SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #643 (10), Friday, February 9, 2001
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TITLE: Yakovlev Short on Plans for Jubilee
AUTHOR: By Tom Masters
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Gov. Vladimir Yakovlev brought a St. Petersburg roadshow to Moscow on Wednesday, in an effort to gather moral support for his city's year-long tricentennial clebrations in 2003.
 Flanked by Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov and Deputy Prime Minister Valentina Matviyenko at the capital's Gos tiny Dvor shopping center, Yakov lev unveiled an exhibition honoring "the past, present and future" of his city to other politicians, business leaders and the media.
 The opening of the exhibit came a day after the federal commission for the 2003 jubilee, which is chaired by former St. Petersburg vice mayor and native son Vladimir Putin, met in the Kremlin to discuss Yakovlev's renewal plans for the city. After the meeting, Viktor Cherkesov, Putin's envoy to the Northwestern Federal District, announced that a far-larger-than-expected 40 billion rubles ($1.4 billion) had been allocated by the state to fund preparations over the next two and a half years.
 Cherkesov added that once the "protocol agreement is signed next week, in which the scale of the financing is determined ... work will go full speed ahead," reported Interfax.
 State Hermitage director and anniversary commission member Mikhail Piotrovsky said that the "funds provided by the [federal] government will not all be spent on fireworks; the best way to give the money back to the people is by means of culture," Interfax reported.
 The exhibition itself, organized by State Commission Secretary Natalya Ba tazhok and held in Moscow's Gos tiny Dvor, was a chance for the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly and Smol ny to present the image, history and future of the city to federal politicians, business leaders and the media, according to a press release.
 While the traveling exhibition - comprised of models, historical displays, photographs and a range of homegrown products from candy to lasers - was praised for being informative, it was criticized for being short on details for the celebrations themselves. 
 "The exhibition was not particularly impressive," said Moscow City Duma Deputy Dimitry Katayev. "It told us a great deal about the past of the city and something about the present, but nothing as yet about what will actually happen for the anniversary."
 Indeed, with sections called "St. Petersburg - Cultural Capital" and "St. Petersburg - Naval Capital," the exhibit's ostensible purpose was to remind Moscow's ruling elite of the second city's grand past, rather than to project a vision of the future.
 Ahead of the traditional cutting of the ribbon, Yakovlev reeled off a long list of facts and figures to demonstrate the city's economic strength, including an official unemployment level of just 0.7 percent and an industrial growth level of 26.4 percent.
 The governor listed scores of projects either completed or already underway, such as the renovation of Nevsky Prospect and the building of a ring road, rather than mentioning any new large-scale projects. 
 Luzhkov, himself a veteran of huge-scale festivities after organizing Mos cow's 850th anniversary celebrations two years ago, joked about the rivalry between the "northern" and actual capitals. He added he will attend the St. Petersburg event "with pleasure, if I am invited," recalling that "one of the most impressive delegations attending the Moscow birthday came from St. Petersburg."
 Aware of the tenuous nature of his relationship with Putin, whose mentor, Anatoly Sobchak, was Yakovlev's predecessor and political enemy, Yakovlev praised the "positive fundamental change that the Putin presidency" has brought, adding that his election to the Kremlin was a "historic day for the fate of the city."
 The 300th anniversary has long been seen as a chance for the St. Petersburg government to redress the comparatively small amount of foreign investment the city has received over the last decade. Moreover, Gov. Yakovlev spoke of it being a timely opportunity to increase tourism, which, currently standing at 2 million visitors a year, could, he said, ultimately be as high as 10 million a year.
 Touring the site with Duma faction leaders and government ministers, Gov. Yakovlev took a back seat as the charismatic Luzhkov ensured that he remained the center of attention, himself assuming the role of guide while Yakovlev and Matvienko looked on.
 Other prominent visitors to the cermony included Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi and Deputy Duma Speaker and LDPR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
 Despite the pomp and ceremony, reactions seemed to be rather luke-warm on the part of the guests.
 The exhibition closes on Friday evening.

TITLE: Press Minster Slams Chechen Broadcasts
AUTHOR: By Andrei Shukshin
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW - U.S.-funded Radio Liberty said on Thursday it would go ahead with plans to broadcast in Chechen despite angry comments by a Russian minister that the move was politically motivated and a challenge to Moscow.
 Former president Boris Yeltsin invited Radio Liberty to Russia after the collapse of communism in 1991, but the station's extensive reporting of human suffering in Chechnya and abuses by Russian troops have ignited animosity in Moscow.
 Paul Gobel, the communications director for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, said last year the U.S. Congress had mandated the Prague-based station to start transmissions in Chechen and two other languages of Russia's turbulent North Caucasus region.
 "In fulfillment of our mandate we have begun a process of exploring the possibilities of doing this," Gobel told Reuters by telephone.
 He said final decisions about the format, timing and staffing of such broadcasts had yet to be made because the U.S. legislature had not allocated specific funds.
 Russia's Press Minister Mikhail Lesin told Interfax on Thursday that the decision to start transmissions in Chechen was political and would encourage separatist feelings in the rebel region.
 "Chechens know Russian, which is the main language in that territory, and to create such a special national autonomy on radio waves is, of course, wrong," Lesin said before leaving for Austria with President Vladimir Putin.
 "Though small, it is a challenge. Why do it? It is absolutely unclear," he said. "It is a very negative step which has very serious political motivation."
 Gobel said that reasoning sounded all too familiar.
 "This statement unfortunately recalls statements that Soviet officials sometimes made about our broadcasts to the non-Russian republics of the Soviet Union."
 He said broadcasts in different languages were meant to give people a choice and asserted that reporting in Chechen would follow the station's general editorial standards.
 Sixteen months after Russian troops marched into Chechnya to re-install Moscow's rule, the region remains in the spotlight of political and public life. The operation in Chechnya has also soured Moscow's relations with the West, which has criticized it as excessively brutal and has called for a peaceful settlement.
 Russia has imposed strict rules for reporting from the region. At the height of fighting last year, Moscow's forces arrested Radio Liberty reporter Andrei Babitsky and later swapped him for Russian servicemen held by the rebels.
 Babitsky was eventually released but had to go on trial and was convicted of having used a forged passport supplied by the people who held him.
 Russian officials including President Putin have expressed anger at Babitsky's reporting and questioned Radio Liberty's editorial policies.
 Lesin returned to that theme, saying his ministry would check whether broadcasts in Chechen could be a threat to Russia's national security. Gobel said there was little the Russian authorities could do to prevent broadcasts, which will be on short wave, except to make life difficult for people on the ground.

TITLE: Nuclear Power: A Tainted Future?
AUTHOR: By Charles Digges and Barnaby Thompson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A little over six years ago, Norwegian environmental activist Tomas Nilsen recalls standing on the Russian-Finnish border, trying to halt the passage of a cargo train loaded with Finnish nuclear waste into Russia. 
 The train, as he described it in a telephone interview from the Oslo offices of the environmental group Bellona, differed little in appearance from a standard, rundown cargo train - except for the heavy presence of armed Finnish military guards who were along for the ride. 
 Nilsen's group - positioned on the Finnish side - was arrested almost immediately. After the train trundled through customs, his colleagues on the Russian side said the guard gave way to a much, much smaller group. 
 "While we could get nowhere near the train in Finland, the security in Russia was far more lax." 
 As a result of the outcry surrounding the existence of such shipments, the Finnish parliament passed a law forbidding the export of its nuclear waste to foreign countries for disposal ever again. The State Duma also outlawed such imports shortly after.
 But an aggressive campaign by Russia's Nuclear Minister Yevgeny Ada mov to repeal that law - amid popular, though little governmental, protest - looks set to succeed later this month. Adamov has recast waste imports as a money spinner that would net Russia's beleaguered nuclear sector $21 billion over the next 10 years. He has also said such a sum could be used to revamp old reactors, build new ones, and clean up contaminated areas.
 But some experts have speculated this money will be used for other purposes - from the development of a highly controversial plutonium-based civilian nuclear economy, to military applications that could eventually be brought to bear on Chechen rebels. 
 In short, the host of dangers to Russia that could be caused by a few waste imports are almost immeasurable, according to authorities both outside and within the Russian nuclear industry. 
 TRAINS OF WASTE 
 Strikingly, Gosatomnadzor, Russia's own nuclear regulatory body, has opposed the waste-import bill ever since its inception. 
 The agency's opposition, however, has meant as little to the Nuclear Power Ministry, or Minatom, as the outcry of the general public, characterized by the ministry as too ill informed to understand the technical aspects of the nuclear industry 
 "Minatom has furnished us with hardly any information whatsoever," said one Gosatomnadzor official charged with reviewing the import bill. 
 "We have asked for documents time and time again," said the official, who requested anonoymity, in a telephone interview Thursday. 
 "They have sent us next to nothing, and what they do send is entirely unreasonable. They have no idea what routes the waste will follow, or how it will be transported - they have, in short, no sense of what is involved." 
 Comments posted on the Bellona Web site (www.bellona.no) from Gos atom nadzor's head, Yury Vishnevsky, were even more dispirited.
 In his view, any of the proceeds garnered from the imports would be "either eaten up or stolen." 
 Nevertheless, the regulatory agency did prepare a small number of vaguely worded amendments, published on its own Web site, that will be submitted with the import law for the final reading. But the amendments clearly boil down to a set of simple customs regulations. To whit: Russia has the right to turn back any shipment Gosatomnadzor inspectors deem to be too dangerous to be transported, or which pose a threat to Russia's environment.
 According to Igor Kudrik, a nuclear-industry expert at Bellona, the agency's status has been gutted, in a war of economics versus safety.
 Nilsen said the most pressing dangers in transporting nuclear waste are presented by derailments or collisions. Any mishap would require large-scale and extremely expensive cleanup operations
 "All soil in the affected area would have to be dug up and disposed of as nuclear waste," said Nilsen. 
 "These trains will also be traveling through some of the most populated areas of Russia, so a spill could displace thousands of people." 
 
 THE PLUTONIUM FACTOR
 If what some experts foresee in Ada mov's import plans hold true, the price Minatom plans to charge for importing, and storing or reprocessing spent fuel - which yields plutonium, uranium, and liquid waste - could be one small part of an ambitious whole: the creation of a plutonium-based energy economy.
 Experts say this has been a preoccupation of the Russian nuclear industry since the 1950s.
 All that Russia needs for this is the money to develop a generation of special reactors called breeders - which, in brief, produce more plutonium than is fed to them - and the facilities to fabricate a special mixed-oxide fuel, or MOX. 
 Under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Russia will be getting a MOX-fabrication plant as part of a very different plan that is meant to reduce the amount of surplus weapons-grade plutonium Russia now holds. 
 If the MOX fuel is burned in a retrofitted VVER-1000 reactor - Russia has seven of these - the plutonium is gradually rendered inert. A roughly similar program will be followed in the United States. If, however, MOX is run through a breeder, the plutonium becomes purer.
 Presently, Russia has one breeder reactor that, at today's rates, cost $918 million to build. If Adamov's $21 billion waste-import plan reaches fruition, Russia would have the resources to build several breeders, plus a MOX plant to feed them with.
 WORLDWIDE DANGERS
 The public-relations image of MOX fuel took a hammering in 1999, when a shipment of the material to Japan - now the world's foremost purchaser of MOX - from Britain raised an international outcry.
 The supplier, the Sellafield nuclear power station operated by British Nuclear Fuels Limited, was found to have falsified quality-control data on the fuel, and although two armed ships eventually delivered the tainted MOX to Japan, the British and Japanese governments agreed to send the fuel back to Britain.
 At present, it is still sitting in Japan. (Ironically, Japan became interested in MOX after an accident at its Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor following a sodium coolant leak in 1995.)
 Taking surplus weapons-grade plutonium and burning it as MOX in Russia's VVER-1000 reactors is central to the U.S.-Russia agreement. But according to Edwin Lyman, science director of the Washington-based Nuclear Control Institute, those reactors are not up to the job.
 "VVER-1000 reactors have problems processing the uranium fuel they were intended to use," he said in a recent telephone interview. For a variety of technical reasons, burning MOX in such a reactor is much more difficult to control, "and the margin of error ... is extremely narrow."
 "It is a documented fact that Russia observes some of the worst standards of up-keep on its reactors imaginable," said Richard Rosenthal, the NCI's executive director. He added that any accident resulting from MOX use in a VVER-1000 would increase the risk of cancer in the affected area by 25 percent more than what the Chernobyl disaster managed.
 "Putting plutonium into a VVER-1000 is a terrible idea."
 While the DOE may shrug off such dangers, there is one aspect of the deal with Russia that is strangely missing: As of yet, no one is accepting liability should something go wrong.
 According to the DOE's Laura Holgate, who brokered the plan, these questions will be addressed at a Group of Eight meeting this summer in Genoa, Italy. But it has been a major sticking-point so far.
 THE TERRORIST THREAT 
 Other factors worrying observers of Adamov's import plan involve the vulnerability to terrorists of a train laden with nuclear waste. Though much of the waste shipped is virtually useless for the purposes of building a large nuclear device, Lyman underscored that "one can make a so-called 'dirty' nuclear bomb out of spent fuel." 
 Such fears have been a preoccupation of Western nuclear disposition organizations since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. 
 "It takes a ball of plutonium the size of an orange to make a bomb more powerful than the one that destroyed Nagasaki," said Rosenthal. He added that trains carrying any of the nuclear material, be it spent fuel or MOX, would have to be guarded with "military force." 
 It is a familiar stance. For a few years from 1992 onward, the Western press was full of reports of the possible smuggling of fissile and other radioactive (but not necessarily weapons-usable) material. One notable report was an investigation carried out by the Frontline program from U.S. Public Broadcasting Service in November 1996, which detailed some of the biggest scares to that date.
 On Nov. 23, 1995, a reporter for NTV claimed to have received a tip-off from Chechen rebel leader Shamil Basayev, and uncovered a package containing cesium-137 buried under some leaves in Izmailovsky Park in northeast Moscow.
 . On Dec. 14, 1994, 2.7 kilograms of uranium-235 was seized by police in Prague. According to the Frontline investigation, the supplier of the material, an Eduard Baranov from Obninsk, had been involved in a number of similar smuggling incidents of "loose nuke" material.
 . Another Frontline report in 1999 revealed how U.S. agents were offered a chance to by small nuclear devices from two Lithuanians, who allegedly had links to a mysterious scientific institute in St. Petersburg, as well as to then Defense Minister Pavel Grachev.
 But a DOE source who requested anonymity said that for all the fear that Russia's nuclear arsenal would slowly fall into the hands of the highest rogue state bidder, "not one bomb has been lost." 
 The source added that the MOX would be transported in the U.S. program via the same transportation infrastructure that kept nuclear arms on the move.
 "I would assume that the Russians have a similar infrastructure," the source said.
 But Bellona's Nilsen pointed out that such internal infrastructures are hard to locate because they run on secret schedules. 
 "This will not be so with international shipments," he said. "Protesters can get scheduling information and protest, pointing out those ships or trains that contain waste."
 
 MILITARY USES
 Another theory as to why Russia wants to import spent nuclear fuel was put forward by Moscow-based defense analyst Pavel Felgenhauer, in a column he wrote for The St. Petersburg Times on Jan. 9.
 "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,'" Felgenhauer wrote.
 "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."
 This theory was confirmed by Paul Beaver, a spokesman for Jane's, the highly respected defense, aerospace and transportation information group, in an interview from London on Wednesday.
 "The British have a penetrator called Broach, which is being looked at by the French and the Americans," he said, "[but] it's one piece of technology the Russians are short of."
 "In order to build a penetrator, you need depleted uranium, which means you need spent nuclear fuel. The Russians also need this for their anti-tank weapons - and it's also used in cruise missiles and guided bombs."
 "One of the reasons they are so interested is because of the problems they have had hitting targets effectively in Chechnya."
 If so, Felgenhauer noted, the irony is rich. All the West's financial help - selling spent fuel, and helping Russia with the MOX deal - will be used to build nuclear weapons that could be used against it.

TITLE: Putin: Austrian Neutrality Important
AUTHOR: By Tara FitzGerald
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: VIENNA, Austria - President Vladimir Putin stressed the importance of Austria's post-war neutrality Thursday and repeated Russian opposition to the eastward expansion of NATO.
 Putin told reporters after talks with Austrian President Thomas Klestil after arriving in Vienna that although the world situation had changed considerably since the days of the Cold War, Austrian neutrality - imposed in 1955 - still held international importance.
 "In the Cold War, in those very tense times, Austrian neutrality proved its value ... for Austria and for Europe and the whole world," Putin said.
 "Today, when there is no such challenge and there are no opposing blocs ... we believe that Austrian neutrality is a very valuable achievement which we rate highly."
 Austria's neutral status was a condition for the withdrawal of post-war Soviet occupation forces, but Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel's center-right coalition has described the terms established then as outdated. Schuessel says neutrality has undergone major changes.
 Klestil said Austria had become neutral as a result of a 1995 constitutional law passed by the Austrian parliament and any change would be a matter for the Austrian people.

TITLE: Berezovsky Throws Hat Into NTV Ring
AUTHOR: By Andrei Zolotov Jr.
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - In an apparent bid to compete with Ted Turner and George Soros on the pedestal of would-be saviors of NTV, Boris Berezovsky has offered to loan his long-time rival Vladimir Gusinsky up to $50 million to help pay his Media-MOST's operating costs.
 He issued an open letter to the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs - dubbed the Trade Union of the Oligarchs - asking for others to join him in chipping in money to support NTV. 
 Berezovsky, who is in self-imposed exile, said he will start negotiating with the Credit Suisse First Boston investment bank on a possible buyout of Media-MOST's $262 million debt that comes due in July. The debt was guaranteed by Gazprom, which has been trying to take control of NTV.
 Berezovsky's appeal was one of three open letters issued Wednesday in the increasing public battle over NTV. Gazprom CEO Rem Vyakhirev published an open letter in The Wall Street Journal saying he no longer wants to deal with Gusinsky and NTV management, while leading Media-MOST journalists appealed to President Vladimir Putin to step into the fray.
 The Swedish Modern Times Group confirmed Tuesday that it is bidding for a stake in Media-MOST. Modern Times was earlier reported to be part of CNN founder Turner's efforts to put together a $300 million consortium that would buy shares in NTV and three other Gusinsky-founded media companies.
 Soros, a financier and philanthropist, also has pledged to take part in the consortium, and there have been mixed reports about interest on the part of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Sources in Media-MOST said there were two more players, one Russian and one American, but their identities have not been revealed.
 "We are interested. ... We are in talks with several people," Modern Times Group CEO Hans Holger Albrecht was quoted by Reuters as saying Tuesday. He declined to say how much money the company was willing to put up. "There are so many players involved that a lot of things are not clear yet," he said.
 Vyakhirev's open letter, which appeared as a full-page advertisement in The Wall Street Journal Europe, was addressed to Media-MOST shareholders and asked them to sell their stakes to Gazprom or pool their votes in a trust with Gazprom for one year to save Media-MOST from bankruptcy.
 Vyakhirev clearly was targeting Western public opinion and potential Media-MOST shareholders rather than the current ones: Other than the substantial stakes held by Gaz prom and Gusinsky, only small stakes are held by the U.S. mutual fund Capital Research and several private individuals, among them NTV's management.
 Vyakhirev said Gusinsky is using free speech rhetoric to cover up management's financial failings.
 Berezovsky, on the contrary, said that it was the need to defend free speech that led him to abandon his old rivalry with Gusinsky. A democratic Russia is "unthinkable" without NTV, he said. "I am convinced that it is not just in our corporate interests, but also in the interests of the entire Russian society to prevent the restriction of free speech, whose most important bearer is NTV."
 Berezovsky said he moved in response to the call of human rights advocate Yelena Bonner, the Union of Journalists and Glasnost Defense Foundation, who have proposed creating a public fund to aid Media-MOST.
 His offer to chip in for NTV comes fresh on the heels of confirmation that he has sold 49 percent of ORT television to fellow tycoon Roman Ab ra mo vich, who in turn has entrusted the private share to the Kremlin. Neither the mechanism of the deal nor the amount of money Berezovsky received has been revealed.
 Media-MOST spokesperson Dmitry Ostalsky said the company was grateful for any help "under the conditions of total war declared by the state," but he did not pin too much hope on Berezovsky's offer. He said talks with the foreign consortium were in progress, but much still depended on the Russian government.
 The Prosecutor General's Office and Federal Security Service on Wednesday paralyzed the work of Gusinsky-connected Image-Bank which handles Media-MOST's accounts, Ostalsky said.
 In a third NTV-related open letter released Wednesday, Yevgeny Kiselyov of NTV, Alexei Venediktov of Ekho Moskvy radio and Pavel Korchagin of TNT television called on Putin to interfere in the activities of the Prosecutor's Office and FSB, which have "de facto stopped all economic activity" at Media-MOST. Its companies are unable to make any payments, they said. 
 Gazprom-Media spokesperson Aelita Yefimova said Wednesday that Berezovsky's proposal elicited "nothing but laughter" in the company.
 "It is nothing but his personal PR," she said. She reiterated that the company is determined to take over control of NTV before any other talks can start.
 "Well, if Boris Abramovich has now gotten involved with free speech, then the price of free speech must be going up," she quoted Gazprom-Media general director Alfred Kokh as saying.
 Alexei Pankin, editor of Sreda media magazine, said Berezovsky's offer could not be taken seriously. "It is just another bluff, it is simply ridiculous," he said.
 
 Staff writers Anna Raff and Ana Uzelac contributed to this report

TITLE: Observatory Still Reaching for the Skies
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: At 76 meters tall and 19 kilometers from the city center, the St. Petersburg observatory is a well-known and somewhat mystical-looking landmark to drivers on the highway to Russia's south, and to the city's air traffic. 
 By day, the building - officially known as the Pulkovo Central Astronomy Observatory - seems eerily quiet, even though there are more than 400 scientists and technical assistants dotted around several buildings. But at night, the round roof's wooden covering slides open, and the telescopes set to work adding to the world's knowledge of the universe.
 "Astronomy is a science working for the future," Yury Nagovitsyn, the observatory's scientific secretary, said in an interview on Wednesday.
 "The results of today's research can be of use 30 or 50 years in the future. When the theory of the movement of the planets was first worked out at the end of the 19th century, nobody knew the importance it would have for today's space flights and satellite launches."
 But Thursday - Science Day in Russia - seemed a good time to reflect on the observatory's illustrious past, and its many contributions to astronomy.
 The Pulkovo Observatory was unveiled in 1839 by order of Tsar Nicholas I. The first observatory in Russia, it soon earned a reputation as one of the world's astronomy centers, alongside its counterparts in Greenwich, London and Paris.
 In the days before the Greenwich Meridian was adopted as the international standard, the Pulkovo Observatory marked out a strip of land that was considered zero longitude in Russia - the point from which all national geographic calculations were computed.
 Among the past achievements of scientists at the Pulkovo Observatory, said Nagovitsyn, have been the determination and cataloguing of the positions of the stars, defining the speed at which the larger planets in the solar system rotate, and research into the rings of Saturn.
 Today, the Pulkovo scientists are occupied with researching the bountiful natural energy in space, and related phenomena still puzzling scientists.
 "The stars are the laboratories of space," said Professor Yury Gnedin, the observatory's deputy director. "By observing the stars and the sky, we can provide information for experiments staged here on Earth and, if the experiments are dangerous, help reduce that danger."
 The observatory is also heavily involved in research into one of the hot topics of the day, global warming. "The warming of the earth's climate is not only affected by the environment and its problems, but also by the cycles of the sun's magnetic field. By studying those cycles, we predict [the behavior] of the climate," Nagovitsyn said.
 But the observatory has had its tougher times as well, as Sergei Tolbin, who runs its museum and knows its history better than anyone, explained.
 Cut off from the world in the '30s, and prohibited from reading foreign scientific literature, 12 leading scientists from the observatory died in Stalin's repressions, including its director, Boris Gerasimovich, who was shot in 1936 for "harmful activities [concerning] solar eclipse research," and for "scientific espionage."
 During World War II, the observatory was completely destroyed, and a new one built in 1951. But as peeling plaster around the complex reveals, there has been little in the way of renovation there for some time.
 Nonetheless, the Pulkovo Observatory today exchanges information with 27 organizations in countries such as Germany, Italy, Spain, the United States and Japan. In addition, it works with 15 other observatories in Russia, combining their individual views of space.
 "Astronomy requires that observatories in different countries cooperate," said Gnedin. "Often it is the case that scientists are doing similar research [to each other], but they are using different methods. When they compare results, that's when they find out the truth."
 The observatory's many departments and its array of huge radio and optical telescopes that scan the night sky suggest a very 21st-century institution. But some things don't change: It's February, and the telescopes need guiding by men and women willing to put up with staying still for long stretches.
 To test the astronomers' dedication still further, the temperature inside must be the same as that outside - any differences make the lens shake, spoiling the clarity of the pictures it is taking.
 "We're used to it," said duty astronomer Natalya Shakh, wrapped in warm clothing and trying to ignore the minus 15 degree Celsius chill.
 "It's only cold when you have to keep still for half an hour to keep your eye on whatever it is we're investigating."
 There's disappointment for lovers of the X-Files, however. Has anyone on the Pulkovo team ever seen a UFO? 
 "No," said Tolbin. "The only people who see UFOs are housewives - and journalists."

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Porcelain To Stay

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The unique porcelain collection that has for 150 years been tended by the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory (LFZ) will officially come under the control of the State Hermitage Museum from February, according to a pending order from the Culture Ministry.
 The order is expected to put an end to the long battle over the location of the state-owned porcelain collection, which LFZ workers see as an inseparable part of the factory's history. A number of attempts have been made to move the collection to the State Russian Museum, but they have failed.
 According to Douglas Boyce, LFZ's director, Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky promised to leave the museum's collection on LFZ's premises and send a team of scientists and exhibition experts to work in Lomonosov.
 
Search for POWs

WASHINGTON (AP) - Despite misgivings in Moscow, U.S. Defense Department investigators are intensifying their search for Cold War-era Russian records that could confirm reports that American servicemen from World War II and the Korean War were held and died in the network of labor camps known as the gulag. 
 The Russian government is cooperating with the effort, but it has been deeply skeptical of the evidence available so far - mainly eyewitness accounts with limited details and little or no documentation. 
 The Defense Department released to The Associated Press last week a compilation of reports from dozens of sources who claimed to have seen American military personnel in such notorious prisons as the Lubyanka in Moscow and such obscure labor camps as Bulun in the remote northern reaches of Siberia. 
 
Sutyagin Setback

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Supreme Court on Wednesday threw out moves to force Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev and arms experts to testify in the treason trial of academic Igor Sutyagin, Interfax reported.
 The court upheld a lower court's decision to reject efforts by Sutyagin's lawyers to call an extra 74 witnesses. 
 Sutyagin, an arms expert at the U.S.A. and Canada Institute, denies passing secrets about Russian nuclear submarines to Britain and the United States. 
 Interfax quoted his lawyer, Boris Kuznetsov, as saying the court had no legal right to reject defense witnesses who could have proved that information handed over by his client was already in the public domain. 
 Kuznetsov said the defense planned to appeal the decision. Sutyagin, 35, will remain in jail, where he has been since October 1999, until the trial, which has been scheduled to begin Feb. 26.
 
Chubais to Far East
MOSCOW (SPT) - National power grid boss Anatoly Chubais rushed to the Far East late Wednesday to monitor an energy crisis that has left much of the population without heat or electricity for several hours a day.
 The crisis is set to deepen as local power companies risk running out of coal supplies in a matter of days. 
 Unified Energy Systems on Wednesday declared a state of emergency in Siberia and the Far East, dispatched a Chubais-led emergency team to keep the grid working, and threatened to sack local managers if things get worse.
 On Monday, Putin fired Energy Minister Alexander Gavrin and forced the resignation of Primorye Gov. Yev ge ny Nazdratenko. Chubais was the only prominent figure to survive the purge, but his days could be numbered.

TITLE: Chechen Rebels Continue Attacks
AUTHOR: By Yuri Bagrov
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NAZRAN, Russia - A rebel ambush and mines killed eight Russian soldiers in Chechnya, an official said Wednesday. Russian media reported that three civilians were shot dead outside a school in the capital, Grozny. 
 Three men, wearing ski masks and camouflage uniforms, rushed onto the grounds of the elementary school, killed the adults and stuffed the bodies in a car and fled, the Interfax news agency said. 
 It was the latest in a spate of civilian killings in Grozny. Snipers have killed at least 17 civilians in the city over the past month, officials said. 
 Rebels have threatened to kill Chechens who cooperate with the Russians. On Wednesday, leaflets were circulating in Grozny, Argun and other cities with threats to kill Chechen collaborators including the head of the Moscow-backed Che chen administration, Akhmad Kadyrov. 
 Six soldiers were killed and 10 were wounded Tuesday when rebels attacked a column of military vehicles near the village of Chiri-Yurt, about 19 kilometers south of Grozny, according to an official in Chechnya's pro-Moscow administration. 
 Two more soldiers were killed and four were wounded when their armored personnel carriers struck mines in two separate incidents Tuesday, the official said on condition of anonymity.

TITLE: LUKoil Branching Out With Getty Deal
AUTHOR: By Angela Charlton
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - For LUKoil, it's not enough to be the largest oil company in a colossal country with vast crude reserves, to employ 120,000 people, to support towns across Russia and to dominate the national stock market. LUKoil wants a piece of America, too.
 Buoyed by a year of soaring oil prices, LUKoil bought Getty Pet ro leum Marketing Inc. and its network of 1,300 U.S. gas stations for $71 million - the first Russian purchase of a publicly held American company.
 The buyout, which was launched in November, was approved by Getty shareholders last week. The deal could provide a welcome boost for Russia's woeful business reputation, but some analysts wonder whether LUKoil is ready to face Western markets.
 Leonid Fedun, LUKoil's vice president, answers that suggestion with a reliable old saw: "If you don't jump in the water, you can never learn to swim."
 Few question whether LUKoil - with assets in 2000 of $14.5 billion, according to U.S. accounting standards - has the money needed to run Getty. But some ask why the Russian company isn't routing the cash to the shabby, investment-hungry domestic market.
 LUKoil has a number of foreign deals in the works - in Iraq and the Persian Gulf and high-stakes Caspian Sea projects in Azerbaijan and Kazakstan. But it considers the United States the crucial market, and it plans to eventually buy U.S. refineries.
 Fedun doesn't deny that LUKoil is saddled with problems familiar to all Russian oil companies: disintegrating Soviet-era equipment, punitive taxes, hard-to-reach reserves and limited pipeline capacity.
 The company has barely increased production in recent years, and its stunning jump in profits from $92 million in the first half of 1999 to $1.45 billion in the same period in 2000 stemmed almost entirely from high oil prices.
 LUKoil is also still smarting from its first, failed foray into the United States. With champagne and balloons, it opened a gas station at a Virginia supermarket in 1997 that was supposed to be the first of 2,000 such outlets. But plans fell apart the next year when world oil prices plummeted.
 "We weren't ready, not legally or organizationally," Fedun said. "The one useful lesson we learned is that you can't build a business from scratch. You have to buy a ready-made business."
 Getty's red, white and gold signs are familiar sights to motorists in 13 East Coast states. Based in Jericho, New York, it is also a regional wholesaler of gasoline, diesel fuel and fuel oil. For the nine months ending Oct. 31, Getty posted a net loss of nearly $6 million on sales of about $903 million.
 The company is a remnant of the financial empire built by oil billionaire and philanthropist J. Paul Getty.
 LUKoil plans to call its U.S. stations "Getty-LUKoil" until its own name is more familiar to American consumers.
 Analysts said the Getty purchase - while symbolically important for Russian corporate confidence - doesn't portend a trend.
 "Not a lot of Russian companies have experience working internationally," said Steven Dashevsky, an oil analyst with the Aton brokerage. "And LUKoil likely will have little impact on the U.S. fuel market because Getty is a relatively small player and major changes are not planned," he said.
 Fedun admits it's early to compare LUKoil, which emerged in 1991 from the collapsing state-run Soviet oil sector, to the Shells and Chevrons of the world.
 LUKoil still has Soviet-style directors with little grasp of what global markets demand, but it also has more pragmatic managers like Fedun who consult Western advisers and appear to recognize the international challenges. LUKoil's production - 1.5 million barrels a day in 2000 - could be much higher if it weren't burdened by aging drilling and refinery equipment. And the thousands of kilometers of petroleum pipelines that cross Russia are ancient and spill-prone, the result being despoiled rivers, forests and tundra and deep cuts into LUKoil's potential revenue stream.
 Russian tax collectors accused LUKoil of evasion last summer, one of several recent cases launched against huge businesses that capitalized on their political influence in the 1990s.
 The LUKoil charges were quietly dropped, but neither Fedun nor the Tax Ministry would say why. Some observers suggested that LUKoil's billionaire president, Vagit Alekperov, had won the favor of President Vla di mir Putin.
 Fedun denied favoritism from the government, which owns 17 percent of LUKoil common stock but has announced plans to sell a third this year. British Petroleum sold its 7 percent stake in LUKoil last week, but said several BP-LUKoil ventures would continue in Russia and former Soviet republics.
 Environmental activists are protesting LUKoil's U.S. expansion.
 "They bought expensive offices and cars for their ecological department, but they still don't clean up spills and don't do anything to prevent them," said Oganes Targulian, who follows Russia's oil industry for Greenpeace.
 Fedun admitted spills are common because of poor pipelines, but he says LUKoil is cleaning up faster than other Russian oil companies.
 Keeping up with spills is no simple task. The State Duma's ecology committee reported that oil companies in Russia spill up to 22 billion liters of oil a year. As a comparison to the high-end figure, the 42 million liters of crude dumped into Alaska waters in the 1989 Exxon Valdez grounding would be less than a day's spillage.

TITLE: World Bank Increases 2-Year Russian Loan Limit to $2Bln
AUTHOR: By Mark Egan
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: WASHINGTON - The World Bank on Tuesday significantly increased the amount of lending it will consider for Russia over two years to $2 billion, including a $60 million loan to improve traffic management in Moscow.
 The World Bank's board approved increasing its lending limit to Russia to up to $600 million in the fiscal years 2001 and 2002, up from a previous limit agreed to in December 1999 of $150 million, bank spokesman Nick Van Praag said.
 That amount can be increased to $1 billion annually if solid progress is made on reforms and other related issues, he added.
 The previous upper limit had been $350 million annually.
 The move was made possible by Russia's previous agreement to cancel earlier commitments of $2 billion for structural adjustment and various investment programs that had not yet been disbursed, allowing the World Bank to go ahead with a commitment to new projects.
 The World Bank country program coordinator for Russia, Hans Martin Boehmer, said that as well as the improved World Bank lending portfolio, there had been a marked improvement in projects meeting development objectives in Russia since 1999.
 "There is better macroeconomic and political stability, and there also is a greater sense of direction that the government is going to take because they have articulated a fairly comprehensive program," Boehmer said in an interview.
 "If you combine all those things, there is an environment that makes sense to approve new loans because there is the prospect that the money will be used effectively."
 As part of the increased lending limit, the bank approved a $60 million loan to improve traffic management in Moscow.
 That new loan takes to $380 million Russia's total World Bank commitments for fiscal 2001, which ends in June - an amount that would not have been possible under the previous lending limit.

TITLE: Identity of Gluck's Kidnappers Remains Unknown
AUTHOR: By Patrick Lannin
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW - U.S. aid worker Kenneth Gluck said on Thursday he had no answer to the riddle of who seized him in Russia's rebel province of Chechnya almost a month ago.
 Gluck, who surfaced on the weekend at a Russian military base, said his abductors had called the kidnapping a mistake and that no aid workers would be touched in future.
 His aid group said it was considering when to restart its operations in the troubled region.
 "I can't engage in speculation about who [was behind the kidnapping], I will leave that up to you," Gluck, 39, North Caucasus mission chief for charity Médecins Sans Frontières, told a news conference.
 Gluck, who had spoken only briefly to reporters since his release, made no mention of any role played in his release by the FSB. The FSB said on the weekend it had freed the American in a "special operation."
 Russia blamed Chechen rebels for the kidnapping. Some Russian media and the rebels suggested Gluck was snatched by Moscow's own troops to show how dangerous the region remained days before a visit to Chechnya by European rights monitors.
 The FSB dismissed the reports as an attempt to discredit it. MSF said no ransom demand was made during Gluck's captivity.
 At the time, Gluck was one of the few foreigners travelling into Chechnya regularly and after his kidnapping foreign aid groups suspended operations in the region.
 Gluck said he was held in a damp cellar for 25 days and that last Saturday the men holding him had taken off his glasses, put them in his pocket and placed a hat over his head.
 "I was driven by car for some time during which I was repeatedly apologised to and was told my kidnapping was a mistake," Gluck said.
 He was dropped off in Stary Atagi, a town to the south of regional capital Chechnya, where he was seized on Jan. 9. He found he was outside the house of a doctor friend, who took him in and informed the authorities of his release.
 Asked if he was interrogated by the FSB or other officials after his release, he said he had met so many so people after he was freed he could not remember them all.
 Gluck reiterated earlier comments that he had been well treated by his abductors.
 "Gratefully, I was never gagged, beaten or tortured in any way during my period in captivity," he said.
 He was fed three times a day and given medicine to treat an asthma condition.
 Austen Davies, MSF's executive director, said the group was now considering what to do with Chechnya in the future.
 "It is a matter of concern that MSF and other aid agencies suspended their operations in Chechnya," Davies said, adding that the population of the region could suffer due to this.
 "We are re-evaluating the future of our medical program in the region," he said.

TITLE: GM Gives Go-Ahead To $330M Car Project
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - After years of delay, U.S. auto giant General Motors has given the green light to a $330 million venture with car maker AvtoVAZ and the EBRD that will be one of the biggest foreign investments yet in Russia, an executive close to the talks said Wednesday.
 GM's board overwhelmingly approved on Tuesday night the as yet unnamed venture to manufacture Niva 2123 sports utility vehicles, the source said. Tolyatti-based AvtoVAZ is expected to give the go-ahead Thursday.
 GM and AvtoVAZ, Russia's biggest car maker, will each hold 41.5 percent stakes in the project and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development will have 17 percent.
 The AvtoVAZ-designed Niva 2123 will be marketed under GM's Chevrolet brand and cost $7,000 to $8,000, roughly twice as much as other Niva models. GM's German subsidiary Opel will build motors for more expensive models.
 The source said that GM will take management control of the venture from Day One. Production is slated to kick off in 2002 and reach 75,000 cars a year.
 GM Russia marketing director Alexander Moinov said an announcement about the venture will be made in the near future.
 "We can neither confirm nor deny it [the vote] until we get an official statement from Detroit," Moinov said by telephone.
 He added that talks with AvtoVAZ have revolved not only around the $330 million Niva venture but a portfolio of projects worth $350 million to $500 million.
 An EBRD spokesman said the bank is in advanced talks with GM over its participation in the project.
 "The project has not yet been submitted for the consideration of the board of directors but is going through the bank's normal approval procedure," the spokesman said, adding that a decision is expected soon.
 GM will contribute about $100 million to the project and the EBRD is expected to hand over $40 million plus a long-term loan worth $90 million. AvtoVAZ, for its part, will provide land, buildings, machinery and intellectual property, including the design of the new Niva.
 The GM vote was also reported Wednesday by Dow Jones news wires, Interfax and leading automotive Internet site Just-Auto.com.
 Observers called the investment a tremendous vote of confidence in the Russian economy that would likely lead to other foreign investments.
 The venture marks the biggest, single investment ever into Russia's automobile industry that is twice as big as Ford Motor Co.'s planned $150 million plant in St. Petersburg.
 "It's a good sign that investment is finally beginning to flow into the real (o)sector and that the automobile market in the $5,000 to $10,000 category is recovering," said United Financial Group transportation analyst Yulia Zhdanova.
 She said that growing car sales and the EBRD's participation in the venture were probably the two factors that convinced GM to give its seal of approval.
 AvtoVAZ just last week rolled out its first 10 Niva 2123 vehicles and said it planned to build 2,000 units in 2001. The auto maker plans to build more than 750,000 cars in all this year and export 130,000 of them.
 In 2000, it produced 705,000 cars, 4.5 percent more than the previous year, on revenues of $2 billion. Exports reached 90,000.

TITLE: Tough Bill On Parties Set To Pass
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Isachenkov
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - The State Duma gave early approval to a Kremlin-sponsored bill that sets tough rules for forming and funding political parties - provisions critics assail as state interference. 
 President Vladimir Putin has said the bill would promote the creation of effective political parties. Opponents contend it would push most of Russia's parties out of existence and make the rest dependent on government handouts. 
 "This bill on parties must be more suitably called a bill on shutting down political parties," said Oleg Shein, a lawmaker from the moderate Regions of Russia faction. 
 The 450-member State Duma lower house passed the bill Wednesday on its initial reading, 280 to 109. It must pass two more readings, the Federation Council upper house and be signed by Putin. 
 Under the bill, a political party must have at least 10,000 members nationwide and no fewer than 100 members in more than half of Russia's 89 provinces. 
 Parties that receive more than 3 percent of the vote would receive state financing. The bill would also require party officials to submit regular financial reports to the state tax service. 
 The bill allows some private donations, but sharply limits their size and who can give, especially foreign contributors. 
 Russia has some 200 parties on paper. Only 26 groups contested the 1999 parliamentary election, however, down from 43 in 1995. Foreign election observers said that was a welcome sign that parties were consolidating and growing stronger. 
 Central Election Commission chief Alexander Veshnyakov said government financing was necessary to prevent the criminal world from financing parties instead. 
 "The government has already subordinated the State Duma to itself," responded Communist Party chief Gennady Zyuganov. "Now it proposes a bill on parties to put them under its spell." 
 The Communists dominated the previous Duma, but lost control of the lower house to pro-government parties in December 1999 elections.

TITLE: Arrest Could Shed Light on Barnaul 5 Missing Students
AUTHOR: By Andrei Zolotov Jr.
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Prosecutors in the southern Siberian city of Barnaul are investigating whether a police driver arrested this week for alleged attempted rape is also behind the disappearance of five girls from a local university.
 The suspect, identified by prosecutors only as Alexander, was detained Monday after a 22-year-old Barnaul University student told police she had jumped out of his apartment window to escape, law enforcement officials said Wednesday.
 Alexander, 30, is a driver for the Barnual police department's drunk tank.
 "So far, he is not suspected of kidnapping the five girls," City Prosecutor Nikolai Mylitsin said by telephone from Barnual. "When a man is accused of sexual violence we check whether he had anything to do with all unsolved rape and murder cases."
 The disappearance of the five girls, who were applying to Altai State Technical University, shook residents last summer and led the police to set up checkpoints and conduct widespread searches. In October, two bodies suspected of being those of students Ksenia Kirgizova and Anzhela Burdakova were found in a forest 40 kilometers from Barnual. Investigators later positively identified one of the bodies as Kir gizova's. They and Yulia Tik h tiye ko va, Liliana Voznyuk and Olga Shma ko va vanished from the university during entrance exams.
 Sergei Teplyakov, a reporter with Barnaul's leading newspaper Svobodnyi Kurs, said the 22-year-old girl who escaped met the suspect Sunday evening. The girl told police that Alexander made sexual advances at his apartment that she turned down. In the morning, she managed to escape by jumping off a balcony while Alexander was in the bathroom. 
 A recent police search of the suspect's apartment found about 300 photographs of sexual orgies and a collection of women's underwear, Teplyakov said.
 The case of the missing girls has baffled investigators for months. The only suspect to have been arrested, 40-year-old Alexander Anisimov, committed suicide under unclear circumstances several days after his detainment.

TITLE: President Given $52M By Generous Oligarchs
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Borisova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - When President Vla di mir Putin asks for money, he gets it.
 At a much-hyped Kremlin roundtable Jan. 24, Putin told a group of the country's wealthiest businessmen that he would like them to contribute money to a new fund for victims of military conflicts.
 The speed of the response was staggering: In just 10 days, some 1.5 billion rubles, or $52.7 million, poured in. 
 That figure was what Putin said that he expected to collect by the end of the year, with the ultimate goal being 3 billion rubles.
 It is a "sacred duty" on behalf of those "people who, at the price of their own life, made it possible for us to work, for our children to go to school and for you to do business," Putin told the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs.
 For the heads of Russia's largest enterprises - including Gazprom, LUKoil, Unifed Energy Systems, Russian Aluminum, Transneft, Yu kos, Sberbank, Severstal, Surgutneftegaz and Interros - Putin's appeal was apparently nothing short of a spiritual awakening. 
 On top of the 1.5 billion rubles already collected from the union's 27 members, an average of about $2 million apiece, Putin secured a promise from union president Arkady Volsky to deliver another "similar sum of money ... in the very near future," the newspaper Se godnya reported on Monday.
 But the union will not distribute the cash, nor will it need to register the "new" fund - it was established in September 1999 by the Russian Patriarchy and is headed by the Patriarch himself. 
 However, it appears as if the fund kept such a low profile that Putin himself was not aware until recently that it already existed. 
 During a Police Day speech last November, Putin called for the creation of such a fund and said that he would ask Patriarch Alexy II to head it. And again, at the Jan. 24 meeting, Putin reiterated his intention to establish the fund.
 Nefyodov said that union members transferred the money that Putin asked for into an account the fund created "a year and a half ago."
 Regardless of the confusion, it appears that the result is a win-win situation for everyone involved.
 Putin got the money for the fund, businessmen got presidential promises of reduced red tape and an improved investment climate, Volsky's union got some good PR, the families of military and law-enforcement officers injured or killed got hope of compensation, and the public got assurances that the charity money wouldn't be stolen.
 The need for the fund is not in dispute: In Chechnya alone, official figures say 3,000 soldiers have been killed and 8,000 wounded. And hundreds of law-enforcement officials are killed or wounded across the country each year. There simply isn't enough money in the budget to compensate the victims. 
 Segodnya quoted Volsky as saying that his union had donated enough money to pay $5,000 to the family of each casualty and $2,000 to the family of each wounded soldier or officer. It is not Volsky's union that will distribute the money, however, but the fund's supervisory council.
 Headed by Alexiy II, the council includes Damba Ayusheyev, leader of Russia's traditional Buddhists, prominent Muslim leader Mufti Talgat Tadzhutdin, Russia's chief Lyubavitcher rabbi Berl Lazar, retired Gen. Balentin Varennikov, Russian Aluminum's Oleg Deripas ka and Yukos board director Mik hail Khodorkovsky.
 The fund's full name is the "National Fund for Support of the Military, Special Services, Law-Enforcement Bodies and Civil Servants Working in Them," and it is headquartered in the Svyato-Danilov Monastery at 34 Novokuznetskaya Ulitsa.
 The only company that said it has contributed to the fund was Vladimir Potanin's Interros holding. 
 Interros spokesman Valentin Shapka said that Interros "cash was transferred to the fund," but he refused to say how much money was involved.
 "The money was transferred from the company. I think a personal donation would have been inappropriate," Shapka said.
 "The matter of donating to charity is sensitive and normally we don't comment on such things," said Russian Aluminum spokesperson Vladimir Alexandrov.
 Oddly, union member and top oil producer LUKoil said that it had been "regularly" making contributions - to a fund for victims of military conflicts that is run by the Energy Ministry.
 Company spokesperson Igor Beketov said this fund, Liniya Zhizni, or the Life Line, was created in 1997 with the participation of the Energy Ministry, the Union of War Veterans, and Military Insurance Company.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Mil Nearer Settlement 

MOSCOW (SPT) - The Moscow arbitration court ruled Wednesday in favor of Mezhregionalny Investitsionny Bank, and excluded the state investment company Gosinkor from the list of creditors of the bankrupt Moscow Mil helicopter plant, said Vadim Mikheyev, a spokesman for the Mil plant.
 This leaves MIB as the only major creditor at the plant.
 MIB wants to make a share emission that will increase the government's stake in the plant to over 50 percent and to use an unspecified amount of the remaining shares to pay debts to MIB, which will retain a blocking stake of at least 25 percent plus one share.
Reserves Hit $29.5M

MOSCOW (SPT) - The Central Bank's hard currency and gold reserves rose $900 million to $29.5 billion in the week ending February 2, Prime-Tass reported the bank's press service as saying Thursday. It gave no reason for the rise in the reserves.
 
Trade Hikes by 32.4%

MOSCOW (SPT) - The nation's foreign trade turnover last year was $136.6 billion, 32.4 percent more than in 1999, Prime-Tass reported the State Customs Committee as saying Thursday.
 Exports increased by 41 percent to $102.8 billion, while imports rose 11.5 percent to $33.8 billion, the committee said.
 Fuel and energy products remained the most important local export. High average contract prices for oil and oil products, the growth of which began at the end of 1999 and continued throughout 2000, meant energy sector exports rose 80 percent. As a result, the share of these goods in the total foreign exports comprised 53.5 percent, a rise of 9.2 percent from 1999.
 
UES in Baltic Accord

 VILNIUS, Lithuania (Reuters) - National power monopoly Unified Energy Systems struck a deal with utilities from the Baltic states and Belarus to coordinate electricity distribution, the UES chief executive said Wednesday.
 Anatoly Chubais said the agreement his company signed with utilities from Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia was "technical in nature."
 "It's not worth inflating its significance, because the parties have been working in tandem for a long time," Chubais said at a news conference after the agreement was signed. "But the working conditions had not yet been laid down," he said. 
 
Oil Export Tariff Talks 

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia will on Friday discuss cutting its export tariff on crude oil to 22 euros ($20.28) a metric ton from 48 euros, said Andrei Kushnirenko, head of the commission for protective measures in foreign trade. 
 In December, the commission, which is part of the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, increased the tariff to 48 euros a ton from 41 euros because the weakness of the European currency meant the government was not earning enough export revenue. 
 "According to the scale established a year ago which links the export tariff to the price of oil on world markets, we have a situation where the export tariff should now be 22 euros a ton," Kushnirenko said.

TITLE: Duma Sets Out To Cut TV Ads
AUTHOR: By Anna Raff and Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Sick of those commercials interrupting "Santa Barbara" every 15 minutes? If the State Duma gets its way, you'll be able to watch the hour-long soap opera commercial free.
 The Duma passed on first reading Thursday a bill that would forbid the airing of commercials during radio and television programming, sparking a quick outcry from top government officials and industry leaders.
 The bill, approved by an overwhelming 275-73 vote, is a raft of amendments to the law on advertising that ban the interruption of films, radio shows and educational and children's programming. 
 Press Minister Mikhail Lesin slammed the approval as a step backward for television.
 "Commercials are the most important revenue earner for television," Lesin was quoted by Interfax as saying. 
 Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said the amendments, if passed into law, would drastically reduce the revenues of radio and television companies and inevitably led to a decrease in programming. 
 Media outlets may be forced to shut down as a result, Kudrin warned.
 Leading advertising agency Video International called the bill appalling, saying television channels would stop buying and producing movies if they could not run commercials during the broadcast.
 "There will be no films in prime time," said Video International president Yury Zapol. "I hope [the deputies] have enough sense not to bring these amendments to a second reading. If they don't, I am hoping for a presidential veto. Is this country really full of idiots?"
 The bill was drawn up by the Astrakhan regional administration and introduced to the Duma by Communist Deputy Nikolai Arefyev.
 Commercials are "basically annoying," Arefyev told Interfax. 
 "Rich people don't need them because they already know what, where and how much; poor people don't need them because they can't afford anything advertised," he said. "For some reason, we were able to live just fine without commercials during Soviet times."
 Arefyev's statements ring true for most viewers, said Andrei Rikhter, a scholar with the Center for Law and News Media at Moscow State University.
 "The broadcasters should be the first to be blamed," Rikhter said. "RTR is the worst. They interrupt their movies every 10 minutes with ads."
 Because most Russians only receive two channels - ORT and RTR - viewers don't have the choice of switching channels when they get fed up with commercials, Rikhter said. Few villages have alternate entertainment outlets like cinemas.
 The Russian Advertising Council had been anticipating the vote Thursday for weeks and lobbing furiously with a series of ads touting the importance of advertising revenues.
 One of the ads parodies a soap opera with the woman asking her lover, "Oh Juan-Carlos, when are we going to get married?"
 "Never, Marisabel," he replies. "Viewers no longer want to see commercials, so the television company has no money to buy the next episodes."
 Another ad asks viewers to watch a soccer match on only half of the TV screen since the rest of the match "was meant to be financed from advertising sales revenues that were canceled."
 Dmitry Badalov, general director of the Russian Advertising Council, said passage of the bill represented a major blow to Russia's advertising market.
 "Both educational programs and feature films are now under a huge threat," Badalov said. "It is simply impossible to finance the purchase of quality films [without commercials]."
 "Advertising isn't just about promoting something," he added. "It's also a solid base for competition, which is beneficial for consumers."
 The bill could also put the brakes an advertising market still rebounding from the 1998 financial crisis, Badalov said. Even without the restrictive bill, TV ads are expected this year to generate only $300 million, 30 percent below 1998 levels, he said.
 The Press Ministry said commercial breaks during nationwide broadcasts make up about 60 percent of all TV advertising revenues. On regional levels, the figure jumps to 80 percent to 85 percent.
 To make up for lost revenues, regional carriers would have to turn elsewhere for financing, First Deputy Press Minister Mikhail Seslavinsky told Interfax.
 "It's obvious," he said. "Regional stations will be turning to governors, legislative bodies, city mayors and industrial leaders." 
 Stations will also be forced to pander to the special interests of those who give them money, he said.
 Zapol with Video International said he was appalled that deputies from the liberal Union of Right Forces and Yabloko factions had voted along with Communists for the bill.
 "They say they advocate independent media, but at the same time they undermine the media's budget," he said.
 The Duma has to pass the bill in two more readings before it is sent to the Federation Council and then President Vladimir Putin for approval.
 The Press Ministry said that the amendments would have to undergo major revisions for it to be passed into law, adding that the ministry would make a direct appeal to Putin if they were to make it to his desk.
 
 Correspondent Andrei Zolotov Jr., contributed to this report.

TITLE: Report: Sistema Grabs License for Northwest
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: An item carried by a Russian Internet site set the rumor and denial mills in the country's telecommunications industry in motion on Thursday, reporting that Sistema Telekom, a Moscow-based holding company, has received a license to provide GSM-standard cellular telephone service in the Northwest region.
 The report, carried by Sotovik.ru, which specializes in coverage of the telecommunications industry, did not say how or from whom Sistema, which owns 43 percent of Mobile Telephone Systems (MTS), Moscow's largest cellular provider, had gained the license.
 "Reliable officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed that Sistema Telekom received a GSM license in the Northwest region," Sotovik.ru reported. "However, no specifics of the deal are available. It is very possible that Sistema Telekom acquired Telekom XXI, a local company that holds a GSM 900/1800 license for the region but has yet to launch operations."
 "It's also possible that the Communications Ministry issued a third GSM license for the Northwest region," the report added.
 But Sergei Grigorenko, chief of the press office at the ministry, said in a telephone interview on Thursday that no additional licenses had been issued by the ministry to operate on the GSM standard in the Northwest region.
 The Communications Ministry divided Russia into eight regions and announced that two GSM licenses would be granted in each. North-West GSM and Telekom XXI won the licenses in spring 1998.
 Analysts believe that the ministry's plans to issue only two licenses in each region are firm. "The Communications Ministry has been pretty vehement about the fact that there would be no new licenses issued," Tom Adshead, telecoms analyst at Troika Dialog, said in a telephone interview on Thursday.
 "But there's no external reason I can think of to rule out the other variant," he said. "As far as I know, Telecom XXI would like to sell the license. Sistema has the money and has already been quite active in buying assets in other regions."
 "This type of deal has been long-awaited by telecommunication specialists," said Vyacheslav Nikolaev, telecoms analyst with Renaissance Capital. "But Sistema Telekom has always denied any rumors concerning a license in the Northwest."
 Rumors first surfaced about a Sistema purchase of the Telecom XXI license when a group of the company's directors were sighted in St. Petersburg. The company dismissed the rumors, saying that the officials were in the city for the 50th birthday of Viktor Cherkessov, governor general of the Northwest Region.
 And officials at the company were clearly disturbed by the Sotovik.ru report on Thursday.
 "The information that Sistema Telekom has received this is absolutely untrue," said Viktor Isaev, head of public relations at Sistema. "We've already sent a letter contradicting the report to that tabloid Internet site, and they will have to publish it soon."
 But Adshead at Troika dialog said there was little to support labeling the site as "tabloid."
 "Sotovik has been a pretty reliable news source," he said. "They haven't said anything you could label as crazy in the past."
 And if the Sotovik report is founded, then the sale will carry benefits for both MTS and for the St. Petersburg market.
 "We have little doubt that if Sistema-Telecom has indeed secured the GSM license, then it will transfer or sell the license to MTS," Nikolaev and Andrei Braginsky wrote in a Renaissance Capital release on Thursday. "Sistema-Telecom is a holding company, not an operator, and MTS is Sistema Telecom's flagship."
 The report said that the St. Petersburg license would bring about $190 million in extra value to the company.
 "This would mean a second operator for the Northwest market," Adshead said. "There's no question that the market is big enough."
 "The big winners would be the consumers," he added. "A second provider would definitely lead to more price competition."

TITLE: Interros Unites Holdings To Gain Edge in Market
AUTHOR: By Alla Startseva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Positioning itself for a possible contract bonanza resulting from the restructuring of the national power grid, Vla dimir Potanin's Interros group said Tuesday it has formed a consortium out of its energy machine-building enterprises.
 The new consortium, Siloviye Ma shi ny, in which Interros owns more than 50 percent, unites six major factories - the Kaluga-based Kaluzhsky Turbine Factory and St. Petersburg's Leningrad Metal Factory, Elektrosila, the Turbine Blade Factory, LMZ-Engineering and Energomashexport.
 Siloviye Mashiny general director Yevgeny Yakovlev said his company would invest $50 million this year to modernize the plants and make them more competitive with Western giants like Siemens AG, ABB, General Electric and Mitsubishi.
 Last year Interros itself invested $10 million in the companies, Yakovlev said.
 Overnight, Potanin has created an industrial giant with annual sales of more than $300 million.
 Yakovlev said the benefits of operating as a single entity could push total sales over $500 million this year.
 Currently the six units are producing at only 40 percent to 50 percent of capacity, he said.
 The integration of the factories was started in 1993 by the financial-industrial group Energomashkorporatsia, or EMK, in cooperation with Inkombank. But the plan stalled after the 1998 crisis, which weakened EMK and drove Inkombank into bankruptcy.
 After Interros emerged from the crisis, it saw potential in the energy machine-building complex and began buying up enterprises - a pursuit that culminated Tuesday with the creation of Siloviye Mashiny.
 Yakovlev said his main task is to better utilize technology and improve the management system of the factories to achieve competitive advantage.
 Potanin said increasing the production of the factories will help the consortium prepare for what he expects to be major, lucrative orders from Unified Energy Systems, the national power monopoly. The government is currently moving to restructure and privatize the energy giant, which should open a floodgate of investments.
 UES and Siloviye Mashiny are "strategic partners," Potanin said.
 Potanin called on the government to support the new consortium because "Russia is not competitive yet," and foreign companies can move aside local producers.
 "It is necessary to convince the government to create special conditions [favoring] domestic producers over foreign companies," he said.
 Renaissance Capital analyst Yev ge ny Satskov said Potanin created the consortium at the right time because "the problem of upgrading energy capacity is nearly a national security issue."

TITLE: Mismanaging NTV
AUTHOR: By Peter Ekman
TEXT: EXPATRIATES in Russia seem to be in a state of panic as Media-MOST's financial problems draw toward their almost inevitable conclusion - the takeover of Media-MOST and its television channel NTV by Gaz prom. Many expats see the current situation as more critical than the August 1998 financial crisis. According to this view, the takeover of NTV will mark the end of Russia's democratic experiment. Freedom of the press will have been crushed, and Russia will return to totalitarianism.
 The single premise behind the propaganda is constantly repeated: The takeover of NTV is purely political and has nothing to do with Media-MOST's debts or financial condition. This premise is demonstrably wrong.
 NTV itself, the other organs of Media-MOST and the foreign press are the major purveyors of this propaganda. For example, last week The Washington Post published a 1,200 word story on Media-MOST, which mentioned Media-MOST's debt just once: "Nor is it only a tale of efforts by Gazprom to collect its debt." The Los Angeles Times' Jan. 30 story didn't quite mention the debt, saying only that Gazprom "had been a creditor to Gusinsky's Media-MOST." Had been?
 The Moscow Times and The St. Petersburg Times, in their extensive coverage of the story, almost always mention the debt, but seldom give many details about it. The many editorials dedicated to the story are almost always pro-NTV or are against the Prosecutor's Office or President Vladimir Putin. Gazprom is scolded for handing out loans, but Media-MOST's debts to Gazprom are not mentioned. So it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that papers editorially support Media-MOST.
 Please consider some facts. Media-MOST ran up short-term debts to its major creditors before last summer of $800 million, according to The Wall Street Journal. Other estimates of its total debts are well over a billion dollars.
 By comparison, total advertising revenue for all Russian television stations in 2000 was less than $400 million. This revenue, of course, is divided among three national television stations and many smaller stations. 
 Overhead, production costs and taxes need to be paid. Any revenues left to NTV would clearly not pay even the interest on such debt, much less pay back the principal. By all accounts, Media-MOST's other properties do not produce much profit. Economically, Media-MOST is dead. Under these conditions, in any country, the most likely result would be that NTV would be taken over by its creditors.
 There are some legitimate concerns about press freedom involved in the case. But anybody who tells you that the takeover has nothing to do with the debts needs to explain how $800 million of short-term debt could be repaid by a single company, when the annual revenue of the entire industry is less than $400 million.
 In November, Media-MOST's debt was restructured so that Gazprom now owns 46 percent of NTV and only $300 million needs to be repaid. This $300 million was originally not due until this summer. But under the usual cross-default arrangements and the November agreement, it is due now unless 25 percent of NTV shares are sold for at least $90 million to extinguish the debt. To avoid losing the votes of these shares Media-MOST backed out of their commitment to sell.
 The joker in the deck is an apparent offer by a syndicate led by CNN founder Ted Turner to buy part of NTV for $300 million, which would pay the debt to Gazprom in full. I say "apparent offer" because nothing is clear about it and most information about it has come from NTV.
 Turner has only said about three sentences to the public about a possible offer, without specifying exactly what he wants to buy or how much control he wants to have.
 Why Turner wants to pay $300 million now, when he probably could have bought 25 percent of NTV for $90 million a few weeks ago, has never been explained. The deal looks nonsensical unless Turner's syndicate is trying to buy out Vladimir Gusinsky's majority stake. George Soros, a possible syndicate member, has said the deal could only proceed if Gusinsky was removed from management. 
 The panic among expats about what is for the most part simply drawn-out bankruptcy proceedings is a simpler matter to explain. NTV has been the least biased source of Russian news for expats and foreign reporters, and is very influential among them. NTV broadcasters have been very effective in stating their views and they are now in a state of panic about the takeover.
 Since their livelihoods are on the line, NTV broadcasters should probably be forgiven for the lack of objectivity in their reports. Foreign reporters are less easily forgiven for their lack of objectivity.
 While they may have the best intentions, foreign reporters who file story after story on Media-MOST while hardly mentioning the company's inability to pay its debts are misleading the public. Stephen Cohen, in his recently published book "Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia," accused Western journalists of "professional malpractice" for their overly optimistic stories on Russia during the 1990s.
 Perhaps journalists are now trying to balance the scales by being overly pessimistic about Russia. But it still looks like professional malpractice to me.
 
 Peter Ekman is professor of finance at a Moscow-based MBA program. He contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.

TITLE: Pandora's Box Of the Far East Is Now Open
TEXT: HOW do you imagine the system of central heating worked in the 18th-century Ottoman Empire? I imagine that it didn't: Central heating is simply not compatible with universal corruption.
 Here is a primer for you on the heating crisis in Russia's Far East. 
 The Far East is far from Moscow. So all the federal bureaucrats in the region had no choice but to cozy up to the former governor, Yevgeny Nazdratenko. Rarely did the peculiarities of local administration out there bubble to the surface. For instance, in 1998, a certain Alexander Brekhov was accused of murdering the director of Primorrybprom. In court, Brekhov desperately tried to implicate Naz dratenko and a local criminal figure called Baul. 
 Nazdratenko had no local opponents, if you disregard Viktor Cherepkov, who combines the roles of Vladivostok mayor and village idiot. Cherepkov has been ridiculed for his tendency to speak with ghosts during cabinet meetings, though it should be noted that even with such a joke for a mayor, Vladivostok was mostly heated and lit. Vla divostok budgeted less than half as much money per person for heat as the nearby city of Nak hod ka, but Nakhodka froze. 
 In 1997, Nakhodka elected a city council that opposed Nazdratenko. Deputies immediately began looking into the heating budget. It turned out that in 1996, the city spent $65 million on heating, which should have lasted for 18 months. By December, though, the city was freezing. 
 No one ever found the money. But they did find a private company called Tanya, which received the funds, ostensibly to buy heating fuel. The fuel wasn't bought, but two land cruisers were handed over to the city administration. Of the two men listed as managers of Tanya, one was appointed the director of local municipal television and the other was made head of the local elections commission.
 Do you suppose that the city administrators in the Far East could get away with such massive theft from their budgets (tens of millions of dollars) without giving a piece of the action to their bosses in the regional administration?
 This system functioned excellently throughout the Yeltsin years. It seems Nazdratenko thought it would continue working as well under Vladimir Putin. After all, Nazdratenko - together with former Kursk Gov. Alexander Rutskoi - was among the first to support oligarch Boris Berezovsky when he formed the pro-Kremlin Unity movement.
 But now Nazdratenko has resigned. I've been amusing myself imagining the arguments that may have been used to get him to surrender.
 Here's one variant: The Kremlin did not demand the resignation of one of Nazdratenko's closest cronies, regional prosecutor Valery Vasilyenko. I mentioned this with surprise in a conversation with a person who knows the situation in the Far East thoroughly. "Until they replace the prosecutor and the head of the local tax police," I said, "no one can come up with evidence against Nazdratenko." 
 "On the contrary," the man told me. "The prosecutor has been told that he can keep his job if he surrenders Nazdratenko." Brekhov's testimony may only hint at what Vasilyenko knows.
 I am glad Nazdratenko has resigned. But I would like to know exactly what he was removed for. Was it because he brought his region to the brink of disaster, or was it because he was a friend of Boris Berezovsky and a founder of Unity?
 
 Yulia Latynina is a journalist with ORT.

TITLE: Pondering Yakovlev's Tea-Time Revelation
AUTHOR: By Barnaby Thompson
TEXT: WAS there any significance in the timing of Vladimir Yakovlev's proposal to draft a bill giving governors immunity from prosecution after they left office?
 To the suspicious eye of the hack, yes - all the more so because Yakovlev's spokesman hastened to reassure us that the governor had merely made the remarks to Interfax journalists over a cup of tea.
 Yakovlev suggested the idea on Friday. The following Monday, Yev geny Nazdratenko, not so much governor as lord supreme of the Primorye region and a man who threw his weight around far more arrogantly than Yakovlev has ever done, was out of a job. On Wednesday, Yakovlev was in Moscow to promote the celebrations for the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg, hobnobbing with a variety of government hotshots, and doubtless revelling in the chance to have the ear of President Vladimir Putin for a word or two.
 One can just imagine Yakovlev - who is far more jovial and easy with the press in informal circumstances than his rather jaded appearances on television would suggest - offering the Interfax boys their tea. "This jasmine stuff really helps me doze off at nights - Irina buys it herself, you know." 
 So Yakovlev casually offers the hacks some sugar, and lazily spoons it into his own cup. "It's wonderful that we have so many varieties of tea to choose from - Tetley's English Breakfast, Lipton, Dilmah. By the way, I'm thinking of putting forward a bill to the Duma that would give me - er, I mean, all the governors - immunity when they retire. It's just an idea. What do you think?"
 With a clatter of cutlery, the journos reach for their notebooks, and at 8 a.m. the following day, the papers pick it up, The St. Petersburg Times included.
 Our report included a somewhat enigmatic remark from Yabloko Duma Deputy Alexander Shishlov about the "negativity" that comes with the image of some of the regional leaders. What it didn't describe was Shishlov's reaction when told of Yakovlev's remarks: a good 10 seconds silence, before he said, "Words fail me."
 Now, a governor recommending that governors be given immunity might be a sign of a governor with a lot on his mind. A governor recommending such a step three days before Nazdratenko gets the boot clearly enjoys the services of a damn good astrologer. And a governor mentioning the idea shortly before he heads off to Moscow to promote a party in his own city to the most powerful people in the land - a party over which he will theoretically preside, if he's not shunted sideways to the whole Russia-Belarus farce - is a clever man indeed.
 Particularly if he's quietly wetting his pants over a past indiscretion or two.

TITLE: Crisis Brought Positive Change
AUTHOR: By Sergei Khrushchev
TEXT: THOSE participating in or witnessing turning points in world history are generally displeased by the way such crises are depicted in films and plays. 
 So, it was only reluctantly that I went to see the film "Thirteen Days," about President John F. Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe in 1962. But I was pleasantly surprised.
 The film portrays the psychological drama of a president at the very moment when he must make decisions that may determine the fate of his country, as well as others, with no knowledge of what is happening in the opposing camp.
 In times like that, it's hard to resist the temptation of applying the cudgel of a military "solution" to the problem. Fortunately, in 1962 the world avoided that temptation, and both sides, the White House and the Kremlin, President Kennedy and my father, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, deserve credit for that.
 I was particularly struck in the movie by what President Kennedy said to Gen. Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - that the blockade of Cuba and announcements of military readiness would serve as signals to the opposing side. And that the future would be determined by how well those signals were understood in the Kremlin. 
 My father had thought along those same lines. 
 In fact, the installation of missiles in Cuba was to serve as a signal to prevent an American attack of Cuba. But Americans misunderstood this signal as a provocation.
 Despite all their differences, Washington and Moscow were united in one conviction: Whatever the cost, the situation must not slip out of their control. 
 The very first shot fired would mean that their generals - not they, the political leaders - and the logic of war, not the logic of negotiations, would begin to determine the future of the planet.
 When the crisis was already over, I remember how American hawks (along with Mao Zedong) vied with each other in taunting my father, accusing him of weakness, of being the first to "blink."
 At the time my father said to me: "The one who blinks first is not always the weaker one. Sometimes he is the wiser one."
 In this case the leaders of both nations showed wisdom. This was the first crisis of the Cold War in which the leaders began almost immediately to exchange secret messages. And that meant that they had begun to trust each other. 
 During all of the crises that had arisen before 1962, the two opposing sides had simply resorted to empty threats, such as military maneuvers and angry diatribes on the front pages of newspapers.
 A great deal changed after the crisis: A direct communication link between Moscow and Washington was established, nuclear testing (except for underground tests) was banned and the confrontation over Berlin was ended.
 But there was much that President Kennedy and my father did not succeed in seeing through to the end. 
 I am convinced that if history had allowed them just another six years, they would have been able to bring the Cold War to a close before the end of the 1960s. 
 I say this with good reason, because in 1963 my father made an official announcement to a session of the U.S.S.R. Defense Council that it was his intention to sharply reduce Soviet armed forces from 2.5 million men to half a million and to stop the production of tanks and other offensive weapons.
 He thought that 200 to 300 intercontinental nuclear missiles would make an attack on the Soviet Union impossible, while the money that would thereby be freed up by reducing the size of the army would be put to better use on such things as agriculture and housing construction.
 But fate decreed otherwise, and the window of opportunity, barely cracked open, closed at once. 
 In November 1963 President Kennedy was assasinated, and less than a year later, in October 1964, my father was removed from power. The Cold War continued for another quarter of a century. 
 
 Sergei Khrushchev is a senior fellow at the Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies at Brown University. He contributed this comment to the New York Times.
 
 Letter From the Far East will be back next week.

TITLE: A Problem Solved, But at Who’s Cost?
TEXT: IF there is one area in which Russia leads the world, it is in its ambitions for all things nuclear.
 It is definite that the Nuclear Power Ministry wants to make money by taking other countries' nuclear waste off their hands, just as it is certain that those countries are eager to get rid of that waste.
 And it seems likely - though no one in power will admit it - that the ministry has broader plans to increase its share of the energy sector, which experts say involves the creation of a closed-cycle, plutonium economy that can exist in perpetuum.
 In certain countries, the opposition to nuclear power has never been stronger. Britain, Germany and Japan are notable examples where accidents and/or the threat of accidents have marshalled public opinion against the industry. The quashing of a Russian referendum on importing spent fuel did nothing to disguise the fact that over 2 million people signed a petition in favor of one.
 But nuclear power is here to stay. The global warming debate has given the industry a new credibility. The Russian government will press on with its plans regardless, while the anti-nuclear movement in the United States, while vocal, well-informed and dedicated, has failed to put the issue on the U.S. government agenda. Iran is building reactors courtesy of Russia, as are China and Cuba. Nuclear power accounts for around 30 percent of the world's energy - not a figure likely to be reduced in the near future.
 But nuclear power has never satisfactorily resolved its biggest problems. Transporting radioactive materials, avoiding accidents, cleaning up contaminated areas, and storing waste that remains hazardous for 200,000 years - these are question marks that have hung over nuclear energy from the very beginning, and the biggest question marks hang over Russia.
 A state regulatory committee that knows next to nothing of how the nuclear ministry is operating. Poor accounting of nuclear materials so that no one is sure what, if anything, is missing. An abysmal safety record, stemming from an indifference to the health of its own population. And a vision of a shining nuclear future, better conditions for industry employees, promises of cleanup programs - and absolutely no idea of what to do with thousands of tons of the most dangerous substance mankind has ever produced.
 Who knows? The Nuclear Power Ministry may come up (in a century or so) with the answer to all our energy crises. But if it poisons us in the meantime, turning on the lights will be the least of our problems. Then we will say, "Perhaps we should have invested $100 billion in windmills instead."

TITLE: MAILBOX
TEXT: Dear Editor, I think that Stephen Ogden did a fairly strong demolition of his own argument in his badly thought out and frankly bizarre complaint against your foreign-pricing article. But I felt compelled to write when he spoke (with obvious scorn for a system he defends) of sneaking in on Russian price tickets for citizens of the ex-Soviet Union and other countires.
 It is rubbish that most people from former Soviet Republics (except Russia, Belarus and Ukraine) speak perfect Russian. As a former Soviet citizen (from Uzbekistan), now holding a Pakistani passport, I can assure you that when I lived in St. Petersburg in 1998 there was no chances of me passing as a Russian, not in my case because of linguistic incapability, but because I am not as white as people like Mr. Ogden.
 I think it is very arrogant of people like Mr. Ogden to assume that all foreigners in Russia are rich. I live in a country with a far lower average income level than Russia, but when I lived in your city, I was constantly charged more, even earning $200 dollars in a month. A trip to the theater was always a gamble, because I could not get a residency permit and many times was refused at the Mariinsky and stopped attending the theater there.
 I agree with the article you wrote and am sure most sensible readers do too. I was glad that you wrote about the fact that it isn't just poor Russians and rich Americans and Europeans who live in Russia, but people from all over the world.
 Yusuf Khan,
 Karachi, Pakistan
 <strong>Dear Editor,</strong>
 If you are here in St. Petersburg, and want to go to a museum, quit your whining and pay the price.
 The museums need an income to survive, and they can't get it from the average Russian citizen, so they get it from the tourists.
 No big deal.
 Also, what a bunch of hypocrites! Talking about the way the prices are different for us foreigners! What a terrible thing!
 Have you ever priced out-of-state colleges in the United States? How about hunting or fishing licenses in a state other than your home state? How about the sneaky way we in the U.S. gouge tourists by levying high taxes on things that travelers use, like hotels and rental cars?
 Russia didn't invent this system of taxing out-of-towners, they are pikers at it still. The U.S. has been doing it, and doing it damn well since before perestroika.
 Get a grip, folks. Would you rather see the wonderful exhibits here made unavailable to the wonderful Russian populace who are, after all, our hosts?
 David Francis,
 St. Petersburg
 
 <strong>Dear Editor,
 </strong>I absolutely agree with Erik Batuev [&quot;For Too Many Journalists, Conflict Is a Chance To Pursue Personal Agenda,&quot; Feb. 6] that &quot;we all need to face the many enemies inside ourselves.&quot;
 But before we do that it might be worth trying to squeeze a slave out of our souls - and this includes Batuev.
 I smiled to read his story that the FSB summoned him to an informal chat and how he was &quot;terrified&quot; about it. Yet he went there anyway! Why did he go?
 Why didn't he invite them to meet at a time and place of his convenience? Did it ever occur to Batuev that he could have refused the &quot;appointment&quot; entirely?
 Until this becomes crystal clear to Batuev and all the rest of us, I doubt there will be any effective fight against the &quot;enemies inside.&quot; In the movie &quot;Basic Instinct,&quot; Sharon Stone tells the police detective, &quot;Have you got a warrant? Then get the f*** out of here!&quot;
 It's a good quotation to remember if you haven't got time to read thorough the Criminal and Criminal Procedures codes.
 Nikolai Sannikov,
 Moscow
 
 <strong>Dear Editor,
 </strong>I just wanted to compliment Russell Working on his article [&quot;Black Beauty of an Ashed City,&quot; Feb. 2]. I especially liked reading: &quot;The same City Hall geniuses who brought us unheated apartments and 20-hour-per-day blackouts have decided to apply coal ash on the streets to prevent skidding on the ice.&quot;
 Have you ever driven on ashed-iced roads? It's lots of fun, I assure you. And our office carpet is looking very attractive - the black boot prints go well with the blue carpet.
 Dmitry Ilic,
 Vladivostok
 
 <strong>Dear Editor,</strong>
 I was disgusted to hear on CBC radio that Andrei Knyazev has not yet had any criminal charges laid against him for the Jan. 27 death of Catherine McLean.
 Quite simply, he killed her.
 I wonder what Russian response would be to a Canadian diplomat that killed a Russian mother of two sons. Perhaps in that context you can imagine our rage.
 This incident will not go away until the Russian government deals with Knyazev justly, in the criminal system. Ordinary Canadians like myself will make sure of that.
 If you do not punish him adequately, the whole issue will become a public trial of the Russian government in Canadians' (and, likely, Americans') minds.
 Dianne Kurelek,
 Ontario, Canada 
 
 <strong>Dear Editor,
 </strong>Russia should think twice about opposing the U.S. space defense shield. The Russian people should know that the United States would never start a war with Russia!
 However, a European Union attack on Russia is something that you must not forget. The EU will form its army and it will be headed by Germany and France with the rest of Europe (except England) tagging along.
 They want your resources and they don't want a protected United States and England getting in their way. That is their reason for objecting to our peace shield.
 John Ellis
 Pleasant Grove, Utah
 <strong>
 Dear Editor,
 </strong>I would like to add my voice to the discourse concerning Chris Floyd's &quot;Global Eye.&quot; Although in the past this column has entertained with its satirical exposures of hypocritical news items, it has evolved into an outlet for Mr. Floyd to pursue - with a vile rancor - his personal vendetta against George W. Bush.
 Must we endure this biased column, allowing the author to flaunt his liberal credentials? In light of The St Petersburg Times' proclaimed &quot;commitment to fair and accurate reporting,&quot; this column begs to be axed!
 
 Arden Simoni,
 St. Petersburg

TITLE: Global Eye
TEXT: Never, ever let it be said that the Global Eye has a partisan bent. Sure, we give those loveable right-wing types a bit of good-natured guff now and then, but that doesn't mean we don't also acknowledge shortcomings on the &quot;other side of the aisle,&quot; as the Beltway pundits say. For example, we too look askance, fold our arms and say tut-tut at former President Bill Clinton's last-minute pardon of fugitive businessman Marc Rich.
 Clinton's clemency for tax-dodger Rich occasioned a firestorm of criticism from congressional Republicans. The deal was particularly dirty, they said, because Rich's pardon plea was handled by attorney Jack Quinn, who had once been Bill Clinton's lawyer. This kind of incestuous coziness between rich scofflaws, top political figures and their attorney-servants is immoral and unseemly, said the outraged Republicans, and we certainly agree. That's why we were looking forward to a vigorous response to the case from that highly moral, eminently sober (for 14 whole years!) figure of rectitude now occupying the White House.
 But the Bush blast was strangely muted. While the resident did allow that he was &quot;disturbed&quot; by the move, he would not try to overturn it. Bush said he wanted to preserve the unlimited presidential power to pardon - &quot;not only for myself&quot; (after all, you never know how many of your cabinet officers you might have to spring from the hoosegow, like Daddy did when he left office), but also, he declared, &quot;for my predecessors.&quot; (And we're sure Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln appreciate George W. looking out for their interests.)
 This damp squib left many of Bush's own supporters puzzled. But all was revealed last week, when the New Yorker reported the real reason the White House downplayed the issue, which could have been milked for much more enjoyable Clinton-bashing. It turns out that Vice President Dick Cheney's own chief of staff, attorney Lewis Libby, had served for several years as a lawyer for, er, Marc Rich. Libby spent that time &quot;aggressively pursuing&quot; a clemency deal for the fugitive, dogging prosecutors on his master's behalf until December 1999.
 Cheney spin jockey Mary Matalin was uncharacteristically terse when asked about this incestuous coziness between rich scofflaws, top political figures and their attorney-servants. &quot;We're moving forward,&quot; she said, &quot;not looking back.&quot;
 Except, of course, for all that work George W. is doing for his predecessors.
 
 Dressing Down
 Who says those buttoned-down City of London types can't have fun? The boys over at Tullett & Tokyo Libery, a top brokerage in London's financial center, sure know how to whoop it up, all right. Why, the other day, those delicious rapscallions ordered a Jewish executive to put on a Nazi uniform - just for a larf, of course!
 But for some reason, Laurent Weinberger, objected to the prank - a &quot;forfeit&quot; he was supposed to pay for being late for work, The Financial Times reports. Maybe the fact that his grandmother was murdered at Auschwitz had something to do with it. You know how sensitive some people can be about little things like that. Anyhoo, after he refused to don the Hitlerian drag, Weinberger found himself demoted to a lesser-paying job.
 Unfortunately, Weinberger didn't see the humor in that move, either. He's filed charges of unfair dismissal and racial discrimination against the fun-loving firm. Tullet & Tokyo have offered a novel defense: They mock everyone's ethnic background, they said. For instance, they made a Welsh executive dress up as Bo-Peep for being late, and a Catholic broker dress as the Pope. The ridicule, accompanied by &quot;banter, horseplay and extremely strong language&quot; was just part of a careful corporate strategy to &quot;create an aggressive, productive atmosphere,&quot; the company said.
 Weinberger's solicitor Makbool Javaid said that dressing someone as Bo-Peep was different from forcing a Nazi uniform on a Jewish employee. &quot;It's like handing a Ku Klux Klan uniform to a black person and saying, 'Wear that,'&quot; Javaid said.
 To which Tullet & Tokyo would undoubtedly reply: &quot;Your point?&quot;
 
 Family Planning
 Papal knight and good corporate citizen Rupert Murdoch is still fighting the good fight for decency and morality on the airwaves. Just last week, his family-values cable channel, The Fox Network, took a bold stand for sexual morality by flatly refusing to air an advertisement for a contraceptive on its new hit show - &quot;Temptation Island.&quot;
 Encare, a female contraceptive, wanted to place an ad showing a respectably married young working woman discussing the contraceptive on the telephone with her husband, Salon.com reports. She speaks glowingly of the love that attends their holy wedlock, while noting that the contraceptive allows her to control her reproductive process for the mutual benefit of their legal union.
 Naturally, this kind of filth has no place on such a respectable program as &quot;Temptation Island,&quot; a &quot;reality-based&quot; show that splits up committed couples and sends them on a series of hot dates with scantily-clad studs and babes to see if they will break their vows of love and do the nasty with a stranger.
 Fox officials refused to comment on their rejection of the ad - and why should they? When you're doing the Lord's work, you need no justification. Anyway, who needs contraception when you're peddling loose sex? You get more families that way!
 
 Love Bombing
 Finally, as a spiritual service to our readers, we present another installment in our ongoing effort to expound the &quot;Compassionate Conservative&quot; gospel of the Right Reverent George W. Bush and his disciples. Today, John DiIulio, newly appointed director of the &quot;White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives,&quot; displays the Compassionate Conservatives' thorough, nuanced understanding of life in United States' poorest regions.
 &quot;All that's left of the black community in some pockets of urban America,&quot; DiIulio writes in the National Journal, &quot;is deviant, delinquent and criminal adults surrounded by severely abused and neglected children, virtually all of whom were born out of wedlock.&quot;
 Poor lost souls; wonder they all voted for Gore. But the Reverent Bush and Brother DiIulio will take care of them now.
 Boy, will they ever.

TITLE: where young and rich go for the best techno
AUTHOR: by Tom Masters
TEXT: It's something of an incongruity that the &quot;Golden Age&quot; of clubbing in St. Petersburg can be so often harked back to with unseemly nostalgia by young clubbers, themselves often barely in their twenties.
 This is particularly the case whenever the Tunnel Club is mentioned. Despite being a chaotic, dirty, low-budget venture in the mid-nineties, housed in a disused bomb shelter on the Petrograd Side, the music was little short of astounding in a city that had largely missed the techno revolution. Many former tunnelshchiki will tell you that it was the best club in St. Petersburg, alongside the still-functioning Griboyedov, where people actually went for the music and atmosphere, unlike the more contrived clubs that have since predominated.
 When the Tunnel was finally closed, the team behind it moved down the road to far better premises, and opened Mama, perhaps St. Petersburg's most famous and notorious techno club.
 Like the Tunnel, there always seem to be as many teenagers outside Ma ma as inside, either victims of &quot;face control&quot; or drinking beer and taking a break from dancing, though this was not the case last Saturday, when, with temperatures at a thigh-freezing minus 25 degrees Celsius, the crowd were all strictly indoors.
 The ritual at Mama begins with the opening of its front door (officially at 11:50 p.m.), although when we arrived just after midnight there was still an enormous crowd, jostling against a resolutely shut entrance. Suddenly, the door flew open, knocking young teens off the steps and causing a general riot to get to the guest-list line (nobody seems to pay here) and from there into the warmth of the club.
 Mama has undergone a rethink in recent years. Its two floors were once both given over to dancing, but after a renovation, the ground floor contains a chill-out room and an enormous computer lounge where frustrated young men play Tomb Raider all night. Thankfully, its upper floor is still a dance floor with two bars and music that still impresses.
 Like London's Heavenly Social or New York's own Tunnel Club in the days way-back-when, Mama has long been home to some of the best progressive house and drum 'n' bass in the city. This is happily still the case, if Saturday was anything to go by, with DJs Phunkee, Oleg Pak and Aram Mantana providing the sounds - a combination of more ground-breaking material and better known crowd-pleasers, which had the dancefloor packed solid by 1 a.m. onwards.
 The very cool, very affluent crowd are generally good fun, and the dance club ethos lives on here, as 99 percent of the crowd is there for the music and dancing.
 The bar is inexpensive, with beers at 30 rubles each, although the staff do not serve spirits to those under 21, and given the appearance of the crowd, this is the vast majority. If you are old enough to drink spirits you will feel like a youth-club disco supervisor. The crowd's average age is about 17, although there is certainly nothing unwelcoming about it. The &quot;element of personal danger&quot; - long the verdict of the club guide on Mama - is only present in a few ankle-biting 15-year-olds who have taken on laughable gangster personas, and threaten very little at all.
 Despite the fact that the former tunnelshchiki continue to wax lyrical about the good old days, they obviously don't come to Mama to relive them, as they would have to be at least an astounding 22 years old.
 
 Mama, open Fri.-Sat., 11:50 p.m., entry 100 rub. 3B Malaya Monetnaya Ul. Tel: 232-31-37.

TITLE: chernov's choice
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov
TEXT: 
 The three-day <strong>Dvizheniye/Movement #1 Festival, </strong>promoted by SP Concert, would be nothing more than three concerts and an all-night dance party, if it weren't for <strong>Proryv Festival </strong>- which is rather clumsily connected with <strong>Dvizheniye. </strong>The Proryv Festival will feature lots of club acts of different styles and quality, and will be the first stadium performance for many of them - although it's not quite clear why they should play at a stadium if they are, well, club acts. See Gigs for the tentative line-up, but it will inevitably change. Yubileiny, Friday.
 Unlike the very uncool Alisa and Agata Kristi, who are performing at <strong>Dvizheniye, </strong>the festival will host a much more amusing character - <strong>Zhanna Agu za ro va. </strong>Formerly a singer in the then-exciting 1980s rock and roll band Bravo, she left the band to launch a solo career in 1988 and moved to Los Angeles in 1990. She made the occasional visit to Russia, teasing the public with bizarre statements, such as insisting on being a space alien. Back in Russia again since 1996, she sings both Bravo's early hits and her later solo material, but usually performs at nightclubs such as Hollywood Nites. Yubileiny, Saturday.
 <strong>Dva Samaliota, </strong>the ska punk band, which made a lot of noise last year with &quot;Podruga Pod kinula Problem,&quot; will play a rare local show at Faculty. After ex-Stranniye Igry Grigory Sologub left in December, the band is performing in their classic 1990s line-up, plus a new trumpet player.
 Now the band plays with its founding member, guitarist and singer Vadim Pokrovsky, who returned after a three-year &quot;sabbatical.&quot;
 The live repertoire contains six new songs, one written by Pokrovsky in his trademark &quot;quasi-Swahili.&quot; Three of them have already been recorded - one appearing on the &quot;Griboyedov Music 2&quot; sampler, compiled by Dva Samaliota's drummer Mikhail Sindalovsky and released last week. Faculty, Saturday.
 <strong>Vnezapny Sych, </strong>a cult alternative pop band with a troubled career, who also features on the compilation, seems to have ceased activity, as its singer, Pyotr Matveyev, died last month, of heart failure. Matveyev, whose chilling vocals on Sych's &quot;Roza-Mimoza&quot; made a stir last year, will be honored by fellow member Kirill Spechinsky.
 Spechinsky, who is also known for writing Pep-See hits, will play in his memory at the Dva Samaliota-managed club Griboyedov, where Sych liked to perform. Griboyedov, Sat.
 Finally, <strong>Volkovtrio, </strong>the three-piece band of virtuosos, led by double-bass player Vladimir Volkov, will play their blend of jazz, rock and folk at Fish Fabrique on Wednesday.

TITLE: mariinsky festival will spoil ballet fans rotten
AUTHOR: by Galina Stolyarova
TEXT: Ballet lovers are looking forward to a week-long feast, and the man to thank is maestro Valery Gergiev. The fiesta - officially called &quot;International Ballet Festival 'Mariinsky'&quot; kicks off Saturday and runs through Feb. 18 at the Mariinsky theater.
 The list of international ballet stars is impressive and features a number of big foreign names, along with Mariinsky talents such as Ulyana Lopatkina, Diana Vishnyova, Igor Zelensky and Svet lana Zakharova.
 Vladimir Malakhov - Bolshoi Ballet School graduate, formerly principal dancer at the Moscow Classical Ballet and currently principal dancer at the National Ballet of Canada - performs in &quot;Giselle&quot; on Feb. 15 with Diana Vishnyova.
 Cuban-born dancer Jose Manuel Carenio - who has performed with the American Ballet Theater and the Royal Ballet in London, among others - will dance with Svetlana Zakha rova in Marius Petipa's &quot;La Bayadere&quot; on Feb. 14.
 Joining Irma Nioradze in Marius Petipa's &quot;Don Quixote&quot; on Feb. 16 will be Carlos Acosta. The 27-year-old leading soloist of the Royal Ballet in London gained fame dancing classical roles at the British National Ballet and Cuban National Ballet.
 The guests will also get together at the grandiose gala-performance on February 17 - a day before the festival closes with &quot;Swan Lake.&quot;
 Though the program is predominated by the works of choreographer Petipa, the festival also offers a chance to return to masterpieces produced during the Soviet years. Rolling back decades, the Mariinsky will devote one of the evenings entirely to Soviet era choreography. The ballet evening on Feb. 13 will be comprised, in particular, of fragments from Vakhtang Chabukiani's 1939 &quot;Laurencia&quot; and Nina Anisimova's 1942 &quot;Gayane&quot;. Produced during the Mariinsky's sojourn in Perm during World War II, &quot;Gayane,&quot; set to music by Khachaturyan, tells the story of the daughter of the head of a collective farm in Armenia, who shows much heroism in helping to catch an enemy of the Soviet state.
 The Mariinsky's most recent renditions of modern Western choreographer's works, like McMillan's &quot;Manon&quot; or Balanchine's &quot;Jewels&quot; seem to be deliberately downplayed in the program of the festival, which is apparently intended to herald the glory of Imperial Ballet.
 An atmosphere of complete secrecy shrouded the rehearsals of the &quot;Nut cracker,&quot; which premieres next Mon day. Young Mariinsky dancer Ki rill Simonov is responsible for the choreography, while dissident artist Mikhail Shemyakin came up with the concept, the direction, the libretto, the sets and the costumes.
 Shemyakin's contract forbids him disclosing any details or commenting on his work before opening night, but he did promise &quot;a Hoffmanesque spirit&quot; and Anton Adasinsky (experimental dancer and ex-member of the &quot;Litsedei&quot; clown group) in the role of Ma sha's godfather and old family friend Herr Drosselmeyer.
 Gergiev has also challenged the Mariinsky soloists by restoring Tchai kov sky's original fast tempi, which were slowed down in previous versions of the piece following complaints from dancers.
 &quot;Gergiev has turned the ballet into a revolution,&quot; Shemyakin said, promising that the new Nut cracker will be &quot;no sugary sight, but a tale for both children and adults.&quot;
 For details, see listings.

TITLE: university students get a club that satisfies everyone
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov
TEXT: The club Faculty, which now attracts hundreds of fans and hosts some of the city's best bands, was launched on Nov. 18 with a concert by Markscheider Kunst - the popular Afro-rock band, which effectively packs any of the city's alternative venues. Dva Samaliota and 3D will play this weekend.
 The rooms on 6 Dobrolyubova that Faculty occupies once hosted, alternatively, an office, a bar and warehouse - and are within a 10-minute walk distance from the University's main building.
 The name Faculty (Fakultet in Russian) evokes the horror movie by Robert Rodriguez and &quot;FUCKultet,&quot; the Russian title for the sex-educational series shown on MTV Russia.
 &quot;The original idea was that the University was to have its own recreational center, its own club - because the University is like a town, it has everything,&quot; said Faculty's director Nikita Pozdnyakov, whose background includes studying Chinese at the University's Oriental Faculty, playing drums with obscure bands and promoting shows - at one time taking part in organizing one by folk pop singer Lyudmila Zykina in China.
 According to Pozdnyakov, the idea - dreamed up by a group of students - was approved by the rector, Lyudmila Verbitskaya, and organized in cooperation with the University's trade-union.
 Although Faculty is oriented primarily toward the University's students, a student card is not necessary to get in, though it gives a 50 per cent discount or even free entrance.
 A night at Faculty is quite a bargain. The door fees range from none at all to 80 rubles (when local big name acts are playing), with Bochkaryov beer costing a mere 25 rubles.
 But however modest, the fees serve as a means of &quot;face control,&quot; admitted Pozdnyakov. &quot;We don't have rednecks in the club,&quot; he said. &quot;When they come, we ask them to show a student card or buy a ticket. It usually stops them.&quot;
 The University connection makes Faculty unique in a way. &quot;Unlike other clubs we don't have to make money,&quot; said Pozdnyakov. &quot;It works for itself; when some extra money appears it's invested back into the club, to improve PA and equipment, and to carry out repairs.&quot;
 University-related events include daytime meetings with professors, students' art exhibitions and &quot;Wind of Spring,&quot; a three-day rock festival of the University student bands, which will feature over 30 acts and take place on Feb. 23 to 25.
 Faculty was opened two weeks after Art Spirit, which is also student-oriented and, just like Faculty, located at one of the University's hostels. &quot;We are separate structures, independent of each other,&quot; said Pozdnyakov, who stresses that Faculty is the University's only official club.
 The club is located in two spacious rooms which can hold up to 300 fans, although as it can be stuffy when a popular club band is playing. The seating capacity is limited to 125.
 Although bartenders can be slow sometimes, the management explained that all jobs are occupied by moonlighting students, whose experience grows as time passes.
 The sound quality is usually decent, although perhaps too loud at times, which makes it difficult to chat.
 &quot;We have very good equipment which allows just about any band to perform at our club - almost all the best-known bands in the city have already played here, some even twice,&quot; said Pozdnyakov, who admits that the last-minute cancellation of a show by the popular act Pep-See earlier this month was caused by a &quot;disagreement.&quot;
 In its musical format, Faculty, like Art Spirit, is similar to Griboyedov, with live shows followed by all-night parties with DJs. 
 &quot;Everybody used to go to Griboyedov, and will keep going there, but we have a different public,&quot; said Pozdnya kov.
 &quot;The formula itself is not bad. A poll was conducted among university students and it turned out that this formula satisfies everybody. No-one wants to dance to a tape recorder; everybody wants vinyl and DJs - and everybody loves live club music - not rock and roll bands which play at pubs. Everybody is bored with them.&quot;
 
 For events and details see Gigs and Club Guide.

TITLE: beer and goat, a perfect match
AUTHOR: by Simon Patterson
TEXT: It's rare in Russia to find a newly-opened restaurant that honestly has to turn people away. Especially when it's an unpleasantly slushy Wednesday night. But the &quot;Priyut Bodlivoi Kozy&quot; beer restaurant, or &quot;Shelter of the Butting Goat,&quot; managed to do just that when we visited.
 Fortunately, we turned up early (before 7 p.m., that is), and were able to sit at one of the few tables that hadn't been reserved. At first we thought this was a marketing ploy, or that we were judged unworthy to sit in the other section, but soon the diners who had booked arrived to fill the empty tables, while less fortunate diners were turned away in droves.
 The interior of the Bodlivaya Koza has certainly had a lot of work put into it. The restaurant is divided into two rooms, and the first room, where we sat, is certainly the more interesting decor-wise, dominated by a large wooden goat, its mechanical insides revealed for all to see. While the design seems to be a nouveau-riche variation on works by the &quot;Mitki&quot; group of artists, it still works well to create a &quot;beer restaurant&quot; with a very Prague-like feel to it.
 We began by ordering beer, (Bochkaryov, at 35 rubles) as everyone else seemed to be doing, though, unlike many of the patrons, we chose to drink it without taking a carafe of vodka each to wash it down. Instead, we picked one of the numerous &quot;zakuski k pivu&quot; (beer snacks) that lead the menu, opting for the cheese sticks (125 rubles). We finished these well before we finished our beer, and they may have been somewhat overpriced for a few hunks of fried cheese, but it was at least a welcome change from dried bread or fish, the beer drinker's usual snack food of choice.
 This was promptly followed by the soups, I ordering the unadventurous but tasty solyanka, or as their menu had it, the selyanka, (85 rubles) to combat the cold, while my wife ordered the cheese soup (150 rubles), which was pronounced very delicious indeed, with a delicate hint of prawns.
 She went on to have the pepper steak in sauce (175 rubles), which was served, for some reason, on a wooden chopping board, with a side order of cauliflower in sour cream (65 rubles), served separately on a plate. This combination of board and plate made eating rather difficult, but the steak itself seemed to be difficult to fault.
 On our waiter's recommendation, I had the lamb cutlets with pineapple (265 rubles), not a combination I can ever remember seeing before, and they turned out to be excellent, seasoned with rosemary, with a side order of vegetable ragout (100 rubles).
 The service was prompt and efficient, and we were intending to leave our waiter a fairly generous tip, but as soon as he brought us the bill he leaned towards us and said surreptitiously &quot;service costs 10 percent, and isn't included in the price.&quot; While there was nothing about this on the menu or on the bill, we gave him the tip anyway, but it seemed as though there was some sort of conspiracy going on between the waiting staff and the management.
 For a beer restaurant, the food at the Bodlivaya Koza is rather pricy, but you do get what you pay for, and the beer is fairly cheap. And if you have problems getting a table in the evening, try coming back later - the place is open 24 hours every day.
 
 Priyut Bodlivoi Kozy, 6/8 Zagorodny Prospect. Open 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. Dinner for two with beer, 1,175 rubles ($41). Tel: 315-72-97. Credit cards accepted.

TITLE: soviet-style museum prepares for revamp
AUTHOR: by Molly Graves
TEXT: As Jan. 18, 2001, marked the 300-year anniversary of the St. Petersburg Naval Institute, and after celebrating the 300th anniversary of the Navy in 1996, the Central Naval Museum - approaching three centuries itself - looks ahead to similar anniversaries, and to putting the past in a new place, while still guarding its former treasures.
 Like many museums of the former Soviet Union, St. Petersburg's Central Naval Museum is faced with the challenge of amending its histories - of retaining pride in the past while providing room for future reconstructions.
 Once located in the Admiralty and transferred in 1939 to the former Stock Exchange building on Vasilievsky Island, the museum was founded by Peter the Great in 1709 and boasts over 800,000 items on display. It chronicles the history of the Russian Navy from relics such as Peter the Great's famous boat, &quot;Botik,&quot; built in 1688, which led the 16-year-old tsar from playing in the art of navigation, to the creation of regular navy in Russia.
 But perhaps nowhere are we made more aware of the constructed nature of historical narratives than in a museum that claims to tell them - as we note not only what is charted and depicted, by diorama and miniature model, but also what stories are left untold.
 What you won't find among the heroes charted on the walls, for example, is anything about the Soviet K-19 nuclear submarine - whose crew in 1961 risked their lives in order to avert a nuclear explosion, eventually resulting in the death of 22 of the 139-man crew. The tragedy was kept a top military secret for 30 years until 1991, and has recently resurfaced following news of the Kursk incident, as two American film companies fight for the rights to tell the K-19 story.
 According to Nikolai Klesarevsky, a curator at the museum, the Naval Museum is working to incorporate such re-emerging pieces of history. &quot;It is necessary to speak about just such events so that they will not be forgotten,&quot; he stated in an interview on Wednesday.
 A small commemorative Kursk exhibit, including a memorial letter from President Vladimir Putin signed on August 26, 2000, listing the crew as heroes of the Russian Federation, was recently added to the museum's exhibits.
 K-19, too, will be finding its place in the museum's collection. According to Klesarevsky, &quot;There will be an exhibition here at the museum. We are already collecting material about the submarine and the crew of the K-19 which truly saved ... the world from a terrible catastrophe.&quot;
 Klesarevsky was not sure when the exhibit would be ready, but added, &quot;we're working on it ... but it will take time.&quot;
 Finally, it should be added that the title &quot;naval museum&quot; is a bit deceptive. With all its models and maritime maps (careful - the old Soviet-era ones no longer light up and you may be scolded for pushing the buttons), this is not just an excursion for sea buffs, but one that would appeal to most anyone interested in Russian history and culture.
 Additionally, a separate gallery houses temporary exhibitions - soon to host a series of sea-themed paintings entitled, &quot;Romance of the Seas,&quot; which will open Feb. 22.
 
 Central Naval Museum, 4 Birzhevaya Pl., tel: 328-25-01 / 328-25-02 E-mail: museum@mail.admiral.ru. Open 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., last entry at 5:15, closed Mon. and Tues. 5 rubles for students, 15 for adults; 30 and 60 for foreigners. Exhibits are in Russian, though tours are available in English (330 rubles). Helpful bilingual Web site: http://www.museum. navy.ru

TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Boris Admits Paternity

BERLIN (Reuters) - Boris Becker, who divorced his wife last month, admitted on Wednesday that he had fathered a child with a Russian model living in London.
 &quot;I acknowledge the paternity. I accept the responsibility and will support little Anna,&quot; Becker, three times Wimbledon champion, said in a statement.
 Angela Ermakowa, 33, went to court in London on Monday to launch paternity proceedings against Becker who she said had fathered her nine-month-old daughter Anna.
 &quot;The results of tests made last week in London have showed that Boris Becker and Angela Ermakowa are the parents of little Anna,&quot; said the statement released through Becker's media adviser Robert Luebenoff.
 
No Pay, No Play

ATHENS (Reuters) - Aris Salonika, a former European basketball powerhouse, failed to show up for a European game on Tuesday because their players have not been paid for months.
 &quot;The situation [with payments] from the start of the season has been dismal,&quot; captain George Floros was quoted as saying in the daily Eleftherotypia newspaper on Wednesday.
 Aris have now been disqualified from this year's European competition by the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) and face a fine.
 Floros said players had warned management on Monday that failure to pay back-wages would prompt a boycott.
 Aris dominated Greek and European basketball in the 1980s.
 
Bryant Reluctant Star

LOS ANGELES (AP) - the L.A. Lakers' Kobe Bryant has reluctantly decided to play in Sunday's NBA All-Star game. 
 Bryant scored 32 points, including the game-winning basket against the Phoenix Suns Wednesday night.
 Nursing an injured shoulder, Bryant would prefer to sit out Sunday's All-Star game, but, fearing a suspension, he committed to play despite his injury.
 &quot;My shoulder's real bad. A couple of those lobs didn't help at all,&quot; Bryant said.
 Bryant said he heard there was a possibility he'd be suspended for five games if he didn't play in the All-Star game.
 &quot;It's been rumored,&quot; he said without elaborating.
 
Dominican Dominance

CULIACAN, Mexico (AP) - Royals pitcher Miguel Batista pitched seven strong innings Wednesday night to lead the Dominican Republic to its fourth Caribbean Series title in five years with a 5-3 win over Mexico.
 Batista allowed three runs, six hits and one walk, striking out nine. He allowed two homers to Miguel Flores.
 Earlier Wednesday, Venezuela beat Puerto Rico 6-1 to clinch third place in the four-team tournament.
 
UEFA Talking Change

NYON, Switzerland (Reuters) - UEFA pledged on Wednesday to consider reforming the UEFA Cup in order to prevent the introduction of a possible breakaway European League by the continent's second-tier clubs.
 Following a meeting of 70 elite clubs at the headquarters of European soccer's governing body, UEFA's Chief Executive Gerhard Aigner said no changes would be made to either the Champions League or UEFA Cup in the immediate future.
 But he acknowledged that UEFA's number two tournament would almost certainly have to be expanded when current television and marketing contracts expire in 2003.
 &quot;There was a general feeling that we should do something about the UEFA Cup,&quot; said Aigner.
 
Good Day for Garcia

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Sergio Garcia sank a 8.5 meter birdie putt to snatch the early clubhouse lead on the opening day of the Greg Norman International golf tournament on Thursday.
 The Spaniard made nine birdies in a first round 64 to open up a one-stroke lead over Sweden's Pierre Fulke. Another four players, including event host Greg Norman, were tied for third at seven-under-par 67.
 Garcia has not won a tournament since the 1999 German Open but quickly put himself in contention to break his drought by matching his lowest ever score under par in a single round.
 
Canucks Land Goalie

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) - The Vancouver Canucks' search for a goaltender landed them Tampa Bay's Dan Cloutier on Wednesday.
 Vancouver acquired the 24-year-old goaltender from the Lightning in exchange for defenseman Adrian Aucoin and a second-round draft pick.
 In 24 games this year, he has a 3-13-3 record and a 3.52 goals against average.
 The acquisition comes with Felix Potvin, the Canucks' designated starter coming out of training camp, struggling to a 14-17-3 record while starting most of the games on a team that is 28-18-4-4. Backup Bob Essensa is 14-5-1 despite making 16 fewer starts and has taken over as the starting goaltender in recent weeks.

TITLE: Aristide Back in Power in Haiti
AUTHOR: By Paisley Dodds
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - To shouts of &quot;50 more years,&quot; Jean-Bertrand Aristide took back Haiti's presidential sash Wednesday, reclaiming the helm of a nation more isolated, divided and impoverished than when he left office five years ago.
 Outgoing President Rene Preval embraced his mentor after handing back the blue-and-red mantle of Haitian power at a Legislative Palace bristling with machine guns, security guards and combat gear.
 But at the same moment across town, the Democratic Convergence opposition alliance, which boycotted the November presidential election that returned Aristide to power, inaugurated its own &quot;virtual president,&quot; 75-year-old lawyer and human rights activist Gerard Gourgue.
 As the poorest of Haiti's poor danced, drank and worshipped Aristide in the streets, Gourgue declared the new president a &quot;dictator,&quot; laying down a gauntlet likely to leave the Western Hemisphere's most poverty-stricken nation unstable for months or years to come.
 Despite sky-high expectations from a nation where, according to the United Nations, 80 percent of the people are unemployed and two-thirds are malnourished, there was little encouragement from the outside world Wednesday. 
 France and the European Union, which have harshly criticized last year's elections that gave Aristide's Lavalas Family party more than 80 percent of parliament and local offices, sent no delegations. Not a single head of state attended. 
 Hundreds of millions of dollars in international development aid earmarked for Haiti have been frozen for two years, after Preval allowed parliamentary terms to expire, delayed new elections for months and finally staged elections the international community declared free but flawed and unfair.
 Aristide vowed in a December letter to then-President Clinton to open his government to the opposition and take steps to resolve post-election challenges. But negotiations between Lavalas and its opponents broke down early on the eve of the inauguration - a day that also marked the end of the United Nations' 5-year-old human rights, elections and police monitoring missions here.
 Also absent Wednesday was the throng estimated at nearly 1 million that deluged the former priest's 1991 inauguration, after an election that ushered in a new era of democracy following decades of dictatorship, coups and paramilitary brutality.
 Aristide, 47, set the tone and tenor of the day as he solemnly placed his left hand on a Bible at the Legislative Palace, held up his right hand and swore &quot;before God and the nation to respect the constitution and the laws of the republic, and to respect the desires of the Haitian people.&quot;
 By all accounts, those desires are enormous among a people who suffered massacres and torture under harsh military regimes after Aristide was overthrown and fled into exile during a September 1991 coup. Then-U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher escorted Aristide back here during the Clinton administration's October 1994 &quot;Operation Restore Democracy.&quot; But Aristide's term expired the following year, and the Haitian Constitution barred him from consecutive terms.
 After the past five years of stagnation, polarization and international alienation under a hand-picked replacement, Haiti's Roman Catholic prelate, Hibert Constant, underscored his nation's expectations during the traditional inaugural Mass at Port-au-Prince's Notre Dame Cathedral.
 &quot;The real fight we need to succeed in is against misery and hunger,&quot; Constant said.

TITLE: Sharon Refuses To Resume Peace Talks
AUTHOR: By Alistair Lyon
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: JERUSALEM - Prime Minister-elect Ariel Sharon rejected a key Palestinian demand that peace talks resume at the point they stopped under Israel's previous government, a senior Sharon adviser said Thursday.
 Sharon does not feel bound by the concessions that predecessor Ehud Barak made to the Palestinians, said the adviser, Zalman Shoval, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States.
 &quot;There were offers by the previous government. All that was said, either verbally or as ideas, does not commit Israel or any government,&quot; Shoval said a day after the Palestinian Cabinet affirmed the demand for continuity in the talks.
 Palestinian officials said they have low expectations that negotiations, if they eventually resume, can produce results. Sharon has ruled out more land concessions and said he was only interested in reaching an interim, not a final agreement.
 Palestinian officials said privately they did not expect Sharon to stay in power for too long. Sharon will be forced to step down if he fails to form a coalition and get a 2001 budget approved by March 31. Sharon is courting Barak's center-left Labor Party which would lend his government greater stability.
 If rebuffed, he would have to work with a slew of right-wing, religious and small centrist factions with conflicting agendas.
 Sharon has appointed a negotiating team to meet with the myriad parties in Israel's fractious parliament. On Thursday, he held meetings with legislators from his Likud party to hear their demands for Cabinet posts.
 In the final days of his government, Barak offered the Palestinians a state in about 95 percent of the West Bank and control over parts of Jerusalem.
 He indicated his willingness to partially relinquish Israeli sovereignty over a disputed hilltop in the Old City of Jerusalem, where the Al Aqsa Mosque was built above the ruins of the biblical Jewish Temples, a site sacred to Muslims and Jews and claimed by both.
 The Palestinians said Barak's proposals did not go far enough, but were engaged in intense last-minute negotiations before Israeli voters voted out Barak on Tuesday by a margin of 62.5 percent to 37.4 percent.
 Sharon's aides said the Barak ideas are off the table. Demonstrating his resolve to change the nature of the relationship, Sharon visited the Western Wall, sacred to Jews as the retaining wall of the disputed hilltop holy site. He declared that all of Jerusalem would remain united under Israeli rule, &quot;with the Temple Mount at its center for all eternity,&quot; using the Jewish name for the site.
 Sharon's Sept. 28 visit to the hilltop to demonstrate Israeli sovereignty set off the current wave of Palestinian unrest.

TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Pastrana's FARC Talks
SAN VICENTE, Colombia (Reuters) - Colombian President Andres Pastrana flew in to a guerrilla-held enclave on Thursday for a key meeting with a leftist rebel leader aimed at reviving the nation's stuttering two-year-old peace process.
 An honor guard of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas saluted the 46-year-old center-right president as he descended from his Colombian Air Force jet at the airport of San Vicente del Caguan in the country's south.
 He was driven off for a cross-country trip to a private meeting with veteran FARC leader Manuel &quot;Sureshot&quot; Marulanda to try and get talks back on track for ending the 37-year-old war that has claimed 35,000 civilian lives in the past 10 years.
 
Foreign Forces Advised

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Chastised by the United States and others for human rights violations in the Congo's many-sided war, Rwanda's president said little would be solved unless all foreign forces lived up to their pledges to get out of the vast central African country.
 But President Paul Kagame was firm in his speech to UN Security Council members that Rwanda's first concern was preventing some 15,000 exiled Hutu fighters from attacking his country and cutting off their support from Congolese troops.
 Many had fled to the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, after the 1994 genocide against minority Tutsis, who Kagame then led to power in Rwanda.
 Rwanda and Uganda, which helped put the recently assassinated Congolese President Laurent Kabila in power in 1997, turned on him a year later and supported rebels trying to topple him.
 
Wahid Names Minister

JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid Thursday named the ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Baharudin Lopa, as the new justice minister, replacing an official the Muslim cleric sacked for disloyalty.
 &quot;The decree has been signed by the president. Baharudin Lopa is named as justice minister,&quot; cabinet secretary Marsilam Simanjuntak told reporters.
 Lopa had previously been secretary general of the National Human Rights Commission and is a career state prosecutor.
 Wahid fired the previous Justice Minister, Yusril Ihza Mahendra on Wednesday after he had openly backed calls for the president to step down over two financial scandals that triggered a censure from parliament last week.
 Mahendra was the second cabinet member to leave in the past month.
 
Railway To Be Rebuilt

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - The militaries of North and South Korea reached full agreement Thursday on arrangements to reconnect a cross-border railway cut since the Korean War 50 years ago. 
 The 41-point agreement, which also calls for opening a hotline between the two militaries, marked another milestone in thawing relations between the two once-hostile countries. Their ties have dramatically warmed since a historic summit of their leaders in June. 
 &quot;By resolving all related military issues, South and North have laid the most important foundation for the railway project,&quot; said a statement from Seoul's Defense Ministry. After reports of the agreement, reached at a border crossing, South Korean officials said they were hopeful that the rail line could be reconnected by the fall, as scheduled. 
 If reconnected, the railway will become the first direct land transport link between the two Koreas since their 1950-53 war, which ended in an uneasy truce, not in a peace treaty.
 
Space Shuttle Linkup

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida. (AP) - Space shuttle Atlantis closed in on the international space station Thursday for a 360-kilometer-high linkup to attach a $1.4 billion science laboratory.
 The two-day chase is due to end around noon on Friday.
 Atlantis' five astronauts spent their first full day in orbit checking their spacesuits and the shuttle robot arm, all of which will be needed to attach the laboratory to the space station, Alpha.
 Once the lab is attached, Alpha will have more habitable space than NASA's long-dead Skylab and Russia's Mir, which is awaiting a suicide dive into the Pacific next month.
 Alpha's commander, Bill Shepherd, and his Russian crew marked their 100th day in space on Thursday. They undocked a garbage-filled supply ship from the station to make room for Atlantis.
 Unlike the Russian piece of the space station, Destiny is well shielded to protect against small bits of space junk.
 
Pay Up, Says UN

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) - Governments must come up with more money to help the UN Environment Program combat global warming and other pressing environmental problems, director Klaus Toepfer told some 80 environment ministers and delegates Thursday.
 Toepfer said governments had to be willing to pay to sustain the environment, rather than exploit it for commercial reasons.
 The environment ministers began two days of talks Thursday on governing and financing the environmental agency.
 UNEP relies on governmental grants for much of its funding, in particular for projects aimed at protecting and sustaining the environment, but the agency struggles to meet its targets because of a lack of cash, Toepfer said.
 
Giant Squid Found

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) - An Australian museum got its tentacles on one of the most elusive creatures known to man. Melbourne Museum took possession Wednesday of a rare 250 kilogram giant squid dredged up by fishermen from deep waters off the southern coast of Australia. 
 A live giant squid has never been seen - and scientists flock to the rare examples snared by fishermen in the hope of finding out more about their life cycles. Melbourne Museum visiting scientist Mark Norman described the giant squid as one of the &quot;last true monsters of the deep.&quot; 
 The specimen caught last week will be preserved and likely go on display, museum spokesman Kate Milkins said. Milkins said the squid was 4 meters long, but including its two long feeding tentacles, which did not make it to the museum, it would likely measure 11 meters.

TITLE: 76ers Rest Early Against Rockets
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania - The Philadelphia 76ers started the All-Star break about three hours too early.
 The 76ers looked uninterested and tired in a 112-87 loss on Wednesday to the Houston Rockets, who got another solid game from a rejuvenated Hakeem Olajuwon.
 &quot;As much as you want to say, Let's not go home early,' everyone is thinking about going home, the All-Star Game and getting some rest,&quot; 76ers guard Allen Iverson admitted. &quot;When you start to think about going home, the results are like they were tonight.&quot;
 The 76ers head to the All-Star break with a 36-14 mark, the best in the NBA. But this was their sixth game in nine days.
 &quot;We're not going to use fatigue as an excuse,&quot; Iverson said. &quot;If we start doing that, that's when things will start to fold.&quot;
 Steve Francis and Cuttino Mobley scored 23 points each to lead a balanced attack for Houston, which led by as many as 30 points as they dealt the 76ers their worst loss of the season.
 For the second straight game, Olajuwon showed an opposing young center he still has some spring in his 38-year-old legs. On Monday, he scored 18 points against New York's Marcus Camby. In this one, he had 18 points and 14 rebounds against All-Star Theo Ratliff, despite sitting out the final 15 minutes.
 
 <strong>Knicks 96, Mavericks 93 </strong>In New York, Latrell Sprewell scored the game's final three points at the line as the Knicks held on for a wild, double-overtime, 96-93 victory over the Dallas Mavericks.
 With six-tenths of a second left in regulation, the Mavs' Michael Finley caught an inbounds pass and threw up an 11-footer that swished through at the horn, forcing overtime.
 In the first overtime, a loose ball was tapped out beyond the arc and Dallas's Howard Eisley picked it up and unleashed a 25-footer for an 87-87 tie with one second remaining.
 Sprewell finished with 20 points and 11 rebounds and Allen Houston added 18 points for New York, which has won three of its last four games.
 Finley scored 21 points, Eisley 17 and Dirk Nowitzki 16 for Dallas, which had won three in a row.
 
 <strong>Lakers 85, Suns 83 </strong>In Los Angeles, Kobe Bryant buried the winning jumper with 2.7 seconds to play as the Lakers blew an 11-point fourth-quarter lead before escaping with an 85-83 victory over the Phoenix Suns.
 Bryant scored 23 of his 32 points in the second half as the Lakers got their fourth win in six games without injured center Shaquille O'Neal.


TITLE: Change of Sticks Does the Trick for Hatcher
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: DALLAS, Texas - Using a new stick, defenseman Derian Hatcher scored his first goal of the season with 8:20 remaining as the Dallas Stars continued their dominance of the Edmonton Oilers with a 3-2 victory on Wednesday.
 Hatcher had not scored in 85 games.
 With Oilers defenseman Jason Smith in the penalty box for hooking, Hatcher took a pass from Joe Nieuwen dyk at the left point, then let go a wrist shot that deflected off defenseman Janne Niinimaa's left leg and past goaltender Tommy Salo.
 &quot;To be honest, I just shot it and tried to get it around the guys in front,&quot; Hat cher said.
 Hatcher credited his goal to a change of sticks.
 &quot;Last year when I got injured, I went to an aluminum stick and I haven't scored since,&quot; he said. &quot;Today I went back to a wooden stick and scored.&quot;
 Hatcher's last goal came against Edmonton in last year's Western Conference quarterfinals. He scored in the decisive fifth game, a 3-2 home victory on April 21, 2000.
 Ed Belfour, who made 20 saves, preserved the lead by robbing Edmonton left wing Ryan Smyth twice. With 90 seconds left, he used his glove to deflect Smyth's wrister from the left side, then stoned his wraparound with 47 seconds left.
 &quot;It was a bang-bang play and more reactionary on my part,&quot; Belfour said of the glove save.
 Dallas has won 11 straight regular-season home games over Edmonton. The Stars also are 14-1-1 at home and 24-3-3 overall against the Oilers since moving from Minnesota before the 1993-94 season.
 &quot;It's just one of those streaks,&quot; Dallas center Mike Modano said. &quot;They're a good team to play against. They come up and down the ice and make the game enjoyable.&quot;
 
 <strong>Hurricanes 2, Coyotes 1. </strong>In Phoenix, after being contained for 60 minutes, red-hot Jeff O'Neill scored 25 seconds into overtime to lift Carolina to a 2-1 win over the Coyotes. O'Neill, who set a franchise record with 14 goals in January, was limited to two shots and took two of his team's five penalties in regulation.
 But after the Hurricanes won the faceoff to start overtime, he took a pass from David Tanabe and fired a slap shot past goaltender Sean Burke from behind the right faceoff circle.
 The 24-year-old O'Neill has seven goals in his last four games and leads the team with a career-high 28.
 
 <strong>Penguins 9, Flyers 4. </strong>In Pittsburgh, Alexei Kovalev recorded his second hat trick of the season and a career-best five points and Jaromir Jagr added two goals and two assists as the Penguins whipped the Philadelphia Flyers 9-4.
 Another All-Star, Mario Lemieux, scored on the power play and Martin Straka converted a breakaway to cap Pittsburgh's five-goal second period.
 Philadelphia's Roman Cechmanek, who surrendered six goals in the second period in his All-Star debut, yielded six again, on 20 shots, before he was replaced by Brian Boucher after 27 minutes, 19 seconds.
 Kent Manderville ended a 122-game goal-scoring drought, but the Flyers lost for the second time in as many nights.
 
 <strong>Capitals 3, Avalanche. 1 </strong>In Denver, Patrick Roy was outdueled by his former backup and committed a turnover that led to the eventual winning goal as the Washington Capitals ended the Colorado Avalanche's nine-game home unbeaten streak with a 3-1 victory.
 Craig Billington, Roy's backup for three seasons, stopped 31 shots in his first start since New Year's Day. He came up big in the opening period, when the Avalanche had a 14-4 advantage in shots, and again in the third.
 Richard Zednik, Jeff Halpern and Steve Konowalchuk scored for Washington. Joe Sakic got Colorado's only goal.

TITLE: Man. Utd, Yankees Ink Marketing Alliance
AUTHOR: By Steve James
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: NEW YORK - Baseball's world-famous New York Yankees teamed up on Wednesday with the world's richest soccer club, Manchester United, in a marketing alliance to boost their names - and sell more shirts and caps to fans on both sides of the Atlantic.
 YankeeNets LLC, parent of the World Series champion Yankees, and United, current English premier league champions, said they would promote one another's merchandise and share information on player fitness, health and training.
 &quot;This is an alliance, there are no financial arrangements,&quot; said Peter Kenyon, chief executive of Manchester United. &quot;The intriguing thing is that the alliance is non-competitive.
 &quot;We both have global synergies, but we're not competing with each other, so we look forward to bringing future benefits to both organizations,&quot; he told a news conference in New York.
 Whether the marriage of two of the most glamorous sports clubs in the world is a home-run or an own-goal remains to be seen, but officials of both organizations touted the alliance.
 Even though TV and merchandise licensing rights have not been finalized, there is a huge potential for making billions of dollars from marketing the teams and their stars, like United's David Beckham, who is married to Victoria &quot;Posh&quot; Spice, and the Yankees' Derek Jeter, who is close to signing a massive new contract reportedly worth $189 million over 10 years.
 YankeeNets is the parent of the Yankees, the New York Nets basketball team, the New Jersey Devils hockey team and a marketing partner of the New York Giants football team.
 One thing the Yankees and United will not be doing is getting involved in each other's sports. You won't see the Yankee outfielder Paul O'Neil playing in goal at United's famed Old Trafford stadium.
 &quot;We don't forget our heritage, Man chester United won't produce baseball teams an d the Yankees won't produce soccer teams,&quot; said former United and England legend Sir Bobby Charlton.
 But asked whether the alliance was merely a cover for the club to sell more merchandise, he said the aim of the partnership was to help develop soccer in the United States.
 &quot;We are not in the process of selling our souls to another sport, this is to make friends and grow the sport,&quot; said Charlton, who was the midfield general of England's 1966 World Cup-winning team and led United to the European Cup in 1968.
 Kenyon said United, which already has legions of fans across Europe and Asia, was keen to tap the huge North American market. Hooking up with the Yankees made that easier.
 &quot;They have a particularly well developed multi-media business and their executive staff know the North American markets better than anyone.
 &quot;We can't ride in on a white charger and say 'This is the way to do i,t' because we don't know the U.S.&quot;
 The agreement aims to increase brand awareness and marketing programs worldwide and satisfy the increasing demand from fans for information products and services, the teams said in a statement. The agreement will also lead to selling products from all franchises in individual team stores.
 United, which also recently signed a huge sponsorship deal with sportswear maker Nike Inc., will eventually have team stores in the United States through Nike.
 U.S. sports leagues currently control overseas licensing, but Dr. Harvey Schiller, chief executive of YankeeNets, said the YankeeNets will discuss the possibility of marketing Yankee merchandise in Britain through United's outlets.
 The deal also includes plans for Man chester United to tour North America before the 2003-2004 season starts.
 In the year to July 2000, United's merchandising revenues stood at 23.6 million pounds ($34.5 million), up 9 percent, but the club has been looking for opportunities to expand its orbit.
 In London Stock Exchange trading, Manchester United shares rose 11.25 pence, or more than 5 percent, to 225 pence.

TITLE: NFC Rushing Champ Calling It Quits
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota - Robert Smith is trading in his football uniform, perhaps for a lab coat.
 Smith hasn't said what he will do next, only that it won't be playing running back for the Minnesota Vikings or anyone else in the NFL.
 The agent for the 28-year-old running back, Neil Cornrich, confirmed Wednesday that Smith is retiring after eight seasons with the Vikings. Smith is leaving the NFL at the top of his game, much like 31-year-old Barry Sanders before the 1999 season, and at the height of his earning power as an unrestricted free agent.
 Cornrich dismissed the idea that the oft-injured back, who recently underwent a third knee operation, was tired of the pounding.
 &quot;He could easily play five more years without jeopardizing his health,&quot; Cornrich said. &quot;He just decided to go in another direction.&quot;
 That direction is uncertain, although Smith has said he might consider a career as a medical researcher. He pursued a history degree with a strong emphasis on science at Ohio State and is interested in a variety of topics such as calculus, molecular genetics and classical music.
 Last season, he said he thought he would be in medical school by now.
 &quot;I enjoy football more than I thought I would,&quot; Smith told the Saint Paul Pioneer Press. &quot;I honestly didn't think I would play as long as I have. But once you're out there and enjoying it, it's completely different.&quot;
 In a brief statement Tuesday to The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Smith let his reasons for leaving remain a mystery. In the statement, Smith thanked his family and friends, fans and the Vikings organization.
 &quot;I also wanted to thank my teammates and coaches for believing in me throughout my career,&quot; he said.
 The retirement leaves a large hole in the Vikings' offense.
 Smith, the Vikings' first-round pick in 1993, led the NFC by rushing last season with 1,521 yards in his first complete 16-game season. He broke the organization's career rushing record, held by Chuck Foreman, with 6,818 yards.

TITLE: Tottenham's Fans Hope History Points to Team of Destiny
AUTHOR: By Mitch Phillips
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LONDON - Tottenham Hotspur fans had their belief in destiny reinforced on Wednesday when their team scored three goals in six minutes to recover from 2-0 down and beat Charlton Athletic 4-2 in the FA Cup fourth round.
 Minor-league Kingstonian suffered a 1-0 home fourth-round replay defeat by Bristol City while first division Blackburn won 5-2 at premier league Derby County. Tottenham have an impressive history of winning trophies when the year ends in a one, including the double in 1961, League Cup in 1971 and FA Cup in 1981 and 91. But recent form pointed against more success in 2001.
 They had drawn their last four games 0-0 - including a dour encounter against Charlton in the league on Saturday. They failed to score in seven of their last nine games and had not won a single away game in the league.
 They fell behind after 11 minutes as Chris Powell nipped in to head his first goal in 113 games for Charlton. Charlton doubled their lead five minutes after the break when Matt Svensson squeezed the ball past Neil Sullivan.
 A Richard Rufus own goal in the 58th minute - Spurs' first in more than five hours of football - gave George Graham's side hope.
 And five minutes later Spurs were ahead after two goals in the space of 60 seconds, Darren Anderton and Oyvind Leonhardson turning the game on its head.
 Sergey Rebrov completed the recovery to earn Spurs a home fifth round against first division Stockport.
 
 <strong>Blackburn 5, Derby 2. </strong>Derby went ahead in the first minute as Chris Riggot headed in a Craig Burley cross and then missed three great chances.
 They paid for their profligacy when Gary Flitcroft equalised three minutes after the break and Marcus Bent headed Blackburn ahead 10 minutes later - both goals coming from Jason McAteer crosses.
 David Dunn made it 3-1 with a 65th minute penalty after a foul on Alan Mann.
 Stefanio Eranio pulled one back for Derby in the 70th minute but within a minute Bent restored Blackburn's two-goal cushion and substitute Matt Jansen got the fifth 13 minutes from time.
 Blackburn visit Lancashire neighbours Bolton in the fifth round.
 Kingstonian, the surviving non-Football League club, were seconds away from beating Bristol City in the original game 10 days ago, only to have to settle for a 1-1 draw.
 This time the second division team again left it late, Scott Murray scoring the only goal two minutes from time after a mass scramble, to earn a trip to premier league Leicester City in the fifth round.
 <strong>
 Leeds United 2, Everton 2.</strong> In the night's only premier league game, Everton drew 2-2 at home to Leeds United.
 Duncan Ferguson headed Everton ahead after 23 minutes but Leeds, without a win at Goodison Park since 1990, deservedly equalised through Ian Harte from the edge of the box in the 66th.
 Kevin Campbell took Everton back into the lead six minutes later, butformer Everton midfielder Olivier Da earned Leeds a point with a deflected long range shot. Leeds climbed one place to sixth while Everton remained 15th.