulously observes its international commitments." But that statement was also something less than a flat denial, because Russia may not consider Ka liningrad to be part of the nuclear-free zone.

Kaliningrad is an enclave sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania and the navy base there provides Russia with access to the Baltic Sea.

Polish Defense Minister Bronislaw Komorowski on Thursday called for international inspectors to verify Moscow's claim that it had not deployed nuclear weapons.

"Poland needs to monitor the situation in Kaliningrad on a day-to-day basis and it is doing that," Komorowski said on Polish public television. "Verification will include pushing for international inspection, which is a usual thing."

The conservative Polish daily Zycie printed a front-page map on Thursday showing tactical nuclear weapons based in Kaliningrad would threaten northern Poland and southern Lithuania.

Officials from the Baltics gave a muted reaction, saying they were hoping to consult NATO diplomats on the issue.

"We are monitoring the situation closely - if it is true it is very sad and we would have to make a statement," said Madis Mikko, spokesman for the Estonian Defense Ministry.

Some U.S. officials believe the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad would be a tactic for increasing pressure on NATO to withdraw all short-range missiles and other nuclear weapons from Europe. Russia has long argued for their removal, but NATO continues to maintain some nuclear bombs for aircraft based in Europe.

But Russian military analysts questioned the logic of such a deployment.

Yury Gladkevich, an analyst at the independent Military News Agency, said Moscow had nothing to gain politically from the deployment. 

Ditching nonbinding arms agreements from the early 1990s, which were intended to limit tactical nuclear weapons deployment in Europe, would only invite the ire of European countries and the United States.

He contended that the news reports were based on disinformation, an intelligence leak intended to influence policy for the incoming administration of George W. Bush or to demonstrate to America's European allies that Russia remained a threat. 

Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent defense analyst, said if the military did bring tactical nuclear weapons to Kaliningrad, for training or some other purpose, they would most likely be naval, like torpedo warheads.

"There's no need to bring air force or missile weapons to the enclave," he said, because their potential targets could just as easily be hit with missiles based on Russia's mainland. 

U.S. experts gave widely varying interpretations of the Russian action. Bruce Blair, president of the nonprofit Center for Defense Information, said Russian generals had warned him two years ago that redeploying tactical nuclear weapons to Kaliningrad would be "a likely response to NATO expansion."

William M. Arkin, a consultant on nuclear weapons to the Natural Resources Defense Council, portrayed the move as an attempt to offset Russia's deteriorating conventional military forces. 

"What is it people expect, given the fact that Poland is now in NATO and the Baltic nations take part in military exercises with the United States?" he said.

Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined the alliance in 1999, and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia want to be the next new members. Russia has said it could not tolerate NATO so close to its border.

But some U.S. officials said speculation that the weapons movement came in response to NATO expansion was probably not accurate.

"If that were the case, they wouldn't have done it secretly, presumably they would have made a big public announcement, saying 'we're going to respond this way to NATO expansion,' " one official said. "But they didn't do it publicly, they did it secretly, so we don't know why they did this."

Officials said NATO was briefed about the movement of the weapons over a period of months.


- AP, WP, Reuters

TITLE: Lawyer Who Retains His Sense of History
AUTHOR: By Sarah Karush
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: When the news broke in 2000, there was one man almost invariably on the scene.


Often just a step behind the cops and always in front of the cameras, smooth-talking lawyer Pavel Astakhov became a household name through his work on the year's most politically charged cases. Vigorously arguing in the court of public opinion as well as the court of law, he was able to draw attention to the plight of his clients - and at the same time to himself.

The case of media magnate Vla di mir Gusinsky has made Astakhov, 34, one of the country's most well-known attorneys. This fall, he defended Edmond Pope, the American businessman convicted in December of spying and subsequently pardoned by President Vla dimir Putin. 

It was precisely his knack for public relations that gave Astakhov a leading role in the Gusinsky case. A regular participant in crime- and law-related shows on NTV, Astakhov was the first person Gusinsky's journalists called when they were in trouble.

"When on May 11, the attack on Media-MOST began [with a raid on the company's office], the guys from the NTV group who came to film it also ended up as hostages in the building. They managed to call me, explain the situation, and say that they needed help," Astakhov said in a recent interview at the Media-MOST headquarters.

"So I arrived like a fire squad at the first call for help. And right away the first comments to the media came from me. There was an enormous number of journalists, and I was basically the only lawyer who was able to get inside and witness this disgrace and comment on it, and interfere in the process. ... After that, after I had been so active, Igor Malashenko [deputy head of Media-MOST] asked me to join the [company's] small group of lawyers."

From that day on, Astakhov, a tall, broad-shouldered man who favors flashy designer suits, was regularly reporting to the public on the Media-MOST raid, Gusinsky's subsequent three-day imprisonment, the company's dispute with Gazprom and Gusinsky's arrest in Spain last month. Suddenly, Astakhov, who despite his television appearances was not widely known to the general public, was sharing air time with Genri Reznik, perhaps the country's best-known lawyer and a colleague on the Gusinsky defense team.

Upon graduation from the Higher School of the KGB in 1991, Astakhov went to work as legal counsel to an airline before passing the bar exam and becoming a trial lawyer in 1993.

"I felt that I was drawn toward defending people from the lawlessness going on," he said. "The only individual who can really defend people in our society is not the law enforcement agencies, not representatives of public organizations, not politicians or deputies, but the lawyer."

But prior to the Media-MOST and Pope cases, Astakhov had been avoiding criminal law, instead favoring inheritance, divorce and corporate cases. 

"I stopped taking criminal cases because they are so trying," he said. 

Astakhov sees himself as a man with a mission. Lawyers, he says, are "pioneers" who are "helping Russia move on to a new stage." 

But courts today are highly politicized and criminal procedure is frequently ignored. This, says Astakhov, can make the work of a defense attorney a thankless task. In the Pope case, for example, the court delivered its 22-page verdict 2 1/2 hours after Pope's concluding statement - leading many observers to conclude it had been ready ahead of time.

Astakhov said that when he took Pope's case, his colleagues warned him against it. 

"They said, 'Pasha, this is a hopeless case because everything has been pre-determined. ... But nevertheless when they saw this case that was unfolding as the world watched, when every day, morning, noon and night, I made comments [to the media], when I showed the documents that we couldn't get included in the case and explained the motions that we filed - every day I filed from five to 10 motions. ... When I showed all of this to my colleagues, they were shocked. Genri Reznik said he was surprised that I was so prolific - squeezing everything out of the case down to the last drop."

But all but a handful of the approximately 200 defense motions in the Pope case, including requests for an independent translator and additional witnesses, were declined. So why did Astakhov bother?

"For history," he said. 

"We have fresh examples in Russia of how verdicts that are 50 and 60 years old are overturned," he added, referring to the rehabilitation of former political prisoners of the Soviet regime. 

"I'm sure that this verdict will also be reconsidered in time."



*********

A Moscow court revived fraud charges against self-exiled Russian media baron Vladimir Gusinsky on Friday, dealing him another setback in a case that has raised fears of a Kremlin crackdown on free speech.


Prosecutors did not hide their joy at the ruling, which overturned an order by a lower court last week for them to drop the case as groundless. Gusinsky is in Spain, on bail pending a decision on whether to extradite him to face the charges.

"The ruling demonstrates that law prevailed after all," Alexander Gorbunov, representing the prosecutor's office in the Moscow City court, told reporters outside the courtroom after the decision was handed down behind closed doors.

Gusinsky's Media-MOST company said the ruling was politically motivated and promised to appeal.


- Reuters

TITLE: Flare Turns Statue Into Chariots of Fire
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: New Year's Eve revelers inflicted heavy fire damage on the already ailing Chariots of Glory monument on Palace Square when a flare damaged the protective scaffolding that has surrounded the statue since restoration works began on it last spring. 


The protective scaffolding and wood paneling made maters worse by trapping heat from the flare - fired by an unknown person from the nearby Alexander Gardens - which melted much of the copper and lead statue of Nika, Russian for Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, which is the monument's centerpiece. 

"The statue is made of copper which is 0.3 millimeters thick, which is bound together by lead joints," Hermitage spokeswoman Larisa Aerova said in a telephone interview Monday.

"Since Nika had been protected by a box for the restoration project, to protect it from the elements, the temperature rose substantially after the flare hit the box. Everything melted down in minutes," she said. 

According to local press reports, some 80 percent of the statue was damaged. To add insult to injury, Aerova said that the 1.4 million ruble ($50,000) restoration project was nearly complete until the New Year's accident. Hermitage Director Mikhail Piotrovsky said another 3.5 million rubles would be needed to repair the new damage, local press reports said. 

Nika and her chariot drawn by six horses adorn the top of the archway of the General Staff Building, which sits across Palace Square from the Winter Palace. It was built in 1828, during the reign of Tsar Nicholas I, as a monument to Russia's 1812 victory in the Napoleonic wars. 

According to Aerova, Hermitage officials are hopeful that the statue will be renovated to its original grandeur. 

"Intarasia, the development company responsible for renovation, made all the necessary measures long before renovation [of the chariot] started," she said.

Intarasia head Viktor Smirnov was also quoted in local media as saying that the new damage won't even throw the project off schedule. He also added that his company would contribute some of the money necessary for the new restoration, local media reported, though he did not say how much. 

City Hall said it would kick in as well. 

"Monuments like that shouldn't be covered in scaffold forever," said City Gov. Vladimir Yakovlev's spokesman, Alexander Afanasiev, in a telephone interview Monday.

Nonetheless, Aerova deplored reckless New Year's revelry. 

"This accident didn't simply happen," she said.

"It was noticeable that some people gathered on the square were having a competition of some kind, trying to hit targets located high above on buildings standing near by, including the statue of the Angel," on top of the Alexander Column, Aerova said.

"It takes such Russian daring to celebrate this way," she said, according to press accounts. "They just want to hit the target first and don't think that they should care about cultural monuments."

TITLE: Georgia Hits Out at Russian Travel Warning
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: TBILISI, Georgia - Georgia's Foreign Ministry dismissed on Monday a Russian government warning that its citizens avoid traveling to its former Soviet neighbor because of rising crime.


"They are manipulating the facts of certain criminal actions artificially to heighten tensions and worsen Georgia's international image," the Georgian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Tensions between Georgia and Russia have worsened in the past year.

Foreign Minister Irakly Menagarishvili was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying Russia's warning, issued on Saturday, was "disinformation."

Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze said only that the situation was calm and added at a news briefing: "Any tension with our large neighbor is unacceptable for both Georgia and Russia,"

Russia's Foreign Ministry said its citizens should avoid travel to Georgia owing to kidnappings by fighters from the Russian region of Chechnya, which neighbors Georgia.

The ministry particularly highlighted problems in the northeastern region of Akhmeta, home to large numbers of refugees from fighting in Chechnya between Russian forces and separatists.

Georgian police are still seeking two Spanish businessmen, seized in Tbilisi by unknown abductors in December and transferred to the mountainous Pankisi gorge, in Akhmeta district.

In August, three Red Cross employees were kidnapped in the Pankisi gorge and released after nine days after talks. Dozens of local people have also been kidnapped.

Relations between Moscow and Tbilisi have been worsening, with Russia accusing Georgia of tolerating Chechen rebels, which Georgia denies. Analysts say Russia is also anxious about Georgia's efforts to boost ties with the West, undermining traditional links with Moscow.

A sign of worsening ties came last year when Russia introduced a visa system for travelers between the two states for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

TITLE: Bush: No Apology to Chernomyrdin
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - President-elect Bush will not apologize to the former Russian prime minister for alleging that he pocketed international aid, a spokesman said Friday. 


"The president-elect made his statement. He's a plain-spoken man and we consider the matter to be dealt with. He has said what he thinks,'' said press secretary Ari Fleischer. 

Fleischer was responding to a report by the Russian news agency Itar-Tass, in which a counselor to former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin said representatives for the two politicians have been negotiating some sort of Bush statement of regret. 

Bush claimed during the Oct. 11 presidential debate and a discussion of U.S.-Russia policy that International Monetary Fund loans "ended up in Viktor Chernomyrdin's pocket and others." 

IMF officials countered that they had no evidence of such a thing. Chernomyrdin threatened to sue Bush and demanded an apology. 

Friday's Tass report suggested that the Bush camp was drafting a letter to Chernomyrdin, which Fleischer refuted. 

"There is no letter," none expected, and no communication with Chernomyrdin's camp about any other form of apology, Fleischer said. 

"There's nothing that's crossed my radar."

TITLE: Words to Anthem Unveiled for New Year
AUTHOR: By Sarah Karush
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - As the hands on the Kremlin clock neared midnight on Sunday, President Vladimir Putin congratulated the country on what he called a year of progress and stability. Minutes later, as champagne toasts were raised, the major television stations broadcast the new national anthem - to which Putin had added lyrics a day earlier.


Putin recorded the traditional presidential address outdoors on the Kremlin grounds amid a light snowfall. The speech was broadcast in each of the country's 11 time zones as midnight approached on Dec. 31.

"Behind us we leave yet another year - a year of joyous and tragic events, a year of difficult decisions," he said. "Yet, what not so long ago appeared almost impossible has become a reality in our lives. Notable elements of stability have appeared and this means a great deal for politics, economics and for all of us."

The emphasis on stability provided a contrast to last year's tumultuous New Year's Eve, when Boris Yeltsin resigned, making then-Prime Minister Putin acting president and forcing snap elections.

Yeltsin paid a visit to Putin in the Kremlin on Sunday, but details of the meeting were not made public. 

In his brief speech, Putin acknowledged that many chronic problems still need to be tackled.

"You and I know that on this festive night far from everyone has a lavish spread on his table, not all homes have happiness and success," he said. "We must remember that. We must not forget that we have plenty of work to do, but we can only complete it by working together."

When the speech ended at midnight, the major television stations - including NTV - played the national anthem, a Soviet-era tune revived by parliament last month with lyrics approved by Putin on Saturday.

Putin's choice for the lyrics was the subject of speculation over the preceding few weeks, with newspapers printing preliminary versions. Ultimately, Putin chose words by Sergei Mikhalkov, the 87-year-old poet who co-authored the original words for Stalin in 1944. He later did another version removing Stalin's name.

Unlike the Soviet versions, the new lyrics have no mention of Lenin or the Communist Party. Instead, the anthem now celebrates Russia as a "holy country" that is "protected by God."

But the new anthem preserves some of the key phrases of the old one - including the first words of the chorus, "Be glorious, our free Fatherland!"

One line calls Russia an "Age-old union of fraternal peoples" - words similar the Soviet version, which referred to "an unbreakable union" of "peoples in brotherhood strong."

Some critics, including Vladimir Strekozov, a Constitutional Court judge, questioned the legality of Putin's decree on the anthem lyrics. The Constitution stipulates that the anthem must be established with the approval of parliament.

The Kremlin lobbied actively for the State Duma to pass a law on state symbols last month. That law revived the Soviet-era melody for the anthem, but left the song without words.

When he came to power, Yeltsin issued a decree replacing the Soviet anthem, with its words by Mikhalkov and music by Alexander Alexandrov, with a wordless piece by 19th-century composer Mikhail Glinka. That piece, titled "Patriotic Song," served as the country's temporary anthem. Yeltsin also restored the tricolor flag and double-headed eagle coat-of-arms, which were finally ratified by the Duma as part of the bill passed last month.

While the Alexandrov music is familiar to most people, the orchestration of the anthem broadcast on New Year's was not the rousing arrangement used in the Soviet Union. Critics described the anthem, which was performed by an orchestra and small chorus, as sounding thin and unmajestic.

The anthem was performed for the first time on New Years Eve at a Kremlin reception hosted by Putin. 

"The anthem is not simply a symbol. It is impossible to live without it," Putin said at the reception.

The newspaper Segodnya criticized the president for passing the lyrics by decree, rather than holding a public discussion.

It also took issue with the words itself. "The lyrics contain not one word about Russia's highest values, which the Constitution declares to be man, his rights and his freedoms; nor about the multiethnic citizenry, which the Constitution pronounces the "only source of power," the paper said in its Saturday issue. 


LYRICS TO THE ANTHEM 

Russia, our holy nation!
Russia, our beloved country!
A mighty will, great glory -
These are yours for all time!

Refrain:

Be glorious, our free Fatherland!
Age-old union of fraternal peoples,
Popular wisdom given by our forebears,
Be glorious, our country! We are proud of you!

From the southern seas to the polar lands
Spread out our forests and fields.
You are unique in the world, one of a kind,
Native land protected by God!

(Repeat refrain)

Wide spaces for dreams and for living
Are opened for us by the coming years
Our loyalty to our Fatherland gives 
us strength
Thus it was, thus it is and always shall be!

(Repeat refrain)

TITLE: Chechnya Imam Killed in Gun Attack on Home
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW - Separatist rebels killed up to four people in an ambush in the Chechen capital Grozny and gunmen shot dead a Muslim religious leader outside his home on Saturday, military officials said.


Three interior ministry troops and a local prosecutor died on Saturday when rebels fired a grenade at their car, detonating ammunition stocked inside, Itar-Tass news agency on Sunday quoted the military as saying.

The car was escorting a column of fuel trucks that came under attack near a checkpoint in the Oktyarbrsky district of Grozny, military officials said. 

Interfax news agency, however, said only three soldiers died in the ambush.

The rebels' Web site www.kavkaz.org said eight Russian soldiers died and 13 others were injured in the 40-minute battle. It said no guerrillas were killed.

Each side routinely exaggerates the other's losses.

Separately, unidentified assailants late on Saturday shot dead imam Khasmagomed Umalatov in the courtyard of his home in Urus-Martan, some 25 kilometers southwest of Grozny, Interfax reported.

Umalatov was the second imam or Muslim religious leader from the town to be killed in Chechnya recently, Interfax said. The rebel Web site made no mention of the death.

Separatist guerrillas have targeted Chechens who have sided with the Russian authorities or joined the pro-Moscow civilian administration running the breakaway republic.

Russian forces suffer casualties daily despite securing nominal control of most of the republic last April when Moscow's generals declared the military phase of the operation over.

Russian federal troops returned en masse to Chechnya on Oct. 1, 1999, with orders to crush separatists and guerrillas blamed by Moscow for an incursion into neighboring Dagestan and a wave of apartment block bombings in Moscow which killed over 300 people.

The rebels have denied responsibility for the bombings.

Elected Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov, who led Chechen forces to victory in the 1994-96 conflict with Russia, and is now in hiding, repeated his call for a negotiated solution to the current war, urging talks without any preconditions.

He made the appeal in a broadcast on underground rebel radio, Interfax said.

TITLE: Bill Cutting Jail Population Set for Last Duma Reading
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia is preparing to release approximately a third of its prisoners in 2001 under an amnesty bill aimed at improving conditions in jails, the Interfax news agency quoted the country's justice minister as saying last week. 


Russia has one of the biggest prison populations in the world at more than one million inmates.

International human rights campaigners have condemned the squalid, disease-ridden conditions in which most prisoners live. 

Justice Minister Yury Chaika told Interfax in an interview that, if the amnesty bill was passed by the State Duma, then up to 350,000 people could be set free. 

Chaika said the bill had been submitted to the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, last year and had passed its first two readings.

He said that he expected the bill to be adopted at some point in first half of 2001. 

"Our goal is to get the maximum out of punitive practices, to move to more humanitarian methods of criminal prosecution and punishment ... " Interfax quoted Chaika as saying. He added that fundamental reform of Russia's penal system was the most important issue. 

Russia traditionally announces amnesties on major national holidays.

The government also views amnesties as a way to free up space in the country's overcrowded prisons. 

In 1999, the Duma passed a bill granting amnesty to tens of thousands of people convicted or charged with non-violent crimes, as part of a prison reform plan. 

The bill also applied to war veterans, pregnant women, elderly people and invalids, as well as those who held a state honor or medal. 

But an oversight meant some serious offenders, who had won state honors, were released. The Duma amended the bill to close the loophole in June last year.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Lethal Glue Cocktail


KALININGRAD REGION (SPT) - Five inmates in penitentiary No. 8 died on New Year's Day after drinking a primitive cocktail they made with synthetic glue and water, Interfax reported.

"On the night of Jan. 1, 2001, ten prisoners broke into a subsidiary where synthetic glue was kept for linoleum carpets," the agency quoted Anatoly Pa na sen ko, the chief jailer of the Kaliningrad Region - a Russian enclave located southwest of Lithuania - as saying. 

"Having diluted the glue with water, they thus celebrated the New Year coming," he said, according to the report. 

Three of the 10 prisoners - all of whom, according to Panasenko, were 20 to 40 years old and drug addicts - died the same night they drank the glue, and the other two on Jan. 2. The five that survived the drink were taken to the hospital, the report said. 



Smoke-Free Smolny


ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Gov. Vladimir Yakovlev has banned smoking in all city government buildings, including City Hall, starting Jan 1, spokesman Alexander Afanasiyev said on Monday. 

This week, all smoking areas in City Hall were closed, Afanasiyev said, adding that a new decree about designated smoking areas outside government buildings would be forthcoming. 

Afanasiyev said the non-smoking Yakovlev's aim was "to care for people's health," according to Interfax.

Yakovlev had issued a decree last year saying that all members of his government should exercise regularly.

In a separate interview Monday, Afanasiyev said he may give up smoking as a result of the new ban. 



Tunnel Plot Averted


NAZRAN, Ingushetia (AP) - Federal forces averted a rebel plan to bomb a police station using a lengthy tunnel, an official said Thursday. 

Authorities on Wednesday evening discovered a 30-meter tunnel in Gudermes, Chechnya's second-largest town. The tunnel led from a residential house toward a police station and was packed with explosives, an official in Chechnya's Kremlin-appointed administration said on condition of anonymity. Sappers defused the explosives Thursday, he said. 



Quake Rattles Kurils


HONG KONG (AP) - A magnitude 5.8 earthquake jolted the Kuril Islands in the Far East on Thursday, the Hong Kong Observatory told The Associated Press. No injuries or damage were immediately reported. 

The quake hit at 12:55 a.m. local time in the Kuril Islands and was centered about 130 kilometers south of the town of Kurilsk. 



10 Months for Fraud


CHICAGO (AP) - A Russian who worked as an agricultural marketing official at the U.S. Consulate in St. Petersburg has been sentenced to 10 months for helping two fellow countrymen commit visa fraud. 

Igor Galitsky, 43, was convicted in September when he vouched for fellow countrymen as legitimate business executives who wanted to attend a food marketing trade show in the United States. Galitsky was sentenced Wednesday. 

He has spent the last eight months in the Federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago and must stay there for several more weeks under federal Judge Harry Leinenweber's sentence. 

Pleading for mercy, Galitsky told Leinenweber on Wednesday that he once associated with professors and business executives but now is penned in with drug dealers and bank robbers at the correctional center. 

"My life has been destroyed," he said.

TITLE: EU Struggles With Tests of Beef for Mad Cow Disease
AUTHOR: By David Evans
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BRUSSELS - Beef is being kept off the European Union market as authorities struggle with new rules to ban older meat from the food chain unless found free of mad cow disease, officials said on Monday.


In response to rising numbers of mad cow cases across Europe, all meat from cattle aged over 30 months now has to be tested for the brain-wasting disorder, but a lack of facilities is holding up the delivery of meat to the shops.

In France, cattle dealers brought gridlock to roads around Paris in protest of the government's handling of the crisis, and in Italy the government announced a new mad cow task force.

According to the Belgian Federation of Slaughterhouses, a lack of suitable testing laboratories was already causing mounting supply bottlenecks.

"There are not only too few analyses, but the test results are too slow to come through," it said in a statement.

"The freezers in the slaughterhouses are full. The carcasses cannot be released for human consumption."

The new measures bring continental Europe into line with Britain, which barred meat from animals over 30 months in the wake of the mad cow crisis in the early 1990s. 

Britain's Over Thirty Months Scheme (OTMS) has resulted in millions of cattle being slaughtered at a cost of billions of pounds.

French Farm Minister Jean Glavany was due to hold urgent talks on Monday with meat industry representatives amid growing criticism of a "climate of confusion."

There are so far only 18 laboratories in France certified by the government to perform the tests, leading to beef piling up in cold storage pending the results.

Louis Orenga, director of France's Meat Information Center, predicted beef prices in some areas could rise between one and two francs per kilo because of a lack of available supplies.

But he said the confusion could dissuade consumers from returning to beef.

"We're giving consumers the impression that this situation is not being managed well," he said. "We're going to have another case in which consumers see dysfunction at all levels."

In Italy, testing had also got off to a slow start. The Health Ministry said the supplier of equipment needed to carry out the tests was struggling to meet demand and it would be a few more weeks before the program could begin.

Untested beef is eligible for a "purchase-for-destruction" scheme - under which farmers are paid to have older cattle destroyed if no tests are available - but the program, mostly funded from EU coffers, has also had its teething problems. Again the problem was insufficient capacity, officials said.

However, some countries were confident of carrying out full testing and reported only minor problems.

TITLE: Pesticides Linked to Parkinson's
AUTHOR: By Paul D. Thacker
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NEW YORK - The combination of two pesticides leads to brain damage very similar to Parkinson's disease, researchers at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry in New York have found.

This research adds to a growing body of evidence that Parkinson's, an incurable and progressive neurological illness, may be linked to environmental factors.


Over a period of six weeks, mice injected twice weekly with the herbicide paraquat and the fungicide maneb showed immediate reductions in motor activity.

Further analysis of the mice brains showed extensive damage to the part of the brain called the nigrostriatal system. Degeneration of this area is found in people with Parkinson's.

These results were not found when paraquat or maneb were injected alone, the authors report in the December issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.

"Paraquat alone does not seem to be [toxic to nerve tissue]," according to study co-author Dr. Eric K. Richfield, associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine.

However, paraquat closely resembles MPTP, a chemical discovered in the 1980s that can result from the incorrect synthesis of heroin. Addicts who consumed MPTP were subsequently diagnosed with parkinsonian symptoms.

"We thought that [paraquat] in combination would be more toxic than alone and that is what we found," Richfield told Reuters Health. "One of the theories is that maneb is helping paraquat to cross the blood-brain barrier," he added. The blood-brain barrier refers to the tissues that separate nerve cells from the bloodstream. It prevents certain substances from crossing into brain tissue from the blood.

Use of both maneb and paraquat occurs across broad regions of the United States raising concerns about human exposure to agricultural mixes. Current safety testing does not check for chemical interactions.

The current incidence of new Parkinson's disease is 1 per 1,000 people worldwide. Parkinson's has been linked to living in rural environments, farming, drinking well water, and occupational exposure to agricultural chemicals.

With thousands of new chemicals and drugs entering the market every year, Richfield noted that it would be impossible to test every possible combination for toxicity. He also cautioned against hysteria.

"This is a first animal study and further research is needed," he said. "We don't know what the human exposure is, and we don't know how much gets into human consumption."

He advises shoppers to continue washing all fruits and vegetables to lower exposure to any chemicals used in agriculture.

TITLE: Trial Tests Benefits of Smoking Cutback
AUTHOR: By Lauran Neergaard
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - Your New Year's resolution was to cut back on cigarettes this year, hoping to lower those health risks. Don't be too sure simply smoking less will truly improve your health.


Cutting back versus completely quitting is a hot new debate among tobacco specialists. Quit and the body starts healing. But when heavy smokers refuse to quit, the theory says helping them smoke less surely is healthier than nothing.

Now one of the first studies to test that theory suggests just cutting back instead of quitting won't help your health.

It's a surprise finding and won't settle the controversy. But the Mayo Clinic's study - which found levels of toxins in heavy smokers' bodies didn't decrease when they cut smoking in half - is getting serious attention.

"That's very important because what it means to the lay public is that if you reduce [daily cigarettes], we're still not sure how much benefit you're going to get," says John R. Hughes, a well-known University of Vermont smoking expert. "So don't fool yourself."

Smoking causes heart disease, lung diseases like emphysema, and lung cancer, and also increases people's risk of seven other cancers.

Quit smoking and those risks start dropping. Seventy percent of smokers say they want to stop, but only about 35 percent try in any given year. It can take repeated attempts to succeed.

Yet many smokers won't try to quit. Hence the "harm-reduction" theory: If hard-core smokers could go from 40 a day to 20, maybe they'd be healthier. Or would it just deter them from ever quitting, without significant benefit?

Pharmacia Corp. is investing in the theory. Its studies say up to 30 percent of smokers who refuse to quit cut their smoking in half by using nicotine inhalers, nasal sprays, gum and pills to curb cravings between cigarettes.

In America, nicotine replacement is approved only for short-term smoking cessation. But Denmark in 1998 let Pharmacia market those products for smoking reduction, too. The company says three more European countries just issued similar approvals, which it will unveil early this year when it begins widely marketing the harm-reduction concept.

"If they reduce the consumption significantly, then one will see a health benefit," says Pharmacia's global policy director David Graham.

But the Mayo Clinic study found no health benefit when hard-core smokers cut their puffing in half.

Dr. Richard Hurt recruited 23 people who smoked between 40 and 50 cigarettes daily but refused to quit, to see if nicotine inhalers helped them cut back to 10 cigarettes a day.

Then he measured levels of two potent cancer-causing chemicals and two other cigarette toxins in smokers' bodies.

On average, smokers cut cigarette intake in half after three months, but only two got down to 10 a day. Weeks later, their smoking inched up again.

Only one cancer-causing toxin decreased slightly as smoking dropped. Yet those chemicals dissipate within weeks when smokers quit completely.

Hughes cautions that larger studies must prove whether cutting back really could help some people's health.

TITLE: Settlement Reached Prior to 1st Ford Trial
AUTHOR: By Megan K. Stack
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas - A settlement involving both money and public disclosure of information was reached Monday in a paralyzed woman's lawsuit that would have been the first to go to trial against Ford Motor Co. and Bridgestone/Firestone Inc. since millions of tires were recalled.


The settlement was announced by lawyers for Donna Bailey and a spokeswoman for Ford.

Financial terms were not disclosed; she had been seeking $100 million.

"It's enough to take care of her for the rest of her life," said Mikal C. Watts, one of her attorneys.

Another attorney for Bailey, C. Tab Turner, said the amount "is far in excess of anything I've ever heard of in any automotive liability settlement."

The settlement also calls for an acceptance of responsibility and apology by Ford, and requires both companies to disclose publicly any additional information from the tire recall investigation, the lawyers said.

The case had been scheduled for jury selection Tuesday. Bailey's attorneys said they reached the agreement about 2 a.m. Monday after four nights of negotiations.

The judge in the case must review the settlement, and then after he accepts it, Ford will have 15 days to release documents to the public and to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

A spokeswoman for Ford, Susan Krusel, said a company representative flew to Houston to visit Bailey at a clinic on Sunday night.

"We are pleased to have resolved this case with Donna Bailey and we extend our sympathies to her and her family," Krusel said in Dearborn, Michigan.

Representatives of Bridgestone/Firestone did not immediately return calls seeking comment.

Bailey, 44, of Portland, Texas, was paralyzed from the neck down in the March 10 crash. She was a passenger in a friend's Ford Explorer when the vehicle rolled over after the tread separated from a Firestone tire.

Bailey's lawsuit, which she had filed with her 18-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son, would have been the first involving the highly publicized allegations against Ford Explorers and Firestone to proceed to trial since a recall of 6.5 million tires last August.

However, Bailey's lawyers said the tires involved in her crash were not among those specified in the recall. Watts said he hopes this settlement will help expand the recall to other Firestone tires.

The recall followed a string of rollover accidents, more than 200 of them fatal, in the United States and several other countries.

As many as 200 lawsuits have been filed against Ford and Firestone over tire-related crashes. Last month, Ford resolved six claims in a single day, and Bruce Kaster, a leading lawyer in defective tire suits, said the company appeared to be moving quickly to resolve the cases.

"The Ford Explorer, on these tires, has rolled over and killed more people than any product in the nation," Watts had said before the settlement was announced. "It is the largest vehicular product liability crisis in the history of this country."

TITLE: Deal May Spell End of Oldest Airline
AUTHOR: By David Scott
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ST. LOUIS - American Airlines will announce plans this week to buy financially troubled Trans World Airlines Inc., part of a complex deal that could clear the way for antitrust approval of United Airlines' pending takeover of US Airways, several newspapers reported Monday.


Spokesmen for the carriers and other interests involved declined comment on reports in The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post of a proposal that could mean the end of TWA, the oldest continuous name in American commercial aviation.

According to the Post, TWA plans to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Wednesday, the third time it has done so, as a precursor of the takeover by AMR Corp.'s American Airlines, which would be announced the same day.

In a brief statement Monday, TWA said the airline "is always receptive to legitimate business overtures and is open to consideration of business combinations that will be beneficial." But the statement said TWA does not comment on discussions until if or when an agreement is reached.

American spokesman Tim Doke said American also doesn't comment on rumor or speculation. "We are talking to lots of folks about lots of different things all the time," he said.

The deal, whose price was not disclosed, also reportedly involves AMR buying a 49 percent stake in DC Air, a new carrier that is being crafted from United Airlines parent UAL Corp.'s planned $4.3 billion takeover of the Arlington, Virginia-based US Airways Group Inc.

To ease antitrust concerns, DC Air - which will be run by Black Entertainment Television founder Robert Johnson - would have most of the takeoff and landing slots at Washington's Reagan National Airport now assigned to US Airways.

TWA is the nation's eighth-largest carrier, US Airways is No. 6, while American is No. 2. All three fall behind United Airlines, the world's largest.

TITLE: Putin: Russia Will Pay Debts
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia will pay all its international debts, President Vla dimir Putin said Sunday after meeting with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroe der, whose country is Mos cow's biggest creditor.


Russia touched off concerns about its intentions last week when it said that it would miss its first-quarter payment to the Paris Club, a group of developed countries owed some $48 billion in Soviet-era debt. The group includes the United States as well as Germany.

A source close to Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, commenting on reports carried by local news agencies, said: "I can confirm this, but you have to go to the Finance Ministry for details."

However, the Finance Ministry was not able to confirm the reports by Itar-Tass, Interfax and RIA news agencies, which quoted sources close to the ministry.

The debt was defaulted on in the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and again in the August 1998 financial crisis in which the ruble's value plummeted from 6 rubles to the dollar to about 23 rubles to the dollar.

Russia owes about $3.5 billion in interest payments on the debt this year, and the missed first-quarter payment would amount to about $1.5 billion.

But Putin moved to allay concerns over the payments on Sunday.

Russia "in any case is determined and will fulfill its financial obligations," Putin said at Moscow's Vnu ko vo-2 airport after seeing the German chancellor and his wife off following their two-day Orthodox Christmas visit.

Putin offered no details of Russia's plans for making payment. He indicated the Kremlin is eager to negotiate a restructuring of its debt, saying that it has asked its creditors for discussions of the issue "at the expert level."

"It is not in the interest of anybody in the world to put the Russian economy in a position where it will not be in condition to fulfill its international obligations," Putin was quoted as saying by the news agency Interfax.

Schroeder suggested last year that Germany, which Russia owes $19 billion in Paris Club debts, would forgive some of the debt in exchange for shares in Russian enterprises, but some Russian officials have sharply opposed the idea.

The Schroeders arrived in Mos cow on Saturday for a two-day Orthodox Christmas visit that was billed as private.

Since their first meeting, which was held in Berlin last June, the two leaders have developed friendly ties, using the informal form of address in the German language. Putin, a former KGB agent who served in East Germany during the Soviet era, speaks fluent German.

TITLE: Survey Shows Experts Positive About Caspian's Oil Resources
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - It has even more reserves than is presently known. U.S. foreign policy has a significant effect on companies operating there. But to justify further development, the price of a barrel of oil has to average over $19 over the next year-and-a-half.


These are some of the results of a recent survey of 25 senior executives from international and domestic oil companies currently operating in the five-nation Caspian region, the hottest piece of real estate in the industry.

The survey, conducted by global accounting major Arthur Andersen, included executives from top Russian producers, LUKoil and Yukos, Shell Azerbaijan Exploration and Production B.V., Offshore Kazakstan International Operating Co., Penzoil Caspian Co., Japan Azerbaijan Operating Co. and Kazakoil. Other major players in the region, such as Chevron, ExxonMobil and BP Amoco declined to participate.

The area in and around the Caspian Sea - bordered by Kazakstan, Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Iran - has about 16 billion barrels of proven oil equivalent, according to the U.S. estimates, and some estimates have put the figure 10 times higher.

All but one of the survey's 25 respondents said they believed that there are still "significant" oil and gas reserves yet to be uncovered. And 20 of the 25 polled said they expect the amount of capital investment in the region to increase in the next five years, with equity being the major source of capital.

Kazakstan and Russia were rated as the most promising of the five countries for new oil finds, while Turkmenistan was rated as the most promising for new gas reserves.

Asked what they would change to facilitate their work in the region, the majority of companies said they desired a more investor-friendly tax and legal environment, as well as the reduction of transportation costs and corruption.

The main problems respondents identified were access to crude oil markets, uncertain oil prices and incoherent governmental energy policies. Although U.S. policy in the Caspian Region came last on a list of nine factors, 43 percent of respondents still said that it had a significant effect on their operations in the region.

The United States has pressed hard for an alternative to the 1,580-kilometer Caspian Pipeline Consortium line, of which the Russian government is the major shareholder. It runs from the giant Tengiz field in western Kazakstan to Russia's Black Sea port of Novorossiisk and will begin exporting oil to Western markets later this year. The United States has been a strong supporter of a different, more costly route that runs from Baku to Ceyhan, Turkey, and bypasses Russia altogether. The Kazak government has proposed its own pipeline through Turkmenistan to Iran.

Survey participants rated the CPC route as the most viable.

Industry analysts agree on the presence of the U.S. government influence in the region but say it's not overwhelming.

"The influence is there undoubtedly," said Gennady Krasovsky, oil analyst with NIKoil brokerage. "With oil prices at $12 per barrel in 1998 the construction of the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline could not be justified, and only the insistence of the United States kept it from falling through."

Renaissance Capital oil analyst Steven Allen said that the effect of U.S. foreign policy is tangible, but not overwhelming, given the fact that Chevron, a U.S. oil major, is involved in the CPC pipeline.

The fact that Chevron and ExxonMobil opted not to participate in the survey left it incomplete and slightly less valuable than it could have been, Allen said.

Both Allen and Krasovsky said that the estimate of the oil price needed to justify further development looked realistic and proved that the companies plan to go ahead with the development.

"In the main [the results] were pretty much what we expected," Collin Brown, head of oil and gas for the CIS at Arthur Andersen, said in a telephone interview Thursday.

TITLE: OPEC Said United Over Cut in Output
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON - Oil prices firmed Monday after weekend reports that the OPEC producer's cartel was agreed on the need to slash output later this month to avoid oversupply when winter demand tails off.


Benchmark Brent blend continued to flex its muscles gaining 36 cents to $25.54 a barrel but dipping from Friday's high of $25.95, while U.S. light crude futures bounced back from a sell-off late on Friday to rise 24 cents to $28.19.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) Secretary-General Ali Rodriguez said on Sunday the 11-member cartel had a consensus to cut crude oil supplies but had not decided by how much.

"For the time being there is a consensus to cut but how much we don't know," the former Venezuelan oil minister told a news conference after a meeting with U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.

Rodriguez said OPEC would consider the United States' view that an output cut would fuel a price hike that could hurt a vulnerable U.S. economy.

The outgoing U.S. official warned against what he called precipitous action to cut output. "We would like to see no production cuts but we recognize that there are realities," he told the same news conference.

The OPEC secretary-general's comments continued to drive market momentum after growing confidence last week that OPEC would slice output when it meets on January 17 sent prices soaring by $2 a barrel.

The five-day rally helped stem a price slide that wiped 30 percent off the cost of a barrel over December.

Some price gains were triggered by a surprise cut last week in U.S. interest rates, which was expected to help the world's biggest energy consumer dodge recession and bolster oil demand.

Kuwaiti Oil Minister Sheikh Saud Nasser al-Sabah Price was quoted by the official Kuwait news agency on Saturday saying he understood from Rodriguez there was consensus within the cartel for cut of between 1.5-2.0 million barrels per day (bpd).

The higher figure is favored by Ku wait, regarded as a price hawk in the organization. But Rodriguez told reporters in Vienna that the size of the cut had not been decided.

OPEC heavyweight Saudi Arabia, the world's biggest crude producer, said last week it saw a consensus for a cut of 1.5 million bpd, or more than five percent of total group production of 26.7 million bpd.

The OPEC-led gains were given an extra boost when Middle East producer Qatar on Monday backed an output cut of at least two million bpd to stabilize oil prices within the cartel's target range of $22 to $28 a barrel - a level deemed suitable to both producers and consumers.

TITLE: Uranium Deal Draws U.S. Flak
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - Buying more than 100 tons of weapons-grade uranium from Russia helped U.S. national security but may be hurting domestic producers as the nation's nuclear power plants become dependent on Russian uranium, congressional auditors said.


In 1993, the United States agreed to a 20-year program of buying highly enriched uranium from dismantled Russian nuclear weapons, imported in a form suitable to fuel commercial reactors. The Energy Department created the U.S. Enrichment Corp. to handle the purchases, then let the corporation be privatized through a July 1998 public offering that brought the Treasury $1.9 billion. The Russian government's counterpart is Tekhnsnabexport, known as Tenex, which processes the uranium and takes the payments.

Congress' investigative arm, the General Accounting Office, found that a committee of officials from several federal agencies, formed to oversee the uranium purchases, "has not fulfilled all of its responsibilities."

The Enrichment Oversight Committee had no contingency plan for replacing USEC, as it was instructed to have, when the company considered severing its ties with the Russia deal in 1999. The committee likewise has yet to complete a study of how government purchases of Russian uranium is affecting the U.S. nuclear fuel industry.

The GAO said Dec. 29 that study should be done and the United States "should be prepared to either replace [USEC] or to take on the responsibilities itself."

While the corporation has tried "to balance conflicting commercial and national security interests," the report said, its stated "priority as a private company is to remain a profitable commercial enterprise and maintain maximum value to its shareholders."

Undersecretary of Energy Ernest Moniz told the GAO he agrees with some of the report's broad themes and noted the 1993 agreement has succeeded in removing the equivalent of 4,000 nuclear weapons from Russia since 1995.

"It is a unique agreement that breaks new ground in the relations among nuclear weapons states," Moniz said.

The number of Russian nuclear warheads is expected to drop to 1,000 or fewer within seven years due to treaties and obsolescence. The prospective START III arms-control treaty, which is still to be negotiated, is expected to establish ceilings of 2,000 to 2,500 warheads.

Nuclear power supplies about 20 percent of U.S. electricity needs.

TITLE: Bankers Positive on World Economy
AUTHOR: By Alice Ratcliffe
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BASEL, Switzerland - Central bankers from major countries offered an upbeat picture of the world economy on Monday, and said they expected a soft landing rather than a sharp slowdown in the United States.


"Nobody around the table was projecting a recession either in the U.S. or the global economy," Bank of England governor Eddie George told reporters after chairing a regular meeting of central bankers at the Bank for International Settlements.

Slower growth, especially in the world's biggest economy, had brought output down to more sustainable levels after the accelerated pace seen in the first half of 2000 so that a soft landing now seemed most likely.

"It may be a bit turbulent but if you look at the landing strip extending out beyond the first and second quarters, then the best bet ... is that it would be a soft landing," George said of future prospects, especially in the United States.

He said U.S. Federal Reserve officials briefing their colleagues had emphasized that underlying improvements in productivity were real and continuing, but the slowdown was likely to return investor expectations to more realistic levels.

"The situation in Europe will be nothing like as bumpy as in the U.S.," he said, stressing the U.S. slowdown was in no way a disaster and expressions like a meltdown were exaggerated.

The bankers thought growth in Japan would remain slow but was unlikely to turn negative.

Most central bankers at the meeting, who included Fed Vice-Chairman Roger Ferguson, believed that the U.S. economy would grow two to three percent in 2001, roughly half the expansion seen in the first half of 2000, George said.

The central bankers saw economic growth in the euro zone slowing slightly to 3 percent, George said. This was a positive move towards a more sustainable level, he stressed, adding the slower pace of euro-zone growth reflected a slowdown in the U.S. economy.

TITLE: Adviser Says That Bush Will Seek Fast Passage of Tax Plan
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: WASHINGTON - A top economic adviser to U.S. President-elect George W. Bush said on Sunday that details of the tax package Bush will send to Congress were still not final but that Bush was depending on "speedy approval" on Capitol Hill, "as quickly as they can move."


In an interview on the "Fox News Sunday" program, Lawrence Lindsey said it was becoming clear that many sectors in the U.S. economy "are in deep trouble" and that the recent moves by the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates would not by themselves halt the economic slowdown.

He said Bush would, therefore, press quickly for his proposed $1.3 trillion tax cut.

"I think you need both," Lindsey said.

On the ABC "This Week" program, he added, "Things are deteriorating rather quickly and the economy definitely needs a shot in the arm."

Lindsey, tapped by Bush to be White House economic adviser, said the incoming administration was considering "speeding up the tax cut in some way" and if such a decision was made, it would likely front-load the benefits of a tax cut by reducing the amount of taxes withheld from workers' paychecks.

"That would obviously be the way it would be done," he told the ABC program.

Lindsey earlier declined to say whether the incoming administration would propose a package retroactive to Jan. 1 in a bid to get relief to consumers as quickly as possible. But he did say Bush would make across-the-board cuts in the tax rate a priority.

"The details of that have yet to be worked out," he said. "What we do need is speedy approval by Congress. And that's why we're making the case so strongly now."

TITLE: Europe Glad of U.S. Rates Cut
AUTHOR: By Bruce Stanley
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON - For many Europeans, last week's cut in U.S. interest rates generated less of a financial tsunami than a modest ripple of hope for lower regional rates and a stronger euro.


Europeans welcomed the Federal Reserve Bank's effort to forestall a recession in the world's largest economy by slashing a key lending rate. Some economists even predict the European Central Bank and the Bank of England might take similar steps to trim the cost of borrowing on this side of the Atlantic.

Such a move could help businesses that sell houses, cars and other big-ticket items. But Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's decision to shave a half point off U.S. rates may have a greater impact in Europe by causing the U.S. dollar, and perhaps the British pound, to weaken against the euro.

That could ease inflationary pressure in Germany and France and give a boost to farmers and manufacturers in the United Kingdom who export to countries that use the European Union's single currency.

"Trying to sell anything to the euro zone at the moment is just a hopeless case because the pound has been so uncompetitive," said Peter Edgington, managing director of NDE Clarke Transmissions Ltd. of Coventry, England.

Britain's central bank has kept its base lending rate steady the past 10 months, and analysts differ over whether it will follow the Fed's lead. British exporters complain that high rates keep the pound unnecessarily strong and hurt their sales in continental Europe.

"The high pound has been the bugbear of U.K. agriculture," said sheep farmer Peredur Hughes of Llanddeusant, Wales.

Hughes exports 60 percent of his sheep to France, but makes ends meet only by renting some of his property to a firm that uses wind turbines to generate electricity.

British farmers hope a stronger euro also will translate into bigger agricultural subsidies from the European Union. These subsidies are calculated in euros, and their value in pounds has plunged by almost a third since the euro began sliding against Britain's currency early in 1999.

"If we didn't have these subsidies, we just wouldn't exist," said Ian Frood, who raises cattle and grows barley east of London in Stanford Le-Hope, Essex.

The U.S. rate cut should ease this pain somewhat, given the pound's relative stability against the dollar.

"The major impact on the euro-zone economies will come in the form of a devaluation of the U.S. dollar," said Jean Dermine, a finance professor at INSEAD, an international business school in Fontainebleau, France.

The euro rose Friday to slightly more than 95 cents, still about 20 percent lower than at its January 1999 launch but well above its October low of just above 82 cents. Rabobank of the Netherlands predicts the euro will achieve parity with the dollar later this year.

A stronger euro would make it easier for European countries to pay for imports of oil and other critical commodities that are priced in dollars.

That, in turn, should help ease fears of inflation and possibly persuade the European Central Bank to relax its own tight grip on interest rates, said Silke Tober, an economist at DIW, an economic think tank in Berlin.

The ECB announced Thursday it was keeping its key rate steady.

For euro-zone exporters, the U.S. rate cut is a mixed blessing. It should help spur American demand for foreign-made goods, but it will also make U.S. products a bit more competitive compared to those from Italy, Spain or France.

The last time the Fed surprised financial markets by cutting rates between its regular interest-rate meetings was in October 1998, during the Asian financial crisis. Share values on major European stock markets increased as a result, and Rabobank economist Hung Tran said the same thing could happen again.

An immediate effect of the Fed's new rate cut was to restore confidence, at least briefly, in the battered shares of hi-tech companies.

Cary Bruce, chief financial officer of Xipolis.net, an Internet content provider based in Munich, Germany, credited the Fed with helping lift the "panic" that has dominated the technology and Internet sector over the past three months.

U.S. companies are likely to remain voracious for acquisitions in Europe, even though a weakened dollar would make their targets more costly, said Daljit Singh, a lawyer specializing in buyouts at the London law firm of Jones, Day, Reavis and Pogue.

Britons will learn this week if the Bank of England plans to trim its benchmark lending rate. Glenn Sayward of Speeds Motor Group Ltd. in Alfreton, England, said a cut of a half percentage point here would have "a huge effect" on his firm's sales of Mercedes and Volvo cars.

TITLE: NASDAQ Drop Gives Euro Bourses the Jitters
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON - Vodafone Group led European shares lower in afternoon trade Monday, with sentiment in new economy shares soured further by a sharp opening drop in the NASDAQ Composite.


Vodafone, the world's biggest mobile phone operator, slid 5.9 percent after Hong Kong's Hutchison looked to sell a stake in the British company.

Other telecom companies were also weak, with France Telecom down 3.9 percent after announcing it would list its mobile unit Orange at the end of the month.

Deutsche Telekom was off three percent, and Spain's Telefonica down two percent.

Elsewhere in the market, standouts included SAP, Europe's biggest software company, which rocketed nearly 18 percent after the German firm reported better-than-expected results for the fourth quarter. SAP was also upgraded by two brokers.

The market also responded favorably to a friendly merger of Lafarge of France and Britain's Blue Circle to create the world's biggest cement maker. Lafarge shares were up 7.2 percent, while its long-standing takeover target Blue Circle climbed 6.3 percent.

The Eurotop 300 index eased 0.44 percent, while the narrower Euro Stoxx 50 index shed 0.8 percent.

The NASDAQ Composite fell 2.5 percent in opening trade, adding to a six percent drop on Friday. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 0.18 percent.

The New York market remains dogged by earnings worries and fear that last week's surprise rate cut by the Federal Reserve may be too late in fending off a hard landing for the U.S. economy.

In Europe, the Lafarge and Blue Cement merger ensured the construction sector was up one percent. Energy, basic producers, foods and financials were also up.

Apart from telecoms and techs, autos, media, insurers and utilities were also weaker.

TITLE: Business Is Given a Funky Twist
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Bored with neoclassical economics but still in the market for a business read? From Sweden comes the answer.


In September of 1999, "Funky Business: Talent Makes the Capital Dance," an offbeat exploration of the business world appeared in English and, since then, it has been translated into 13 other languages, including Russian.

Pavel Pavlovsky, a student at the Stockholm School of Economics in St. Petersburg translated the work, which was written by two professors - Kjell A. Nordstrom and Jonas Ridderstrale - working at the school's main campus in Stockholm.

The book's appeal lies mainly in the way the authors create an ideology for a new style of business based on their reading of existing social, political and economic trends.

And the unusual method of presentation, using an anecdotal approach rather than a systematized, analytical approach, makes the book a departure from the drier fare that generally occupies the shelves of bookstore business sections.

Their main argument is that the world of competition has changed, and those most able to compete in the new system are not those companies which establish themselves as long-term, large-scale structures, but which rely on their intellectual capital to identify products and get them into production quickly. Thus, it's not the production facility that's of the greatest importance, but the minds who operate it.

"At Ericsson Telecommunications, 70 percent of all employees are involved in the intellectual sphere. At IBM that number is even higher at 92 percent. These are the kind of numbers you see in any successful current company," the authors write. "The critical means of production is small, gray and weighs around 1.3 kilograms - the human brain."

And its not just the brain as the most important production factor that's stressed, but the possibilities it presents if used to its full potential. One example given might not sit well with purists in a chess-playing country like Russia.

"Our brain is capable of outperforming the most powerful computer," the authors write. "Some of you may turn your attention to the chess battle between the IBM chess computer, Deep Blue, and the human Garry Kasparov."

"In February 1996, didn't the computer eventually beat the human grand master? It did, but the victory was possible because both players adhered to the rules, the given number of possible strategies. The trouble for corporate chess players is that the future competitiveness will not be about following rules. It will be about challenging current wisdom and moving your pawn from A2 to E7 in one move."

"There's a revolution happening in our minds and there are three reasons for this," Ridderstrale added. "The first is the rise in information technologies and the Internet. This, however, does not bring a competitive advantage, since soon almost everyone will have access.

"The second is the rapid change taking place in institutions and organizations. Even states are integrating, transferring assets and changing their names."

"And the third is the shift in peoples' values in relation to what they treasure." 

The authors foresee a number of significant changes in society on all fronts. Political institutions in the future will be based less on ideological and more on economic grounds. The average lifetime of companies will be reduced because of rapid and constant changes in profitable areas of business activity. Most alarming perhaps, they predict that the family will likely become almost an exceptional phenomenon, an unusual archetype as the form of the family isn't conducive to the type of speed and freedom in decision-making necessary in the new economy.

"All these tendencies move societies toward an economy of surplus," Ridderstrale said. "Fun, responsibility, freedom and good jobs are more plentiful."

"The problem is that very often more means just a greater number of the same goods."

"In this situation, a business can only prosper on the basis of a brief monopoly resulting from an exclusive idea."

And they stress that new ideas in company organization or technological innovation don't bring advantages that can be counted on to last.

"Nokia started making rubber boots, and now have about 30 percent of the world cell-phone market," Nordstrom said. "This was hardly because they knew something special about microchips."

"They've been successful because after eight years of research they started making smaller phones, for the smaller palms of women, and they started making more colorful phones six years before their competitors."

Although both authors are economics professors with over 10 years of research experience, the best thing about the book is that it is accessible, avoiding overly theoretical approaches. Nordstrom and Ridderstrale use lively language, examples of well-known politicians and rock stars and forceful logic.

The result is a book about business and management with an almost new-age feel.

"The book is the result of our attempt to describe the essence of the Funk," the authors wrote. "For years our ideas developed under the influence of a combination of sources. The book is not about the future. The future is already today."

TITLE: Duma Deputy Wages Tobacco Fight
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Global tobacco giants Philip Morris and British American Tobacco will be put on trial, have their cigarettes pulled off local shelves and fined $18 million if a writer, an economist and a politician get their way.


In a lawsuit filed last week in a Moscow court, State Duma Deputy Alexei Mitrofanov - a member of Vla di mir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party of Russia - Mytishchi writer Alexander Sorokin and Rostov economist Sergei Cherednichenko accused the companies of violating the country's consumer-protection laws.

The plaintiffs say Philip Morris and BAT are violating the law by not printing on each pack of their international brands of cigarettes either the location of the factory where they are produced or an address where consumers can lodge complaints if they are unsatisfied with the product.

Mitrofanov said in a telephone interview Wednesday that by not printing where their cigarettes are manufactured - which the State All-Union Standard, or GOST, demands - the two companies are misleading consumers into thinking that products produced in Russia are actually imported from the West.

"These companies understand that [their profits] would suffer if customers knew that international brands are produced in Russia," Mitrofanov said.

Both Philip Morris, which makes Marlboro, Chesterfield, LM and Parliament, and BAT, which produces the popular brand Yava Zolotaya locally and imports Kent, Vogue and Lucky Strike, said Wednesday they were shocked by the lawsuit, which they only learned about from local media reports.

Mitrofanov said that he is asking the court to order Philip Morris and BAT to recall all their products that are in violation of GOST standards and pay up to 500 million rubles ($18 million) in "moral damages."

"[Eighteen million dollars] will not affect the business of Philip Morris and BAT in Russia, but it's a decent sum for both them and us," Mitrofanov said, adding that the money should be used to launch an "aggressive" anti-smoking campaign.

Mitrofanov also said the suit is just one of several he intends to file against the companies. The next issue to be addressed is the difference in quality between imported and domestically produced cigarettes of the same brand. And another complaint is that the companies do not print expiration dates for their products, he said.

TITLE: Economy Giving Boost to Russian Incomes
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Incomes are on the rise across the nation thanks to the booming economy and the government's better management of subsidies to the regions, a government watchdog reported.


The number of regions where average residents earn less than subsistence-level incomes dropped from 41 in January 2000 to 16 in the third quarter, according to a study by the Labor Ministry's All-Russian Center of Living Standards.

Regions such as Leningrad, Vo ro nezh, Omsk, Tver and Pskov have managed to climb over the poverty threshold, which averages 800 rubles to 1,000 rubles a month depending on the region, center head Vyacheslav Bobkov told the Trud newspaper.

The study by the center compared average incomes in all 89 of Russia's regions except Chechnya, which was omitted due to a lack of statistical data from the war-torn area.

However, the study found that most of the 50 regions whose residents now earn more than subsistence-level incomes are still rather poor compared to Moscow and resource-rich areas like the Yamal-Nenetsk autonomous district and the Khanty-Mansiisk autonomous district.

Muscovites are considered the best off with average incomes of 1,100 rubles a month, well above the government-decided subsistence level income of 882 rubles. Residents in the two autonomous regions also bring home incomes much higher than their regions' minimal levels.

Bobkov credited local administrative efforts to develop market econo mies, support small business and create investment-friendly environments for the higher incomes of the residents in the more affluent regions.

Most of the residents in 16 regions, however, remained below the poverty threshold, with Ingushetia ranking as the poorest, the All-Russian Center of Living Standards said. The average resident of Ingushetia, which borders Chechnya, earns 561 rubles a month, far below the subsistence level of 1,500 rubles.

Bobkov also said that the gap between the country's richest 10 percent of the population and poorest 10 percent narrowed slightly when compared to 1999. Still, the richest segment earns 14.3 times more than the poorest, he said without giving comparative figures.

Some observers agreed that Russia's economic growth of some 7 percent in 2000 was fueling a rise in household incomes but cast doubt on the validity of some of the figures.

Felix Eigel of the EA-Ratings agency said that real incomes could easily be 30 percent higher than reported by the Labor Ministry's center since many Russians work in the so-called shadow economy and, thus, either fail to declare their incomes or underestimate them to avoid taxation.

TITLE: U.S. Chicken Importer Buys Big Russian Player
AUTHOR: By Igor Semenenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - U.S. poultry giant Tyson Foods has reached a $4.7 billion deal to acquire No. 1 meat producer IBP Inc. in a merger that would create a bird- and-beef powerhouse on the Russian market.


Tyson is estimated to hold up to 40 percent of the import market for chicken legs. IBP imports beef and pork and runs a sausage plant in the northwestern Moscow suburb of Tushino.

"By combining the No. 1 poultry company with the leader in beef and pork we are creating a unique company that has a major global presence," Tyson Foods president John Tyson said in a statement announcing the merger Jan. 1.

The agreement will form the world's largest meat producer with annual sales of $23 billion.

However, the deal is unlikely to lead to any major shake-ups in their respective activities in the Russian marketplace as a result the companies' diversity, said Nikolai Shkolnikov, director general with Soyuzkontrakt, a leading company on the domestic poultry market.

"Tyson is itself a dominant player in the chicken-legs segment," said Shkolnikov. "IBP is in a slightly different line of business. Besides, it is a lower-key player."

In the long run, the merger may result in synergy effects for both companies, said Kim Iskyan, retail and consumer goods analyst with Renaissance Capital. "The local food market will become more competitive," he said. "The acquisition is likely to create economies of scale."

The proposed takeover must still obtain the approval of U.S. antitrust regulatory authorities. If granted, the merger is expected to begin in the first quarter of this year, IBP said in a statement.

Tyson Foods rolled into the local chicken legs market in 1995 after three years of importing with Soyuzkontrakt, then the dominant company in the poultry market.

Its sales grew steadily until 1998, when imports dropped sharply in the wake of the 1998 ruble devaluation. The company then changed its strategy from direct sales to selling products free-on-board in sea ports.

By the end of last year, Tyson had managed to restore its lead as the largest seller of poultry in Russia by raising its market share to 30 percent to 40 percent, said Shkolnikov at Soyuzkontrakt.

Tyson officials were unavailable for comment Wednesday due to the holiday season.

IBP, which opened a Moscow office in December 1998, has two lines of business here: free-on-board sales of pork and beef and the manufacture of sausages at the Tushino plant.

IBP's local representative, Marina Dakhnova, said in a telephone interview Wednesday that business is booming.

"We have had two banner years in Russia," Dak h no va said, adding that exact figures would only be available by the end of January.

But Tyson remains to date the more dominant of the two companies in Russia. The firm is selling about 30,000 tons of chicken legs a month to the Commonwealth of Independent States, of which 20,000 to 22,000 tons are sold to Russia, according to Shkolnikov.

The firm also says it plans to produce 16,000 tons of poultry in 2001 at the Elinar-Broiler plant near Moscow. Tyson set up the plant with a group of other U.S. chicken producers and a Russian partner in 1999.

And its sales could well continue to soar. Official statistics show that demand for imported poultry is growing at a brisk pace after the sharp setback in 1998. Imports for the first 10 months of last year shot up to 504,300 tons compared with 236,000 tons for all of 1999, according to the State Customs Committee.

Industry insiders say the official figures account for just a fraction of actual imports due to a number of schemes used by traders to avert paying customs duties.

In the meantime, it could well be months before any effects of the merger by Tyson and IBP begin to trickle down onto the Russian market.

"It is yet premature to talk of any implications for our local operations," Dakh nova said.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Alcoa in the Money


PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania (AP) - Fourth-quarter earnings at aluminum giant Alcoa Inc. jumped 17 percent, helped by cost-cutting measures and recent acquisitions.

The Pittsburgh-based company said Monday that net income rose to $392 million, or 45 cents per share, compared to $334 million, or 44 cents per share, in the same period last year. Revenue jumped 54 percent to $6.56 billion from $4.25 billion in the year-ago period.

Analysts surveyed by First Call/ Thomson Financial were expecting 42 cents per share.



DaimlerChrysler Up

STUTTGART, Germany (Reu ters) - DaimlerChrysler AG said on Monday that revenues in 2000 rose six percent to 160 billion euros, as solid Mercedes sales and a strong dollar masked the fallout from a slower U.S. car market.

The German automaker said the rise in full-year sales, which amounted to a rise of 10 percent in comparable terms, came despite a more difficult market environment in the United States.

Revenues from Mercedes-Benz and Smart cars rose 13 percent to over 43 billion euros ($40.84 billion), beating the previous high recorded in 1999.


Lafarge Clinches BCI

LONDON/PARIS (Reuters) - French building materials group Lafarge said it had agreed to buy the 77.4 percent it did not already own of British rival Blue Circle Industries PLC for 3.8 billion euros ($3.61 billion), heralding the creation of the world's largest cement maker.

Lafarge's agreed offer of 495 pence ($7.41) per Blue Circle share clinches a pursuit it started last May when the U.K. firm fended off a hostile bid of 450 pence. Lafarge shares firmed 4.5 percent in morning trade to 95.75 euros.



Net Firms in Deep

NEW YORK (Reuters) - More than one-third of publicly traded Internet companies seem destined to run out of cash by the end of 2001, Barron's financial newspaper reported on Sunday.

According a study for Barron's conducted by Pegasus Research International, publicly traded Internet companies used up about $2 billion in cash in the third quarter of 2000.

That amount is roughly the same as that for the second quarter. The figures cover 335 publicly traded companies in the battered Internet sector.

Barron's said the top 15 companies on its list actually were due to run out of cash in the fourth quarter of 2000.

TITLE: Global eye
TEXT: Rebel Yell


Who's been a busy little bee, then, buzzing in his hive over the holidays? Why, little Georgie Bush Bee, that's who. While an overfed America sprawled in blissful post-prandial haze, Georgie was working his little tail off, secreting waxy Cabinet choices to make sweet honey for his hard-Right pals.


While dropping the usual verbal bricks ("Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods," Bush said at a meeting in Austin, Texas, no doubt to a roomful of brows furrowed and jaws agape), the unelected president-elect was busy stocking his cabinet with retreads and rejects: Ford and Nixon jowl-flappers, Reaganite underlings, Daddy's cronies and several politicos ousted by the voters in November. Despite the window dressing of a few acquiescent "ethnic" faces, the lineup is relentlessly right-wing - even white-wing - where it counts.

But let's not dawdle over choices like Spencer Abraham, the defeated senator who has tried several times to abolish the Energy Department and has now been appointed by Bush to head - what else? - the Energy Department. Or Gale Norton, the disciple of Reaganite Interior Secretary James "Jesus Is Coming Soon So Screw the Environment" Watt, whom Bush has tapped to nurture the nation's natural resources as, yes, interior secretary. Or Linda Chavez, the virulently anti-union, hard-right apparatchik who will now oversee - you guessed it - the Labor Department.

All of these are indeed bold, ideologically rigid choices for a judicially appointed president rejected by a majority of the nation's voters. But the creme de la creme of the cabinet picks can only be John "Johnny Reb" Ashcroft, defeated at the polls by a dead man but unbowed in his determination to bring a fiery Christian fundamentalism to his job as attorney general, the nation's chief law enforcement official.

Ashcroft is perhaps best known now for his cozy relationship with apologists for slavery, his embrace of the racial purity champions at Bob Jones University, and his extreme economy with the truth in opposing the appointment of a black federal judge.

As a senator, Ashcroft blocked Clinton's appointment of African-American Ronnie White to the federal bench. He claimed White was "pro-criminal" because, as a Missouri Supreme Court judge, he had upheld the death penalty in "only" 41 cases out of 59. Ashcroft's predilections for the "neo-Confederate" movement may have a teensy bit to do with his distaste for Judge White. Ashcroft is an aficionado of Southern Partisan, a magazine whose writers are given to full-throated praise of Nazi-Klansman David Duke, to sentimental doggerel depicting slaves happily reminiscing about "dem good ole days" with Massa. Ashcroft gave an interview to SP, lauding its stances - such as the magazine's claim that slavery is not "racism," and anyway, it's supported by scripture.

This then is the man who, as attorney general, will direct the Justice Department's investigation into voting irregularities in Florida, where thousands of descendants of dem happy ole slaves were systematically - mayhap deliberately - disenfranchised by the minions of America's new Massa. Yee-haw!


Down by Law


But if George W. is looking for other bold Republican leaders to staff his Praetorian Guard, he need look no further than Lebanon, New Hampshire, where GOP stalwart Tom Alciere will soon take a seat in the one of the nation's most venerable state legislatures.


Alciere, who bested the Democratic incumbent by a razor-thin margin, ran a very low-key campaign - so low-key, in fact, that his constituents weren't even sure exactly what he stood for. But boy, they sure know what he stands for now. This week, Alciere delivered himself of a few home truths in the county newspaper, ABCnews.com reports, including a rather idiosyncratic view of the local constabulary:

He thinks they should be killed.

In fact, Alciere "loves it" whenever a cop is gunned down. "It's unfortunate that cops do make it necessary, [but] they're waging a war on drugs and I view cops as enemy officers," he told the paper, adding that he is "too chicken" to pull the trigger himself. Even so, the legislator says: "Nobody will ever be safe until the last cop is dead."

Alciere is resisting resignation calls from GOP leaders - who obviously gave him the same kind of vetting job they gave old D-Dubya-I before his run. It turns out Alciere was twice peripherally involved in investigations of cop-killings, when he wrote letters praising the perpetrators. In 1997, for example, he called Carl Drega - who gunned down two state troopers, a judge and a newspaper editor - a hero, who was, apart from that unfortunate murder of the editor, "an otherwise innocent cop-killer taking out enemy officers in battle."

Alciere also displayed a positively Bushian cynicism when it comes to dealing with the hoi polloi. While draping himself during the race with those warm, vague "healer-uniter" robes we know so well from the national election, Alciere came clean once the votes were counted. In a posting on his Web site, the 41-year-old statesman declared that he'd been voted in by a "bunch of fat, stupid, ugly old ladies that watch soap operas, play bingo, read tabloids and don't know the metric system."

Well, he may be a raving loony - but at least he knows the metric system. That's more than you can say for the 43rd president.

TITLE: DEFENSE DOSSIER
AUTHOR: By Pavel Felgenhauer
TEXT: Nuke Imports Will Pay for New Weapons 

LAST month, the Duma voted overwhelmingly to approve a government-backed law that will amend current legislation and allow Russia to import highly radioactive waste from foreign countries. While this was not the final reading of the bill, its eventual approval seems virtually inevitable.


This result seems strange at first glance since all polls show that the Russian public is unequivocally opposed to such imports. Last fall environmental activists collected more than 2.5 million signatures calling for a national referendum on the issue. But the Central Electoral Commission rejected this petition on a technicality, and now Duma deputies have shown no difficulty voting against the clearly expressed will of their constituencies.

Nuclear Power Minister Yevgeny Adamov has predicted Russia will earn up to $20 billion over the next 10 to 15 years by importing foreign waste. Adamov and other officials have stressed that spent nuclear fuel is not "waste," but a valuable commodity. After reprocessing, they maintain, plutonium and uranium may be extracted and recycled. They also try to make the idea more palatable by saying that proceeds from these imports will be used to clean up existing contaminated zones.

Many areas of the country are radioactively contaminated: The worst zone is in the Urals, in the region around Che lya binsk. However, there are simply no effective means of "cleaning" large-scale radioactive contamination. When relatively small radioactive spills occur, the contaminated earth is put into steel barrels and buried somewhere. Hard surfaces are washed with water and detergent. These methods are obviously not practical when hundreds of square kilometers are contaminated.

The claim that imported waste will be "reprocessed" is also a sham: Russia does not even have the capacity to reprocess spent nuclear fuel it produces itself. More importantly, reprocessing spent nuclear fuel does not make economic sense. Since the end of the Cold War, Russia and the United States have been dismantling their nuclear arsenals and many Western countries have been scaling back their civilian nuclear power programs. As a result, the world is awash with cheap uranium and there is no realistic market for recycled plutonium.

So why do the Duma and the Kremlin support such a dangerous and doubtful plan? It can hardly be for the money. After all, last year Russia had a trade surplus of about $50 billion. A few hundred million in revenues from importing waste simply won't make much of a difference.

The explanation for the extraordinary unanimity of the political elite on the waste imports issue is the typical one: defense considerations. In April 1999, the Security Council (President Vladimir Putin was the secretary of the Security Council at that time) ordered the Nuclear Power Ministry to speed up the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons, including so-called "penetrators." These weapons are designed to burrow down tens of meters underground before exploding. The Security Council also ordered the development of a new generation of very low-yield tactical, battlefield nuclear weapons.

Immediately after Putin announced the Security Council decision, Adamov began to clamor for foreign nuclear waste and a bill was introduced in the Duma. In May 1999, Adamov told a conference: "They told us to accelerate military nuclear programs, but said we should do that using our own sources of revenue." In effect that meant the only way Russia can develop a new generation of weapons is if the West is willing to pay for it by dumping its nuclear waste here. 

The gist of the Adamov plan - to make the West pay for a new generation of nukes that may be eventually used against it - has clearly captured the imagination of the Russian elite. During the Duma debate last month, leading Communist deputy and former Politburo member Anatoly Lukyanov said that anyone opposing the nuclear-waste bill must be an "American agent."

In fact, the U.S. government has already endorsed Russia's initiative to import nuclear waste. But true Russian patriots will not be fooled by such tricks. Foreign radioactive waste will soon be on its way in.


Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent, Moscow-based defense analyst.

TITLE: EDITORIAL
TEXT: Are These Words Meant To Move Us? 


IT seems odd that after spending so much time and energy debating which music to choose as the national anthem, Russia proceeded to adopt lyrics with hardly any public discussion at all. Rather than agonizing over what sort of message the country wanted to send with the words to its official hymn, the government just covered over the obvious ideological anachronisms in the Soviet anthem with some frankly banal patches.


"O Party of Lenin, the strength of the people/ To Communism's triumph lead us on" has metamorphosed into "Popular wisdom given by our forebears/ Be glorious, our country! We are proud of you!" 

What are we to make of the line "You are unique in the world, one of a kind"? Sounds like something that an "anthem-generating" computer program might come up with. 

Russia had a great opportunity to enter the 21st century with an anthem that showed it had learned something from the trials of the 20th century. It could have produced lyrics that moved beyond the glorification of the state and the government and actually inspired people to be proud of their country.

In a previous editorial, The St. Petersburg Times argued for possibly borrowing from the ideals of the Olympic Games - at which Russia's athletes complained about having nothing to sing - where competition between nations, and pride in one's own, is tempered by friendship, dignity and mutual respect.

Another source of inspiration could have been the man whose tune was replaced, Mikhail Glinka, who took Russian music before him and created something that was the foundation of so much music after him - a synthesis of past, present and future, of culture and identity.

Russia might even have taken inspiration from Western protest singers of the 1960s. Accused of being unpatriotic, many of them countered by writing powerful songs that expressed both a love of one's country and a commitment to improving it. 

Take, for instance, "The Power and the Glory" by Phil Ochs. In traditional anthem style, Ochs' chorus runs, "Here is a land full of power and glory/Beauty that words cannot recall."

But the real punch comes in the final verse:

"Yet she's only as rich as the poorest of her poor/Only as free as the padlocked prison door/Only as strong as our love for this land/Only as tall as we stand."

But those who decided on the words we are now stuck with ignored all that, went for a totally uninspiring fudge, and missed the chance to adopt an anthem that would make us stand tall.

TITLE: Gorbachev Calling Bush
TEXT: Dear Mr. Bush, 

I am writing to you as a citizen of our planet and someone who beholds the last remaining superpower. Can there be any doubt that the United States plays a major role in guiding our world? Only a fool could disregard that fact. To acknowledge this is a given, even though American spokesmen are perhaps somewhat overly inclined to press the point home to the rest of the world. 

For while America's role is acknowledged throughout the world, her claim to hegemony, not to say domination, is not similarly recognized. For this reason, I hope, Mr. Bush, as the new American president, that you will give up any illusion that the 21st century can, or even should, be the "American Century." Globalization is a given - but "American globalization" would be a mistake. In fact, it would be something devoid of meaning and even dangerous. 

I would go even further and say it is time for America's electorate to be told the blunt truth: that the present situation of the United States, by which a part of its population is able to enjoy a life of extraordinary comfort and privilege, is not tenable over the long run as long as an enormous portion of the world lives in abject poverty, degradation and backwardness. 

For 10 years, U.S. foreign policy has been formulated as if it were the policy of a victor in war, the Cold War. But at the highest reaches of U.S. policy-making no one has grasped the fact that this could not be the basis for formulating post-Cold War policy. 

In fact, there has been no "pacification." On the contrary, there has been a heightening of inequalities, tension and hostility, with most of the last directed toward the United States. 

Instead of seeing an increase in U.S. security, the end of the Cold War has seen a decline. It is not hard to imagine that, should the United States persist in its policies, the international situation will continue to deteriorate. 

It is also difficult to believe that, under present circumstances, relations between the United States, on the one hand, and China, India and all the rest of the earth that lives in abject poverty, on the other, could develop in a positive direction. Nor is it possible, on the basis of its present posture, for the United States to establish effective, long-run cooperation with its traditional allies, Europe first and foremost. 

Already we see the outburst of numerous trade disputes, evidence of the conflicting interests separating the United States and the European Union. For example, at the recent conference in The Hague, where the participants were supposed to come up with a common policy on limiting greenhouse effects, the United States found itself largely in isolation. U.S. positions were far removed from those of all others, including the Europeans. As a result, no decision was taken. This is clearly an example of a failure of "world governance." 

From the standpoint of the Old World, the post-Cold War period ushered in hopes that now are faded. Over the course of the past decade, the United States has continued to operate along an ideological track identical to the one it followed during the Cold War - but now without a cold war. 

Need an example? The expansion of NATO eastward, the handling of the Yugoslav crisis, the military theory and practice of U.S. rearmament - including the latest and utterly extravagant Anti-Missile National Defense System, which, in turn, is based on the truly bizarre notion of so-called "rogue states." 

Isn't it amazing that disarmament moved further along during the last phase of the Cold War than during the period after its end? And isn't that because U.S. leadership has been unable to adjust to the new European reality? Like it or not, that new reality has placed Europe on the world scene as a new, independent and powerful player. To continue to regard it as a junior partner, ally or no, would be a mistake. Europe's experience, including the bitter elements of it, must serve as a lesson for future relations. It can do so, however, only if America and Europe build a genuine, equal-to-equal partnership. 

Finally, as concerns Russia, the fact that relations between the United States and Russia have deteriorated over the course of recent years is hardly a secret. Responsibility for this state of affairs must be shared between the Russian and American leadership. 

The present leadership of Russia appears ready to cooperate with the United States in framing a new agenda for relations. But it is unclear what your orientation will be. What we heard during the electoral campaign did not sound encouraging. 

If we truly want to build a new world order and further European unity, we have to recognize that that will not be possible without an active role on the part of Russia. This recognition is the necessary basis for setting future Russian-American relations on the right path. 

In more general terms, we need to bear in mind that the world is complicated, that it contains and expresses a variety of interests and cultures. Sooner or later, international policy, including that of the United States, will have to come to terms with that variety. 

Thank you for hearing me out. 

Sincerely, 


Mikhail Gorbachev,

President, The Gorbachev Foundation

Moscow

TITLE: Palestinians Reject Clinton Plan
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: JERUSALEM - Senior Palestinian negotiators said on Monday that the Palestinian Authority rejected President Clinton's proposals as a basis for ending conflict with Israel.


"We can't accept Clinton's ideas as a basis for future negotiations or a future settlement. Clinton didn't take [Palestinian President Yasser] Arafat's reservations into account and these ideas don't offer our people their legitimate rights," senior negotiator Ahmed Korei told Reuters.

Another Palestinian negotiator, Hassan Asfour, said on Monday that Clinton had failed in his efforts to achieve a final peace because his aides were influenced by Israeli positions that had already been rejected by the Palestinians.

Clinton, peacemaker-in-chief after eight years in office, came close to acknowledging that a deal might not be reached before his presidency ends on Jan. 20, and a senior aide said separately that an accord would be hard to achieve by then.

Palestinian officials said Arafat, in talks with Clinton in Washington on Jan. 2, had accepted the ideas with conditions, and only if amendments were made.

Clinton presented his peace proposals to the Israelis and Palestinians two weeks ago and summarised them on Sunday in a speech to the Israeli Policy Forum in New York.

Clinton told the gathering that both sides would have to endure painful sacrifices and engage in wrenching "territorial swaps" to achieve peace. He said more than 4 million Palestinian refugees displaced by the 1948 founding of Israel should abandon their aspiration to return to Israel. He said the United States would take the lead in raising international funds to compensate the refugees and help them find homes in an independent Palestine or a third country. 

For their part, the Israelis would have to transfer Israeli settlers from territory under the control of a "sovereign and viable" Palestinian state. Israel would also have to accept an international presence in the region, modeled on a multinational force deployed in the Sinai Desert, to secure the border along the Jordan Valley and monitor implementation of the final agreement by both sides. 

But Clinton provided little new detail on the sensitive issue of Jerusalem's disputed holy sites. "Jerusalem should be an open and undivided city, with assured freedom of access and worship for all," he said. "It should encompass the internationally recognized capitals of two states - Israel and Palestine."

"Both Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat accepted these parameters as a basis for further efforts," he said. "This is the outline of a fair agreement. ... It will entail real pain and sacrifices for both sides." 

Palestinians said that Clinton's ideas would cancel United Nations resolutions 242, 338, and 194, the basis of the peace process which Israel accepted nine years ago.

These resolutions call for swapping lands that Israel occupied in 1967 for peace with the Arabs. They also call for the right of return of Palestinian refugees to homes and villages they were uprooted from in 1948 when Israel was created. The Palestinians were pressured to accept those resolutions before peace talks were launched with Israel in 1991.

Israel said it had accepted Clinton's ideas with some reservations.


- WP, Reuters

TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Turks Attack PKK

ANKARA, Turkey (LAT) - Iraqi Kurdish officials confirmed Sunday that at least 500 Turkish troops have pushed 160 kilometers into northern Iraq in their deepest incursion into the Kurdish-controlled enclave in 15 years of war against Kurdish separatists. 

The officials described the move as preparation for a major offensive against about 2,500 rebels belonging to the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, who are dug in along a swath of mountainous territory on the Iran-Iraq border. 

The mass-circulation Turkish daily Sabah repeated earlier reports that as many as 10,000 Turkish troops have poured into northern Iraq since Dec. 20 in response to pleas for help from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK, which has been clashing with the Turkish Kurd PKK since September. 



Embassy Reopens

ROME (AP) - The U.S. Embassy in Rome reopened on Monday, three days after it was abruptly closed owing to a terrorist threat. "After a review of our security posture, the U.S. Embassy in Rome has decided to open to the public," a statement said. 

On Friday, the embassy sent its employees home without warning owing to what U.S. officials only described as a security concern. They refused to discuss the nature of the threat, but Italian news reports said that a team of three Algerians, including a suicide bomber, planned to attack the embassy on Friday. 

The reports linked the attackers to Osama bin Laden, the Saudi millionaire widely blamed for the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, that killed 224 people, and for the suicide bombing of an American warship in Yemen in October. 



Oil Ducts Hit

BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - Colombia's second-largest crude oil export pipeline, crippled nearly 100 times last year by leftist rebels, was out of action again after the first attack of 2001, state oil firm Ecopetrol said on Sunday.

A spokesman said the pipeline was hit by dynamite on Saturday some 95 kilometers west of the Cano Limon oil field near the Venezuelan border.

Cano Limon is operated by U.S.-based Occidental Petroleum Corp.

The spokesman had no details of levels of reserves or for how long the 220,000 barrel-per-day capacity duct would be out of action. He blamed National Liberation Army rebels, believed to have been behind most of at least 97 recorded attacks on the pipeline last year, for the sabotage.



Girl Faces Flogging

ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) - A 17-year-old Muslim girl who rights groups say was forced by her father to have sex with three men will be flogged this month for breaking a law against premarital sex, a judge said Friday. 

Judge Idris Usman Gusau said the sentence - 180 lashes with a cane - would be carried out Jan. 27, despite an appeal by the federal government to suspend the punishment. 

The sentence has prompted an outcry from human rights groups, which fear that the girl, Bariya Ibrahim Magazu, might die during the administering of the sentence. Gusau said her condition would be monitored throughout the flogging, which could be halted if she is not able to cope with it all at once. 

The girl was charged after it was discovered that she was pregnant. The sentence had been delayed until she delivered her baby. She was sentenced in September by an Islamic court in the northern Nigerian state of Zamfara.



Pinochet No-Show

SANTIAGO, Chile (Reuters) - Augusto Pinochet failed to show up on Sunday for psychological tests that a judge ordered to see if the retired general is mentally fit to stand trial for alleged human rights abuses during his dictatorship.

As part of a two-day examination, Pinochet, who was in power from 1973 to 1990, had also been scheduled to appear at the Military Hospital on Monday. But sources close to Judge Juan Guzman said the magistrate canceled Monday's tests because Pi no chet, 85, again planned not to turn up.

Guzman plans to interrogate Pino chet on Tuesday regardless of whether he undergoes the tests, but Pinochet is not expected to cooperate. If Pinochet does not agree to be interrogated, Guzman can order his arrest, which would mark the second time he has done so.



Nepal Peace Parade

KATHMANDU, Nepal (Reuters) - Thousands of people staged peace rallies in Nepal's capital on Sunday following violent protests in which five people died last month over alleged anti-Nepalese slurs by an Indian film star.

Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala and opposition leader Madhav Kumar Nepal led a multi-ethnic march through the streets of the temple-studded city demanding harmony among different communities.

The rally was the biggest of a series of gatherings in recent days that have sought to calm tension following violence triggered by alleged remarks by movie star Hrithik Roshan that he did not like Nepalis or their Himalayan kingdom. Roshan has denied making any such comments.



Child Abusers Busted

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) - Six alleged pedophiles have been arrested under suspicion of sexually abusing a 14-year old girl, a Belgian newspaper reported Sunday. 

Judge Jean-Marc Connerotte ordered six arrest warrants in the case near Bastogne, in southeast Belgium, La Derniere Heure newspaper reported. Local police confirmed the arrests but would not go into further details about the case. 

Connerotte, best known for his role in bringing down Belgium's most notorious pedophile ring, has led the investigation in this case, the newspaper said. 

The arrested include the father of the 14-year old victim as well as a local doctor, all of whom allegedly abused the girl. 




Elephant Threatened

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) - Motola, the Thai elephant who drew sympathy and donations from around the world after being maimed by a land mine, has become a target of death threats, her keeper said Sunday. 

"I get calls from people saying they want Motola dead," said Soraida Salwala, founder of the world's first elephant hospital, where Motola's mangled left foot was amputated in August 1999. 

Soraida, who said she has received threats on her own life, believes they come from elephant traders as well as other Thai animal welfare organizations jealous of the donations and publicity brought by Motola's plight.

TITLE: Afghan Government Orders Death Sentence for Converts
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghani stan's Taleban rulers on Monday imposed the death penalty for anyone who converts from Islam to another religion.


Any non-Muslim found trying to win converts will also be killed, Taleban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar said on Taleban-run Radio Shariat.

Omar accused followers of other faiths - particularly Christians and Jews - of trying to convert Muslims and of seeking to demonize the harsh brand of Islam that is practised by the Taleban regime.

"The enemies of Muslims are trying to eliminate the pure Islamic religion throughout the world," Omar said.

The Taleban enforce a strict interpretation of Islamic law in Afghanistan. Women are barred from working, and the Taleban have stopped all schooling for girls beyond age 8.

Men are required to wear beards and pray in mosques without fail, while women must wear head-to-toe coverings. Most forms of entertainment have been outlawed, including television and music other than religious songs.

On Monday, Omar also announced a five-year jail term for book store owners found selling material critical of Islam and about other religions.

Despite the ban on evangelism, followers of other faiths have been allowed to continue practicing their religions.

A large Sikh and Hindu community worships at several temples in Kabul, the capital, and a lone Jewish rabbi still lives in the city though most Jews left when the former Soviet Union invaded in 1979.

The Taleban control about 95 percent of Afghanistan. Their opposition, led by ousted president Burhanuddin Rabbani, rules in the other area. Fighting between the two sides has raged in recent weeks in central Bamiyan province, where the Taleban said Sunday they regained control of the key city of Yakaolong.

TITLE: Balkans Uranium Scare Grows
AUTHOR: By Burt Herman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BERLIN - NATO warned countries with armies and aid workers in the Balkans about the possible dangers of depleted uranium ammunition, the German Defense Ministry said on Sunday - an issue which has recently sparked concern as a possible cause of serious illnesses in soldiers who served there. 


The ministry confirmed that it received a warning in July 1999 of the risks from the ordnance, used by the United States during air campaigns across Yugoslavia for its armor-piercing qualities. 

According to an internal Defense Ministry document obtained by the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper and dated July 16, 1999, NATO had warned soldiers and aid workers that month of a "possible toxic threat" and advised them to take "preventative measures." 

The ministry previously said it began health checks on soldiers who had come into possible contact with the depleted uranium ammunition that same month - as UN peacekeeping forces were still entering Yugoslavia's Kosovo province after NATO's 78-day bombing campaign. 

Despite that, the document said NATO planned no further steps, according to the newspaper. The Defense Ministry said it immediately responded with orders for soldiers on how to behave in areas that were targeted with depleted uranium. 

The renewed concerns over depleted uranium arose in December after Italy announced an investigation into 30 sick soldiers who served in the region. Twelve have cancer and five have died of leukemia. Since then, numerous other countries with troops in the Balkans have launched testing programs. 

The United States has denied there are health risks from the ammunition. 

German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping also repeated the ministry's assertion that the ammunition poses no danger. He is to present a report to parliament on the issue this month. 

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, on a visit to Russia, said the questions were serious ones and would be investigated. 

"It is in our interests to see any danger to our own soldiers and those of our partners to be ruled out," he said. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose country opposed the NATO bombing, on Sunday called the use of force in Yugoslavia "impermissible" and said investigations would have to determine "why such weapons were used and with what results." 

Across Europe, calls continued for a thorough look into the possible effects. 

"If it is shown that depleted uranium causes an increase in cancers, then we have got to look at alternative weapon systems and at precautions which could be taken to protect our troops, as well as at how we can clean up the areas where the shells were used," said Bruce George, chairman of the defense committee in Britain's House of Commons. 

The British Defense Ministry acknowledged on Saturday that depleted uranium has been used at two firing ranges in Britain for more than 10 years, but said there was no evidence it posed a significant health or environmental risk. 

Meanwhile, the head of the UN Environment Program criticized NATO for not being more forthcoming about where it used the ammunition. Klaus Toepfer told the Berliner Zeitung in an article to be published Monday that the alliance had taken the stance "that investigation at these locations wasn't necessary anymore. That is very clearly not correct." 

UNEP has visited 11 of 112 sites in Kosovo identified by NATO as having been targeted with ordnance containing depleted uranium, and found higher radiation levels in eight locations. Final results are expected in March. 

Toepfer said similar investigations should be done in Bosnia and Serbia, and that it was NATO's responsibility to dispose of the ammunition.

TITLE: New Director of Czech TV Dismisses Resignation Calls
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: PRAGUE, Czech Republic - The embattled new head of public Czech Television has no plans to step down despite mounting pressure from parliament, his staff and the public to quit over alleged political bias, his aide said on Sunday.


Jiri Hodac remained defiant after the powerful lower house of parliament called on Saturday for the Czech Television Council, which appointed him, to sack him if he refuses to go voluntarily.

"I just spoke to Mr. director ... and he assured me that he is not planning to resign under any circumstances," Hodac's news director, Jana Bobosikova, said.

The Dec. 20 appointment of Hodac sparked a strike by staff and street protests over allegations that the new TV chief was biased toward the Civic Democrats (ODS), one of the country's two main parties - a charge that he denies.

The Civic Democrats are a key parliamentary ally of the ruling Social Democrats. Both parties dominate the council that elected Hodac.

The stand-off with the station's staff - along with the massive public support that they have received - has prompted the Social Democrats to withdraw their support for Hodac, which has therefore swung the balance in parliament against him.

In spite of his show of defiance, Hodac is still expected to be forced out eventually, either by parliament appointing a new Television Council, or through a legal change in the pipeline.

Hodac himself is in the hospital where he was taken on Thursday apparently suffering from exhaustion.

Doctors said he was stable and might go home Monday.

TITLE: Former Teen Star Looking To Shine Again
AUTHOR: By John Pye
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SYDNEY, Australia - Jennifer Capriati, intent on getting into "immaculate condition," beat Russia's Tatiana Panova 6-4, 3-6, 6-1 Monday in the first round of the Adidas International.


"I'm not quite there physically but I still have this week to go and I think ... by the time Melbourne comes along I'll be feeling really good," she said.

Capriati, fine-tuning her game for next week's Australian Open, had to contend with heat and a swirling wind inside the Sydney International Tennis Center - the tennis venue for the Olympics - that played havoc with her serve in the second set.

Capriati says she's not as fit now as she was in Australia last year, when she lost in the second round before reaching the Australian Open semifinals the following week.

Leg and elbow injuries hampered her late last year, but the 24-year-old American says she's back on course to compete with such players as Venus and Serena Williams.

"I can hit the ball better than any of those players but I have to be able to get to the ball," Capriati said. "I need to be in immaculate physical condition."

Capriati had a well-documented break from the game after becoming the youngest Grand Slam semifinalist when she reached the French Open semis at 14 in 1990.

"Tennis-wise, I'm playing a lot better than I was last year. ... I have a little more variety in my game," she said. "I've evolved with the game. I've always been a power player, but I think now it's double what it used to be."

In other first-round matches, Barbara Schett of Austria swept Gala Leon Garcia of Spain 6-2, 6-4; Brie Rippner defeated Thailand's Tamarine Tanasugarn 6-0 6-7 (4), 6-3, and Lisa Raymond erased Nadedja Petrova of Russia 6-2, 6-1.

Australian teenager Alicia Molik dropped serve twice in the second set but won 6-1, 7-6 (1) against Meghann Shaugnessy.

In a rain-interrupted late match, seventh-seeded Amanda Coetzer of South Africa rallied past Denisa Chladkova of the Czech Republic 3-6, 6-2, 6-2.

In the men's draw, No. 6 Sebastien Grosjean of France defeated Richard Fromberg of Australia 7-6 (3), 6-2, and No. 8 Younes El Aynaoui of Morocco was ousted by Gianluca Pozzi of Italy 7-5, 6-4.

In another match delayed because of rain, Australia's Andrew Ilie cruised to a 6-4, 6-3 win against former French Open champion Michael Chang.

On Tuesday, top-seeded Magnus Norman faces Andrei Pavel, and defending champion Lleyton Hewitt opens against Australian Davis Cup teammate Wayne Arthurs. 


****************

MELBOURNE, Australia - Thomas Enqvist of Sweden and Alex Costa will miss the Australian Open because of injuries.


Enqvist is to have surgery on his shoulder and foot. Costa has an injured shoulder.

The women's wild cards were announced Monday, with six Australians receiving berths in the 128-player singles draw for the Grand Slam event that begins Jan. 15.

Evie Dominikovic, Bryanne Stewart, Annabel Ellwood, Amanda Grahame, Christina Wheeler and Melissa Dowse were nominated. Two more women - one from France, the other from Asia - will receive wild cards in the next several days.

TITLE: Thailand Votes for Tycoon as Ruler
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BANGKOK, Thailand - Thaksin Shinawatra pledged on Monday to build a coalition this week with the clout to dominate Thai politics following his landslide general election victory.


But despite winning the biggest ever mandate in Thai political history, the 51-year telecoms billionaire could still see victory snatched from his grasp by the country's Constitutional Court, which is examining graft allegations against him.

Thaksin said he aimed to build a coalition by Thursday to command about 320 seats in the 500-seat parliament.

"I will try to form the government by this Thursday. It should be a three-party coalition because we are aiming at forming a government with 320 seats," he told reporters.

Unofficial results from Saturday's election show Thaksin's populist Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thais) Party won an absolute majority in parliament - the first time this has ever been achieved in Thailand.

Building a coalition will give him an even stronger power base, and allow him to avoid a parliamentary censure motion, which requires the support of at least 200 legislators.

Local television said Thai Rak Thai had won around 51 percent of the popular vote, making Thaksin's victory the biggest win since the abolition of Thailand's absolute monarchy in 1932.

Outgoing Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai's Democrat Party won just 128 seats, mainly in its heartland in southern Thailand. The party conceded defeat on Monday, with deputy leader Abhisit Vejjajiva saying the Democrats were ready to return to the opposition benches.

Counting continued in dozens of constituencies and at least four were due to hold re-votes after allegations of serious voting irregularities, officials said.

The final result was due by Feb. 5, following re-votes in some constituencies, they said.

Thaksin's likely choices for coalition partners are the New Aspiration Party of former prime minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh and the Chart Thai (Thai Nation) party of ex-premier Banharn Silpa-archa.

The three parties together can dominate parliament. But the main threat to Thaksin's supremacy comes not from other parties, but from the Constitutional Court.

Thailand's official anti-graft agency ruled last month that Thaksin had failed to declare some of his wealth before and after he was a minister in the 1990s. He denies wrongdoing, but if the Constitutional Court upholds the ruling, he would be barred from politics for five years. A decision may take several months.

Thaksin won his resounding victory through promises of lavish spending to boost the economy. Voters punished Chuan for a perceived failure to lift the economy out of the doldrums.

Thaksin won strong rural support with a pledge to allocate one million baht ($23,000) from the national budget to each of Thailand's 70,000 villages.

TITLE: Champion Lakers Fall to Crosstown Rivals
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LOS ANGELES - Pigs didn't fly nor hell freeze over, but the lowly Los Angeles Clippers did beat the defending NBA champion Los Angeles Lakers Sunday, and it wasn't even close.


Lamar Odom scored a season-high 29 points on 13-of-18 shooting to lead the Clippers to a convincing 118-95 victory over the mighty Lakers.

Odom scored 11 of his points in the fourth quarter, grabbed eight rebounds and dished out five assists for the Clippers, who ended a 16-game losing streak against the Lakers by scoring at least 30 points in three of the four quarters.

The new and improved Clippers defeated the Lakers for the first time since March 14, 1997, after taking the Lakers to overtime eight days ago before losing.

Rookie Quentin Richardson added 16 points and Cherokee Parks chipped in 13 for the Clippers, who posted only their 12th win of the season.

The Clippers also got a spark from diminutive guard Earl Boykins, who was activated from the injured list before the game and chipped in 11 points and three assists.

Shaquille O'Neal led all scorers with 33 points for the Lakers, but fouled out for the third straight game.

Kobe Bryant added 27 points but made just 10 of 24 shots as the Lakers lost for only the second time in their last 10 games.



Vancouver 120, Milwaukee 117. In Vancouver, Shareef Abdur-Rahim collected a season-high 38 points and the Grizzlies scored the game's final six points for a 120-117 upset of the Milwaukee Bucks.


A red-hot Abdur-Rahim connected on 15 of 17 shots from the field and made all eight of his free throws to lead Vancouver to just its sixth win in its last 28 games.

Michael Dickerson added 21 points and Mike Bibby came within one rebound of a triple double with 16 points, 14 assists and nine boards for the Grizzlies.

It looked as if Abdur-Rahim's effort might be wasted after the Bucks took a 117-114 lead with 2:43 remaining. But Sam Cassell's layup accounted for the last points for the Bucks.

Glenn Robinson led Milwaukee with 31 points and Ray Allen added 28 in a losing effort.



Denver 94, Charlotte 87. In Denver, Antonio McDyess scored eight of his 33 points late in the fourth quarter and pulled down 16 rebounds as the Nuggets beat the Charlotte Hornets 94-87.


Raef Lafrentz chipped in 20 points and Voshon Lenard added 14, including a key 3-pointer down the stretch, as Denver won its fourth in a row to move four games over .500 for the first time this season.

Eddie Robinson scored 18 points and Baron Davis added 15 for the Hornets, who completed a disappointing 1-5 road trip.



Minnesota 108, Phoenix 88. In Phoenix, Anthony Peeler and Terrell Brandon picked up the slack for a slumping Kevin Garnett as the Minnesota Timberwolves gave coach Flip Saunders his 200th win with a 108-88 triumph over the Suns that spoiled Penny Hardaway's return.


Peeler had a game-high 28 points and 10 rebounds and Brandon chipped in 19 points and made six steals for Minnesota, while Garnett was held to 11 points, just enough to extend his streak of double-digit scoring to 245 games.

Hardaway made his season debut after missing 31 games with a left knee injury. He scored nine points with three rebounds and three assists in 24 minutes.

"It felt great, no pain. But I was extremely tired," Hardaway said. "I played 24 minutes, it felt like 74 minutes."



New York 103, Washington 87. In New York, Marcus Camby scored 21 points and Allan Houston 19 for the Knicks, who led by as many as 25 in the fourth quarter on the way to a 103-87 rout of the hapless Washington Wizards.


Knicks guard Charlie Ward returned after missing 20 games following arthroscopic knee surgery and scored seven points in a 12-0 third-quarter run that gave New York a commanding 79-55 advantage.

Juwan Howard scored 27 points and Tyrone Nesby 22 for the Wizards, who have won just seven times this season.



Toronto 94, Seattle 22. In Toronto, Vince Carter scored 23 points and Morris Peterson added 22, but it was two points from Alvin Williams that lifted the Raptors to a 94-92 victory over the Seattle SuperSonics.


Williams, who had just four points, scored on a follow-up shot with one-tenth of a second on the clock to lift Toronto to its narrow victory.

After Seattle tied it at 92-92 on Vin Baker's dunk with 14.2 seconds left, Toronto's Mark Jackson drove the lane and put up an off-balance hook shot that bounced high off the glass. Kevin Willis grabbed the rebound but his finger roll went across the front rim before Williams banked in his follow-up for the winning bucket.

TITLE: Stanford Latest No. 1 Team in NCAA
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: ARLINGTON, Virginia - Stanford has become the fourth team this season to be ranked No. 1 in the ESPN/USA Today college basketball poll.


The Cardinal (13-0) received 27 first-place votes and 769 points from a nationwide panel of coaches on Sunday night to jump over Michigan State (12-1), which fell to third after a last-second loss to Indiana.

Michigan State took three first-place votes. One was given to No. 2 Duke (13-1), which trails Stanford by 36 points.

In addition to Stanford, Duke and Michigan State, Arizona (8-5) also has held the top spot this season. But the Wildcats have suffered through a turbulent start, including the death of coach Lute Olsen's wife, and are ranked 20th.

The rest of this week's top 10 includes fourth-ranked Tennessee (14-1), Kansas (12-1), Wake Forest (12-1), Florida (10-2), Illinois (12-3), Virginia (11-1) and Syracuse (13-1).

North Carolina (11-2) jumped three places to 11th after defeating Wake Forest on Saturday night. The Tar Heels are followed by a pair of Big East schools, Connecticut (12-2) and Georgetown (13-0), while fellow league member Seton Hall (10-3) is No. 15.

Alabama (12-1) is up four notches to 14th and Maryland (11-3) advanced one spot to 16th, while Wisconsin (10-2) fell five places to No. 17 after its 10-game winning streak came to an end against Minnesota on Saturday night.

The only newcomer to the rankings is No. 23 Iowa State (13-1), which on Saturday posted a 20-point home victory over Oklahoma. The Sooners (11-2) fell three places to 19th.

TITLE: Czechs Claim World Crown
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Rostislav Klesla and Vaclav Nedorost did the scoring, and Thomas Duba was outstanding in goal as the unbeaten Czech Republic defended its title at the world junior hockey championship by defeating Finland 2-1 Friday.


The win was the fourth major international crown in the last three years for the Czechs. They also who won the senior world title last year after taking the Olympic gold medal in 1998.

Canada defeated Sweden 2-1 in overtime in the bronze-medal game.

Klesla, a first-round pick of the Columbus Blue Jackets of the NHL, put the Czechs ahead 1-0 on a shot from the point during the power play 13:19 into the game.

The Czechs made it 2-0 at 2:54 of the second period, when Finnish defenseman Tuukka Mantyla inadvertently gloved down a weak shot from the point directly into the path of Nedorost at the side of the net. The Czech forward stuffed a backhander past a helpless Ari Ahohen.

Jani Rita scored for Finland with 1:09 left in the second period, beating Duba with a wrist shot after a solo rush the length of the ice. It was his eighth goal of the tournament for the Edmonton Oilers' prospect.

The Czechs breezed through the round-robin with a 4-0-0 record, outscoring the opposition 20-4 before defeating Switzerland 4-3 and Sweden 1-0 in the championship bracket.

The United States beat Switzerland 4-0 to finish fifth. The Americans got goals from Jonathan DiSalvatore, Demian Surma, Jeffrey Taffe and Robert Globke.

Russia wound up seventh, beating Slovakia 4-3 after a shoot-out.

TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Belfour Suspended

DALLAS (Reuters) - The Dallas Stars suspended veteran goaltender Ed Belfour indefinitely on Sunday, one day after he left the team following a "disagreement" with coach Ken Hitchcock.

The Dallas Morning News reported Sunday that Belfour wanted to start against the Bruins, an assignment given to rookie Marty Turco. As the backup goalie, Belfour was supposed to take the ice for the morning skate but refused, the newspaper said.

Gainey immediately began collecting information and imposed a gag order that prohibited Hitchcock from discussing the matter after Turco backstopped the Stars to a 4-0 victory. 



Striker Faces Surgery

ROME (Reuters) - AS Roma's Argentine striker Gabriel Batistuta might need surgery on his right knee which would sideline him for up to four months, a surgeon used by the club said on Sunday.

Pier Paolo Mariani, who has operated on several Roma players, said Batistuta was suffering from tendinitis.

Mariani said Batistuta had been suffering from tendinitis since the start of the season but added that the player did not appear to need immediate surgery.

Batistuta has been resting in Argentina over Christmas and the New Year and did not play in Sunday's 2-0 defeat of Atalanta Bergamo which took Roma eight points clear at the top of the first division.



Ex-NBA Player Dies

WILKINSBURG, Pennsylvania (AP) - Kenny Durrett, a former All-American basketball player at La Salle who played in the NBA for four seasons, died at his home Sunday of an apparent heart attack. He was 52.

Durrett, who averaged 4.0 points for Cincinnati, Kansas-Omaha and Philadelphia from 1971 to 1975 before a nagging knee injury ended his career, was the fourth player chosen in the NBA's entry draft in 1971 by the Cincinnati Royals.

He signed a contract with the Royals that was reportedly worth more than $1 million, with deferred payments until 1991. His pro career ended in 1975 when he failed a tryout with the Philadelphia 76ers.

TITLE: Eagles Flounder, Ravens Soar in NFL Playoffs
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: EAST RUTHERFORD, New Jersey - Ron Dixon returned the opening kickoff 97 yards for a touchdown and a swarming Giants defense contained Philadelphia quarterback Donovan McNabb as New York beat the Eagles 20-10 on Sunday to reach the NFC championship game for the first time in 10 years.


The Giants' defense not only stifled the extremely dangerous McNabb all day - holding the Eagles to just one field goal prior to the final two minutes - but produced a touchdown of its own.

A diving Jason Sehorn intercepted a McNabb pass and got up and ran 32 yards for a score in the second quarter to open up a 17-0 New York lead.

With their third victory over the division-rival Eagles this season, the Giants earned the right to host next week's NFC title game against the Minnesota Vikings, 34-16 conquerors of the New Orleans Saints Saturday.

The Giants, winners of six consecutive games, improved to a perfect 9-0 in meetings with the Eagles since Jim Fassel took over as New York's head coach.

McNabb, who accounted for 75 percent of the Philadelphia offense during the season, much of it as the team's leading runner, was held to 17 yards on the ground and sacked six times.

"We kept Donovan McNabb where we needed to keep him," Fassel said.

Prior to Philadelphia's lone touchdown with just 1:56 left, which followed a blocked punt deep in New York territory, the Eagles had managed to convert just one of 14 third-down plays.

New York's ball-control offense was held to a pair of Brad Daluiso field goals. But the Giants did a sensational job of protecting quarterback Kerry Collins, totally neutralizing Philadelphia pass rusher Hugh Douglas.

Douglas, who made several huge plays in last week's wild-card victory over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, not only failed to get a sack but did not make a single tackle.

The game got off to an explosive start that immediately put the Eagles in a hole when rookie Dixon took the opening kickoff at the three-yard line and raced the length of the field for the first opening return for a touchdown in the franchise's 34-game postseason history.

New York's defensive schemes - a mix of blitzes, man-to-man cover, zones and the employment of a "spy" to monitor McNabb - worked to near perfection as the Giants forced three turnovers and held the Eagles to 186 total yards.



Baltimore Ravens 24, Tennessee Titans 10. Anthony Mitchell returned a blocked field goal 90 yards for a touchdown and Ray Lewis added a 50-yard interception return for a score as the Baltimore Ravens upended the Tennessee Titans 24-10 Sunday to advance to the AFC Championship game.


With their ninth consecutive victory, including successive playoff wins on the road, the Ravens earned a trip to Oakland for next week's AFC title game against the Raiders, who blanked the Miami Dolphins 27-0 on Saturday.

"Whoever doubted us, you all need to go back and do your homework," boasted Baltimore linebacker Brad Jackson.

The defending AFC champion Titans, who were stopped one yard short of tying the Super Bowl on the final play last year, were denied a return trip to the big game. They became the first home team to fall this postseason, suffering only their second loss in two years at Adelphia Coliseum, both to the division rival Ravens this season.

The Titans totally dominated virtually every offensive category, including time of possession (40:29 to 19:31), first downs (23 to six) and total yardage (317 to 134). But they lost the battle of miscues and were unable to find their way back to the end zone after opening the game with an 11-play scoring drive, capped by a two-yard Eddie George touchdown rumble.

In the battle of the NFL's two best defenses, special teams played a decisive role with a nightmare day for Titans kicker Al Del Greco proving to be Tennessee's undoing.

After failing on a pair of first-half field goal attempts - a 45-yarder that was partially blocked and a seemingly easy 31-yarder that banged off the goal post - disaster struck for Del Greco and the Titans in the fourth quarter.

With a chance to break a 10-10 tie, Del Greco's 37-yard attempt was blocked by Keith Washington and the ball floated into the hands of Mitchell, who raced 90 yards for the touchdown to give Baltimore its first lead of the game at 17-10 with 12:12 left.

Defensive Player of the Year Ray Lewis drove the final nail into the Titans' coffin when George bobbled a McNair pass and Lewis pulled it out of the air and raced down the sideline for the touchdown and a 24-10 lead.

The Titans got big plays from rookie special teams standout Chris Coleman, who blocked two punts inside the Baltimore 30. But Tennessee was only able to turn those breaks into three points - a 31-yard Del Greco field goal in the third quarter.

Against the league's top defense against the run, George picked up 91 yards on 27 carries with one touchdown and McNair scampered for another 31 yards.

Tennessee effectively bottled up the Baltimore running game, holding Ravens rookie Jamal Lewis to 47 yards on 17 carries. And Ravens quarterback Trent Dilfer completed just five passes all day.

TITLE: Sooners Defeat 'Noles To Win National Title
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MIAMI, Florida - Oklahoma completed its stunning revival as a college football power by beating Florida State 13-2 in the Orange Bowl Wednesday to claim its first national title since 1985.


The top-ranked Sooners bottled up Heisman Trophy winner Chris Weinke, and Quentin Griffin scored on a 10-yard run to become the only undefeated team in the country. 

Florida State (11-2) failed in its quest to win back-to-back national titles and its third crown since 1993. It also eliminated any chances of Miami, which defeated Florida in the Sugar Bowl last Tuesday, of earning a share of the national title.

Tim Duncan kicked a pair of field goals to give the Sooners a tenuous 6-0 lead after three quarters, and it was a key play by the defense that increased the lead.

A scrambling Weinke had the ball swatted away by linebacker Rocky Calmus and safety Roy Williams recovered at the Seminoles 15-yard line. Two plays later, Griffin raced in for a 13-point lead with 7:46 left.

The defense iced the victory with two other big plays later in the quarter. Derrick Strait batted away a fourth-down pass that could have gone for a touchdown, and fellow cornerback Ontei Jones completed the domination with an interception in the final seconds.

Linebacker Torrance Marshall, a Miami native who had a first-half interception, was named the game's Most Valuable Player.

Oklahoma quarterback Josh Heupel finished second to the 28-year-old Weinke in the Heisman Trophy voting but it was the southpaw who ended up with the last laugh.

Heupel completed the journey to a national title that began in his hometown of Aberdeen, South Dakota, and included stops at Weber State and Snow Junior College in Utah. He completed 25 of 39 passes for 214 yards.

Weinke clearly missed his favorite receiver, Marvin Minnis, who was suspended for academic reasons. There were numerous drops by Weinke's targets, including a pivotal miss in the third quarter that could have given the Seminoles a first down.

Weinke was 25-of-51 for 274 yards and was intercepted twice.

The opening quarter had as many turnovers as points, with the only score being a 27-yard field goal by Duncan.

Two of the turnovers were by Seminoles cornerback Tay Cody, who first stripped Andre Woolfolk following a 22-yard reception.

Marshall answered with an interception of Weinke on the next play. A 36-yard pass from Heupel to Josh Norman set up the field goal by Duncan.

Heupel moved Oklahoma down the field on the next possession but tried to force one pass too many and Cody ended up with it at Florida State's eight. Cody left the game later in the first with an abdominal injury and was taken to a hospital for tests.

Florida State's kicking woes also resurfaced. Brett Cimorelli missed badly on a 30-yard field goal attempt with 7:30 left in the second quarter.

The Seminoles failed to score in the first half for only the second time this year. The other was in a loss to Miami at the Orange Bowl on Oct. 7.

The Sooners doubled their lead on a 42-yard field goal by Duncan with 4:24 left in the third period. Heupel scrambled and threw a 39-yard pass to Curtis Fagan but Oklahoma settled for three points after he overthrew a wide-open Antwone Savage in the end zone.

In other games, Washington didn't need another comeback to win the Rose Bowl, while Virginia Tech can only wait and see if quarterback Michael Vick will come back to school after winning the Gator Bowl.

No. 4 Washington, which rallied to win eight games this season, never trailed in the Rose Bowl, beating No. 14 Purdue 34-24 last Monday.

Marques Tuiasosopo, who missed the end of the third quarter with an injured right shoulder, ran for one touchdown, passed for another and accounted for 213 yards to win the player of the game.

Also last Monday, No. 5 Oregon State won its first bowl game since 1962, beating 10th-ranked Notre Dame 41-9 in the Fiesta Bowl, the second-worst bowl loss ever for the Fighting Irish.

In other games, it was Michigan 31, Auburn 28 in the Citrus Bowl; Kansas State 35, Tennessee 21 in the Cotton Bowl; and South Carolina 24, Ohio State 7 in the Outback Bowl.

Tuiasosopo missed the last three plays of the third quarter, but returned for the fourth and threw an eight-yard touchdown pass to Todd Elstrom to put the Huskies up by 10.

Willie Hurst's eight-yard run made it 34-17 as Washington (11-1) gave the Pac-10 its first Rose Bowl victory in five years.

The Boilermakers (8-4) were playing in their first Rose Bowl in 34 years. Purdue's Drew Brees was 23-of-39 for 275 yards and two touchdowns - both to Vinny Sutherland.

Lee Suggs ran for three touchdowns to complement Vick for Virginia Tech (11-1).

Quarterback Woodrow Dantzler was a virtual one-man show for Clemson after the Tigers (9-3) lost tailback Travis Zachery with a broken foot early in the second quarter.

Dantzler rushed 18 times for 81 yards and was 15-of-32 for 180 yards and one touchdown.

Jonathan Smith threw three touchdown passes as Oregon State completed its remarkable rise from pitiful to powerhouse.

The Beavers (11-1), college football's laughing stock for more than a quarter-century, handed the Fighting Irish its worst bowl defeat since a 40-6 loss to Nebraska in the 1973 Orange Bowl.

Smith, the former walk-on who was mistaken for the team manager when coach Dennis Erickson first saw him, completed 16 of 24 passes for 305 yards, then sat out the final quarter.

Anthony Thomas ran for 182 yards and two touchdowns, and Drew Henson passed for two TDs for Michigan.

Henson was 15-of-20 for 294 yards for the Wolverines (9-3), which has won bowls in four straight seasons for the first time.

- Reuters, AP

TITLE: Man Utd Squeaks Out 2-1 Win in FA Cup
AUTHOR: By Bill Barclay
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON - A rasping drive from Teddy Sheringham a minute from time gave Manchester United a 2-1 win at division-one leaders Fulham on the English champions' return to the FA Cup on Sunday.


Fulham looked to have held on for a replay against Alex Ferguson's side, who missed the competition last year to play in the world club championship in Brazil, until Sheringham drilled his 16th goal of the season low past Maik Taylor from the edge of the area.

In the day's all-premier-league clash at St James' Park, the runners-up in two of the past three seasons, Newcastle United, drew 1-1 against Aston Villa.

David Jones marked his return to management in style as his Wolverhampton Wanderers side won the all-division-one clash against Nottingham Forest 1-0 at the City Ground.

Fulham was without several key players through injury but often out-passed Alex Ferguson's side on a sunlit day in west London.

But they made an appalling start when Lee Clark, passed fit to play just before kick-off, lost control on the edge of his own area after eight minutes.

Norwegian Ole Gunnar Solskjaer pounced and curled a low effort past Taylor in the Fulham goal.

Fulham gradually settled though and leveled when Frenchman Fabrice Fernandes curled a David Beckham-style 20-meter free kick into the net after 24 minutes.

United captain Roy Keane was the guilty party. He had encroached by poking the ball away following the award of the free kick which was subsequently brought forward 10 meters - into Fernandes' shooting range.

The energetic Luis Boa Morte and defender Kit Symons, replacing injured captain Chris Coleman, could have extended Fulham's lead before the interval.

United slowly wrested control of the game in the second half and went close when Keane saw his effort blocked on the line by Andy Melville.

Fulham were being pushed back though and substitute Sheringham, fed by Luke Chadwick, made them pay the ultimate price with seconds left.

Steve Stone, a boyhood Newcastle fan, volleyed Villa in front at St. James' Park after 54 otherwise disappointing minutes.

Villa's former Newcastle winger David Ginola backheeled the ball to Gareth Barry and his cross was met by the sidefoot of Stone five meters out.

Foluwashola Ameobi struck a post for Newcastle before Peruvian Nolberto Solano's low volley from the edge of the area with 10 minutes left made it 1-1.

Villa's Dion Dublin and Darius Vassell both spurned chances to win it for the visitors, while Solano also hit the bar for Newcastle.

Adam Proudlock's individual effort after 87 minutes against Forest ensured former Southampton manager Jones, cleared last month of child-abuse charges, enjoyed his return to the manager's dugout.

TITLE: Pitino To Step Down In Boston
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: BOSTON - Rick Pitino, frustrated over his inability to turn around the struggling Boston Cel tics, is expected to announce his resignation as the team's coach on Mon day, a newspaper reported on Sunday.


Citing sources close to Pitino, the Providence Journal-Bulletin reported that Pitino had reached an agreement with Celtics owner Paul Gaston on a buyout of his 10-year contract.

Assistant Jim O'Brien will take over as interim coach, the newspaper said.

The 48-year-old Pitino, who has never been able to match the previous success, which he experienced at the collegiate level, in the NBA, appeared especially disheartened by Saturday's 112-86 loss at Miami, the Celtics' 11th defeat in 14 games.

He said afterward he was taking a day off to spend time with his wife, Joanne, and consider his future.

"I said all along that come January, I will make a decision," Pitino explained. "What I was looking for was defensive improvement and obviously, by the way the Heat played, you can see it is not there."

The 112 points was a season-high for the usually low-scoring Heat.

"It has been a while since I remember having a day off. My wife is coming down and we are going to spend the day together and I am going to do a little thinking. It is safe to say I will have a decision after the day off," he said Saturday.

The Celtics, who have lost five in a row and 15 of their last 20 games, rank 26th in the NBA defensively (98.3 points per game allowed), a source of great disappointment to Pitino.

Pitino won an NCAA championship with Kentucky in 1996 and led the school to the title game the following year before signing a 10-year contract to become Boston's president and coach in 1997.

Under his tenure - Pitino's second stint as an NBA head coach - the Celtics are just 102-146 with no playoff appearances.

He went 90-74 with the New York Knicks from 1987-88 to 1988-89 before returning to the college ranks.

TITLE: Stricker Ends Drought To Capture World Matchplay Title
AUTHOR: By Greg Buckle
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MELBOURNE, Australia - American 55th seed Steve Stricker ended four lean years to win the world matchplay championship at the penultimate hole against Sweden's Pierre Fulke on Sunday.


Stricker, the world number 90, never trailed to win the final two and one.

He had moved clear by claiming the 15th, 16th and 17th holes before Fulke picked up a birdie on the par-four 18th to turn two-down in the 36-hole contest at the Metropolitan golf course.

The 33-year-old American, who played consistent golf throughout with some wonderful bunker saves, saw his lead whittled down to one stroke with eight holes to play.

Fulke's bogey five, however, to Stricker's four at the par-four 35th hole finally settled the match.

It was Stricker's first tournament victory since 1996 and the biggest pay-day of his career - a first prize of U.S. $1 million.

Stricker, however, was forced to fight right to the finish.

The American had gone three up on the 25th hole after Fulke three-putted for a bogey, but the Swede cut the margin back to two on the following hole with a birdie four.

With nine holes left, Stricker looked in command but his putt for par lipped out on the 28th hole, cutting his advantage to a single hole and giving the 29-year-old Fulke a chance.

They halved the next six holes before Fulke, the world number 45 who won the Scottish PGA and the Volvo Masters last year, missed a 4.5-meter par putt on the par-four 35th hole to concede the match and the Walter Hagen Cup.

Fulke joked that he could not buy a putt in the final, not even for a million dollars.

Stricker last played a tournament in September, and last made a cut in July.

South African Ernie Els, the top seed and world number two who was knocked out in the semifinals on Saturday by Fulke, lost again on Sunday to Japan's Toru Taniguchi, four and three over 18 holes for the US $400,000 third-place prize.

Fulke had been using the controversial Callaway ERC model driver, which is banned by the United States Golf Association because of its spring-like face that is purported to offer extra distance. Under Royal and Ancient rules, though, which govern the world matchplay championship, the driver is legal.

Fulke will now have to find another driver for the U.S. Tour this year.

The world matchplay, the first of four World Golf championships each year, will be moved to La Costa in California in February, 2002.

TITLE: Wings Down Avs in Overtime
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: DETROIT - Steve Yzerman watched his team blow a lead in the closing seconds of regulation, then went out and won it in overtime.


The Detroit captain stole the puck from Ray Bourque and scored his second goal of the game just 68 seconds into the extra session to lift the Red Wings to a 4-3 victory over the arch-rival Colorado Avalanche Sunday.

Colorado had not lost in 25 straight regular-season overtime games, going back to a 5-4 loss at Philadelphia on Oct. 28, 1999.

Detroit was protecting a 3-2 lead with time running out in the third period when Colorado's Chris Drury got to a loose puck, darted into the slot and wristed a shot between goaltender Manny Legace's pads with 12 seconds left.

Just over a minute into the overtime session, Yzerman intercepted Bourque's clearing attempt, skated in, put a fake on Colorado goalie Patrick Roy and lifted a shot inside the left goal post for his third game winner of the season.

Yzerman also had a power play goal in the second period and set up Steve Duchesne's first-period tally.

Kirk Maltby added a short-handed goal for Detroit, while Shjon Podein and Joe Sakic had the other goals for the Avalanche.

Lagace made 21 saves, while Roy, who faced 18 shots in the second period alone, finished with 33 stops.



Carolina 5, New York Islanders 2. At Carolina, Rod Brind'Amour recorded his first hat trick in more than eight years and rookie Shane Willis collected four assists to lead the Hurricanes to a 5-2 victory over the hapless New York Islanders.


Brind'Amour, who has just 11 goals in 69 games with Carolina since being acquired from Philadelphia last January, scored twice in the first period.

He completed his second career hat trick at 12:19 of the second to put the Hurricanes ahead 4-2.

"It was just nice to get a couple of breaks. It's a strange game because you can play a long time and not get any breaks," he said.

Martin Gelinas added a goal and he and Willis assisted on all three of Brind'Amour's tallies.

"I give a lot of credit to Marty because he was the catalyst to all the goals," Brind'Amour said. 


Chicago 7, Tampa Bay 4. In Chicago, Tony Amonte and Michael Nylander each had two goals and an assist and Eric Daze added a goal and two assists as the Blackhawks beat Tampa Bay 7-4 to spoil John Tortorella's debut as Lightning coach.


Tortorella, who became the fifth coach in Lightning history Saturday when general manager Rick Dudley fired Steve Ludzik, saw his team jump out to a 3-2 lead after one period. But Chicago scored the next four goals, sending Tampa Bay to its fourth straight loss.

Brian Holzinger had two goals and an assist for Tampa Bay.



Edmonton 4, Columbus 2. In Edmonton, the Oilers avenged Wednesday's loss to the expansion Blue Jackets with a 4-2 triumph over Columbus.


Columbus opened the scoring on a goal by Espen Knutsen less than three minutes into the contest. But the Oilers responded just over two minutes later with the first of four unanswered goals. Ethan Moreau set up the first Oilers tally and then later scored the fourth.

Tommy Salo made 17 saves for the Oilers and helped Edmonton kill off all four Columbus power plays.