SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #668 (35), Friday, May 11, 2001
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TITLE: Moscow Hosting Missile Talks
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW - A top U.S. arms expert arrived in Moscow on Thursday to try to persuade Russia to accept "a whole new concept" on missile defense plans that it has already rejected as threatening decades of arms control efforts.
Russian officials, on the eve of the talks, made clear they were ready to listen. But they said they would convey their own strong views on President George W. Bush's plans to proceed with a National Missile Defense scheme.
U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz arrived from stops in Warsaw and Berlin, part of a diplomatic blitz ordered by the White House to sell plans for a $60 billion rogue-rocket shield. Critics say the plans will undermine global stability.
"We're looking forward to our discussions," Wolfowitz told Reuters after his late-evening arrival.
Wolfowitz was unworried that previous U.S. attempts to win over Russia's leadership on the issue had proved unsuccessful.
"We're here to talk about a whole new concept and we'll see what happens," he said.
The chief spokesman for Russia's Foreign Ministry, Alexander Yako ven ko, had earlier said that Moscow "will set out to the American representatives our concrete approaches, and the direction in which strategic stability can be strengthened.
"Also, questions will be put to them about their ideas on this issue," he said.
In a major policy address on May 1, President Bush vowed to press on with a National Missile Defense (NMD), which has been fiercely opposed by nuclear powers Russia and China, who fear their deterrents will be compromised.
But Bush also promised to consult allies and nuclear nations, including Russia, and refrain from a unilateral breach of the 1972 ABM Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty.
President Vladimir Putin, who sees preservation of the ABM pact as vital, said Bush's speech was a "good basis" for dialogue but only time would tell what such talks would produce.
Wolfowitz and U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley will meet a senior Foreign Ministry arms control official, Yury Kapralov, and First Deputy Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Trubnikov during their visit.
Washington says it needs NMD to meet the threat posed by what it calls "rogue states" - countries like Iran, Iraq and North Korea, which are developing nuclear missile technology.
Bush has sent teams of diplomats with his message to NATO headquarters, China, a string of European capitals including Paris, Berlin and London, and also to Turkey and South Korea.
Reaction in Western Europe has so far been noncommital.
German officials said after meeting Wolfowitz in Berlin that they could say neither "yes" nor "no" pending answers to key questions. A French foreign ministry spokesman said diplomats had "reminded" the Americans of their reservations during talks on Wednesday.
Moscow says the missile threat is exaggerated, and has cautioned that NMD's deployment could trigger a new arms race.
Parliamentarian Andrei Nikolayev told the AVN military news agency that NMD would allow Washington to "reinforce [its] strategic domination of the world, using NMD as an effective instrument for conducting policy from a position of strength."
But Putin has softened Russia's hostility. He said last Friday that new threats could emerge in a changing world and that the United States should work with Russia to confront them.
Moscow has proposed its own anti-missile shield for Europe, a proposal so far offering European states limited cover.
Washington says the Moscow scheme fails to meet its security needs. But U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said in a May 4 interview with the Russian Izvestia daily newspaper that the United States would "take into account Russia's concerns."
TITLE: Children Face Psychological Strain
TEXT: With reports of increasing mental illness and rising crime among Russian children and teenagers, psychologists are saying that the stresses of post-communist society are not being adequately combated. Galina Stolyarova and Molly Graves report.
Ira is 15 years old, and has lived for seven months at a city crisis center for girls who are the victims of physical violence or sexual abuse. She ran away from her alcoholic father who used to beat her and force her to drink with him. She has been in and out of several shelters in town, afraid to return home and seeking some source of refuge. She ended up in the center, and says she finally feels at home.
But for Ira, adapting wasn't easy. At first she was scared of everything and everyone around her, she said. If someone nearby made a sudden move, she instinctively recoiled as if they were going to hit her. It took her over six weeks to stop shaking every time someone knocked on the door of her room.
Daily meetings with the center's psychotherapist helped. "It wasn't that she [the psychotherapist] insisted on these conversations," Ira said. "I needed them. Living with my fears had become impossible. I couldn't sleep at night. I still feel sick when I see knives, because I remember my father terrorizing my mother with a knife. I dread seeing ropes, too, because he threatened to strangle me."
Lyudmila Romashkina, the director of the crisis center, sees a direct connection between children's mental health and the social conditions of their families.
"All of our girls have some form of neurosis, and are very unstable emotionally," Romashkina said. "And all of them come from troubled families - financially broke, with at least one of the parents being alcoholic."
NOT JUST POVERTY
"While rates of epilepsy and mental retardation in children and teenagers have remained stable, there has been a rise in borderline cases of psychosis and neurosis," said Lyudmila Rubina, St. Petersburg's chief psychiatrist and children's psychiatrist, in an interview on Friday. "This is owing both to increased problems with drugs and alcohol, as well as growing social instability."
The increase in youth problems is part of a general trend. According to data collected by the City Health Committee, in 2000 over 105,000 people in the city were under psychiatric supervision. And although only 6 million are registered, about 30 percent of the country's total population are estimated to suffer from mental disorders - an increase of 50 percent over the past decade, and one of 150 percent for children and teenagers.
The number of children actually registered as suffering from various mental disorders in St. Petersburg - as opposed to borderline, or "at risk" cases - increased from 25.85 per 1,000 in 1999 to 27.7 per 1,000 last year, according to the Health Committee.
Psychiatrists say that nearly 40 percent of mental disorders have their roots in social problems: The strain of providing essentials such as food and clothing for their families leaves adults with little time or energy to devote to their children's emotional and spiritual needs.
But mental illness is not restricted to the poor. "Even children from financially secure families have their own problems," Rubina said. "They are very concerned about the future in a country that they know is unstable, about getting a good education to find a better job, and starting their careers early."
UNDER THE CARPET
"What is particularly distressing is that certain families come to us to ask how they can hide their child's problems from other people," said Rubina, "believing that this is more important than alleviating the problem and fighting its cause. Such parents are more concerned with the image of the family than with the child's disorder."
But if family pressures are a problem, the environment at schools is also a contributing factor.
"What is needed in all schools is an individual approach to every student, which is absolutely impossible in state schools where classes comprise 30 to 40 people," said Karina Kashirina, one of three psychologists at the Diplomat private school, which has 100 students.
Most experts agree that, ideally, all schools should have psychologists on the staff - at least one per 100 students - and that treatment of any problem should be holistic, involving the family in the process. The majority of state schools cannot afford even one psychologist for their entire student body.
Kashirina also said that mental disorders are frequently accompanied by physical problems - in other words, psychosomatic illnesses.
"Children these days get adults' diseases," she said. "It is not uncommon for kids to develop ulcers as graduation approaches. They don't feel well, get tired too fast, and so are forced to abstain from physical or intellectual labor. All that makes for additional stress."
Many psychologists blame the situation on the absence of the children's and youth organizations, such as the Pioneers, which in Soviet days took care of organizing students' spare time, providing an after-school social outlet as a family extension.
Today, such social organizations are virtually non-existent, and most children are left with unstructured and unsupervised free time - time spent hanging around on the streets, at risk of the influence of drugs and crime.
LOOKING AROUND
A particularly striking statistic comes from the St. Petersburg Police: Last year, almost half of the total number of crimes in both the city and the Leningrad Oblast were committed by children under 18.
Kashirina made a clear link between the increase in juvenile crime and the jump in mental disorders among youngsters. As the support from family and schools decreases, so the issues children confront, such as alcohol, drugs and AIDS, grow more and more serious. "In ordinary schools, drugs are frequently on sale in school bathrooms," Kashirina said. "They are cheap and accessible."
"With their many fears about life and the future," she said, "children feel the need to defend themselves and turn aggressive. Their surroundings - life on the street, what they see on television, ethnic conflict - are aggressive, too, which provokes them even more."
Vladimir Agishev, chief doctor at St. Petersburg psychiatric hospital No. 2, said that the number of patients there with alcohol- and drug-related psychiatric problems had exploded over the last 15 years - "and most of them are youngsters."
There are seven psychiatric hospitals in St. Petersburg. Ours was built 130 years ago," said Agishev, "and was the last clinic constructed specifically for psychiatric patients." Not a single psychiatric hospital was built in the city in the entire Soviet era. Agishev added that all local hospitals for psychiatric patients are overcrowded, containing two to three times more patients than they are licensed to hold.
"Conditions are better for children, who have a state-run center consisting of a crisis help department, a consultancy department, a neurosis department, six outpatient centers and several hospitals. There is also a crisis hotline that children and teens can call anonymously (164-00-05) to discuss problems and seek information.
For some children, said chief psychiatrist Rubina, a common reaction is to blot everything out. "When they're getting bad news from all directions, children seek refuge in pretending they don't hear or see anything. "People don't share their sorrows and joys anymore - not just to psychotherapists or psychologists, but not even to friends, neighbors and family members."
"Most Russians are exhausted, and they don't believe that the government has any wish to help them. The government must show it cares for its people. When people are consumed by such depression and apathy, when they do not believe in the goodwill of the state, there can be no hope for future progress. The government must realize the danger of the situation - for its people, and for the entire country."
Back at the crisis center, Ira says she is about to finish ninth grade, and hoping to get into college.
"I am really happy I found this place," she said. "At ordinary orphanages, a social worker would ask me a couple of questions on the very first day, tell me to go, and then forget about me. Here, it's just as nice as a proper home."
Her mother is now divorcing her father, and is planning to get married again, which, she said, might make a move back home possible. "But after I turn 18, get a degree and start working, I can live on my own."
TITLE: Contact Resumed With Satellites
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW - Embarrassed Russian military officials said they lost contact with four military satellites after a blaze on Thursday ravaged an important ground relay station.
Military chiefs later said that the fire had been brought under control and that they were receiving data from the four satellites.
"At the moment we are reading all information from the satellites [in question]," Nikolai Deryabin, head of the Defense Ministry's press office, told ORT public television.
"The fire has been brought under control, but firefighters are still keeping a close watch to prevent any new outbreak. There will be a round-the-clock watch."
Officials had said throughout the day that the overall satellite system was working normally, with ground controllers trying to restore contact via other stations.
"We never lost control over the satellites," Deryabin said. He added that he could not comment on the satellites' specific task "but they were not the only ones performing such functions."
Some U.S. experts have warned recently that failures by Russia's ageing early-warning satellite system could lead Moscow to launch nuclear missiles in reaction to a false alarm.
Itar-Tass news agency quoted Defense Ministry officials as saying a short circuit triggered the blaze in the early hours at the relay station near Serpukhov, in Kaluga region some 200 kilometers southwest of Moscow.
Thirty-eight fire trucks, 100 fire fighters and 50 rescue workers tackled the blaze, Russian news reports said.
ORT said the blaze erupted at about 2:30 a.m. on the third floor of one of the buildings in the complex, much of which is located underground. But the alarm was not sounded until more than two hours later. NTV television had footage of a plume of smoke rising into the air in mid-morning.
Firefighters were sent from the capital to help tackle the blaze with specialised foam-making equipment that Defense Ministry crews on the scene lacked. Police cordons were formed around the complex, but eased later in the day.
Anatoly Perminov, commander of Russia's Space Forces, had earlier told state-run RTR television that the flames had caused substantial damage. But no one was injured and secret documents, computer programs, weapons and equipment were recovered in time. ORT said the station's main antennas were undamaged.
Starved since the collapse of the Soviet Union of the vast funds it once enjoyed, the Russian military keeps much ageing equipment in use well past its designed lifespan.
Military specialist Alexander Golts said that 70 percent of Russia's 100-130 military satellites were nearing the end of their operational life.
Bureaucratic reorganisations have left the satellite network short of cash and bedevilled by a complicated chain of command.
"Another of the habitual bureaucratic restructurings is going on right now. All the space forces are being separated from the structure of the Strategic Rocket Forces. Two years ago they merged," he said.
TITLE: Images of St. Petersburg May Line City's Coffers
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: As St. Petersburg's 300th anniversary approaches, the local government has hit on a way of making money out of the city's most famous landmarks by charging companies for the right to use them on promotional material.
According to a gubernatorial decree signed last month, companies will have to pay for the right to use such images as The Bronze Horseman, the ship at the top of the Admiralty spire, the angel at the top of the Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, and the official emblem that includes the words "St. Petersburg 1703-2003."
Alexander Afanasyev, spokes person for Governor Vladimir Yakovlev, said that other images will be added to the list, including the Alexander Column in Palace Square, and the names and images of famous artists, scientists and other historical personages associated with St. Petersburg.
But some observers contacted said that they have already foreseen problems with the plan.
Leonid Romankov, a lawmaker at the Legislative Assembly and member of the city parliament's commission to prepare for the anniversary, said that Smolny did not in fact have the right to sell the city's symbols. "Federal law [on tax collection] says that only the state or local self-administrations have the right to sell symbols," he said in an interview on Thursday. "The only way City Hall can get around this is by registering the symbols as trademarks."
According to the decree, this is what City Hall plans to do. If a company then wishes to use The Bronze Horseman as part of its logo, for example, it must submit the logo for scrutiny to the city's committee for the anniversary, which falls in 2003.
The Moscow Municipal Government came up with a similar decree in 1993, which covered almost all of the historical monuments in the city, and other sights that are associated with the Russian capital - including the Kremlin. Obtaining a license to use images of these symbols as part of an advertisement carried a price tag of approximately $2,000.
According to a Moscow government report, the city budget gained around $100,000 annually from under the aegis of this project. However, a few years later - Moscow officials could not say when - a city court overturned the decree and ordered all money collected to be returned.
Ilya Kartashov, a Moscow city official who is involved with approving local symbols, said by telephone on Thursday that a new law was passed in 1997, charging around 500 rubles to use these kind of symbols.
"True, this is not really legal," he said, "but since the fee is quite low, nobody pays any attention."
The St. Petersburg administration has not finalized the cost of obtaining the rights to use the symbols, but officials said that it could be around 5 percent of the wholesale price of a given product, such as a bottle of beer or a pack of cigarettes. Contracts for the rights would last until 2005.
"[In theory], any company could register the symbols as a trademark, so it depends who gets there first," said Andrei Tolmachyov, an aide to Romankov. "But this is an unlikely situation. Who wants to have [this kind of] argument with City Hall?"
Lyudmila Fomichova, a spokes person for Baltika Brewery, said that the company was looking at the question but had not received any samples of what symbols City Hall wants to register as its own.
"Besides, it would not be right not to use an event such as the 300th anniversary to promote our products," Fomichova said.
Viktor Sergeyev, the director of state film studio Lenfilm, was dismissive of the proposed money-making scheme. "The Bronze Horseman, with two rays of light crossing above it, is our trademark, and is registered with the St. Petersburg Registration Chamber," he said in a telephone interview on Thursday.
"City Hall can use it too, but we've had it since 1934. We don't pay anyone for it, and we're not going to.
TITLE: Former PM Named Ukraine Ambassador
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Pu tin on Thursday unexpectedly appointed former Prime Minister Viktor Cher nomyrdin ambassador to Ukraine, signaling the beginning of heavier Russian attention to its troubled neighbor.
Chernomyrdin, who founded Gaz prom, is expected to take on the problems over natural-gas deliveries that have hurt relations between the two countries. Ukraine owes Russia at least $1.4 billion for gas, although some estimates put the debt at twice that much. Moscow also accuses Kiev of siphoning off Russian gas exports that pass through Ukraine on their way to Western Europe.
"The basis for our relations with Ukraine are trade and economic ties. And there is hardly any other person who knows as well the nature of the relations between our two countries, knows the strong and weak sides of Russian and Uk rai nian eco no mies," Putin said Thursday in televised remarks.
Chernomyrdin, who was prime minister from 1992 to 1998, is being sent to Kiev at a time of political turmoil in Ukraine. He is considered close to Ukrainian President Leonid Kuch ma, who has been the target of nationwide protests over allegations that he played a role in the killing of an opposition journalist. The pro-Western prime minister was ousted last month by parliament.
Chernomyrdin will replace Ivan Aboimov, a career diplomat who also has served as Russian ambassador to Italy, Finland and Hungary.
Chernomyrdin agreed to take the post, although the appointment formally must be approved by the State Duma. "It's time to get to business. And this is what will lead to the growth of the individual wealth of citizens and the creation of new jobs," he was quoted by Interfax as saying.
Politicians and analysts welcomed the appointment, saying it will strengthen Russia's position in Ukraine.
"To bring in such a political heavy-weight as ambassador is a significant step for Russia," said Boris Nemtsov, the leader of the Union of Right Forces.
Roland Nash, an analyst with Renaissance Capital brokerage, said Cher nomyrdin's arrival could give Gaz prom a new boost in Ukraine.
"Chernomyrdin is a very good choice. He has great contacts in politics, he knows how Russian-Ukrainian relations operate, and obviously knows how Gazprom operates," Nash said. "In that kind of position he will be able to cut deals and continue the process Gazprom has been into for the past year or so - using financial muscle to gain greater economic strength in Ukraine."
Andrei Ryabov of the Moscow Carnegie Center said it shows the Kremlin's desire to coordinate foreign policy with the interests of big industry.
"It appears that with Chernomyrdin stepping onto the scene the state is trying to involve various industry lobbies in Russia's foreign policy," he said.
In Ukraine, Russian business interests are extensive. Siberian Aluminum and the Tyumen Oil Co. have acquired major Ukrainian assets, including the Nikolayev Alumina Plant and the Linos oil refinery.
The privatization process in Ukraine is still under way and a number of assets also could still be gained via bankruptcy proceedings, Nash said.
As Kuchma has come under increasing public pressure in recent months, Putin has remained either supportive or silent. Putin's appointment of Chernomyrdin allows Russia to increase its economic influence in Ukraine, while giving Kuchma someone he can work with.
Kuchma approved of the appointment, according to Putin's press service.
Although Chernomyrdin was elected to the State Duma in December 1999, he has largely been out of the political spotlight in recent years. In June 2000, he even retired from his position as chairman of the board at Gaz prom. Chernomyrdin, who had headed the Soviet ministry in charge of natural gas in the 1980s, founded Gazprom in 1993.
TITLE: Prosecutors Raid Office of Ekho Moskvy
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Prosecutors conducted a search at the Ekho Moskvy radio station Thursday, confiscating financial documents and inviting a well-known journalist for questioning, company employees and media reports said.
A spokesperson at the Prosecutor General's Office said the "investigative activities" at the station were linked to an ongoing probe into former Aeroflot executive Nikolai Glushkov, accused of corruption and attempting to escape from police custody. He declined to elaborate.
Glushkov's lawyer, Andrei Borov kov, gave an interview to the station in mid-April and Interfax reported that the journalist who conducted the interview, Olga Bychkova, was summoned for questioning on Friday afternoon.
Ekho Moskvy, which has a mostly news format, is part of Vladimir Gusinsky's crumbling media empire, Media-MOST. Its future as a station independent of the state was put in doubt last week, when a Moscow court gave Media-MOST's main creditor and shareholder Gazprom 25 percent plus one share of all the companies owned by Media-MOST, including Ekho Moskvy.
The shares were put up as collateral for a Gazprom loan to Media-MOST, which matures in July, but were awarded to the gas giant as part of a separate settlement. Ekho Moskvy journalists have proposed buying the shares from Gaz prom, although the talks seem not to have yielded any conclusive results.
Ekho Moskvy's general director Yury Fedutinov told Interfax that -contrary to the official explanation that the search was connected with Glush kov - the investigative team was looking for and confiscated a number of documents concerning the station's financial activity.
"[They looked for] everything that had to do with establishing the market price of the station," he said Thursday.
The search was conducted in the building housing the company's commercial offices, which are separate from its editorial offices, a radio employee said in a telephone interview Thursday.
Nonetheless, the only employee asked to come in for questioning was a journalist.
Bychkova will have to "explain the circumstances surrounding the interview" with Glushkov's lawyer, Interfax reported.
Bychkova said she had no idea what kind of circumstances the prosecutors had in mind.
"The 'circumstances' are always the same: We invite our guest, he comes to the studio and gives us his opinion on a certain subject," the agency quoted her as saying.
. Local media circulated reports this week that the head of Radio Liberty's Moscow office said he had been sacked for agreeing to appear on a talk show on NTV television, Media-MOST's flagship and the object of a bitter takeover battle last month.
The RIA-Novosti news agency quoted Savik Shuster as saying Wednesday that he had been dismissed for agreeing to return to NTV's "Third Half" soccer talk show, despite the change in NTV's management.
Shuster and Radio Liberty staff in Moscow and Prague declined to comment on the reports Thursday.
The head of the station's Russian service, Mario Corti, was in Moscow on Thursday on what news agencies cited him as calling a prearranged visit.
Dozens of leading NTV journalists at NTV have quit in protest over the takeover by Gazprom.
TITLE: Russia's G-8 Status Coming Under the Gun
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: WASHINGTON - A leading Democratic congressman has launched an effort to suspend Russia's participation in the organization of leading industrial nations known as the Group of Eight.
Representative Tom Lantos of California, ranking Democrat on the House of Representatives International Relations Committee, introduced a resolution in Congress on Tuesday calling for Russia's suspension until the government in Moscow "restores press freedoms and respect for human rights."
The resolution, if passed by Congress, would not have the force of law. But depending on how it fares, it could influence administration thinking and make a political point.
"Russia no longer deserves a seat at the table of major industrialized democracies," Lantos said in a statement.
"By cracking down on the free press in Russia, President [Vladimir] Putin has forfeited his nation's voice and vote in the G-8," he added.
Lantos said that when the then-G-7 nations invited Russia to join their ranks in 1991, they conditioned Russia's participation on continued progress towards economic and political liberalization.
"The Russian government has failed to meet these conditions, flouting democratic norms and violating its citizens' human rights. Russia's membership on the G-8 should therefore be suspended," he said.
Lantos' initiative follows a period in which Putin has cracked down on Russia's independent media, including the April 14 takeover by Gazprom, a partially state-owned gas monopoly, of NTV, Russia's only privately owned nationwide television station.
Since his election last year, "Putin has manipulated the levers of state power and orchestrated a concerted campaign to suppress voices of criticism in Russia, betraying his own KGB training and authoritarian tendencies," Lantos said.
"Membership in the G-8 confers international legitimacy and prestige. Those nations that participate in this forum are viewed as the leaders of the democratic world. To include Russia despite its crack down on the free press is to undermine the legitimacy of the G-8," the congressman added.
Vladimir Gusinsky, the embattled media magnate who owned NTV, urged Western leaders last week during a speech in Washington to set "red lines" for Russian behavior beyond which "one cannot go if one wants to live in a civilized world."
"This is the free press, this is human rights, and it is many, many other things that have to happen in Russia for it to be able to call itself a civilized country," Gusinsky said.
But he stopped short of advocating the ouster of Russia from the G-8.
"It's not my decision, it's the decision of the G7 countries, or G7-and-a-half. ... But I would like to repeat ... that a country that does not honor the basic principles of existence in the civilized world has major problems," he said.
Gusinsky was publicly praised by Americans as Putin, his nemesis, was named one of the 10 worst enemies of the press by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Bosnia Withdrawal
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia will withdraw 150 peacekeepers from Bosnia starting on July 1, scaling down its contingent to 900 men, an unnamed source at Russian armed forces' general staff told Itar-Tass news agency Thursday.
Some 1,600 Russian troops were initially deployed in Bosnia in 1996 as part of international peacekeeping force formed under the Dayton accord, which ended a bloody civil war which tore Yugoslavia apart in the early 1990s.
About 3,000 Russian troops also form part of KFOR, a 38,000-strong NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia.
Seals Die of Hunger
MOSCOW (AP) - Hundreds of thousands of baby seals are likely to starve to death this spring in the White Sea, a scientist said.
Vladimir Potelov, head of the sea mammal lab at the Polar Institute of Fish and Oceanography in Arkhan gelsk, said unusually strong winds had prevented newborn Greenland seals from migrating to better feeding grounds. He estimated that more than 200,000 seals, out of about 350,000 born this year, would die.
Seals travel south from the Barents Sea to the White Sea every spring to give birth. Over the course of 1 1/2 months, the seals drift on ice floes back to better feeding grounds in the Barents Sea. The tiny capelin fish and crustaceans that make up the Greenland seal's diet also inhabit the White Sea, but they are too deep for the cubs to reach, Potelov said.
Finland Spy Case
HELSINKI (Reuters) - The Finnish military said Thursday it had asked police to investigate a suspected case of spying for Russia, but Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov played down the affair ahead of a two-day visit to Finland.
The suspect is an officer working for the military's internal investigation branch, Finnish Defense Forces spokesperson Erkki Paukkunen said, but declined to say what information he was suspected of leaking.
Finnish national broadcaster YLE television said the officer, who has been suspended from his duties, was suspected of handing Russia information about armaments, though no confirmation was available.
Speaking in Russia ahead of official engagements in the eastern Finnish town of Joensuu on Thursday and Helsinki on Friday, Ivanov said the affair should not damage relations between the two neighbors.
U.S. Identifies Body
KIEV (AP) - A team of U.S. experts have concluded that a headless corpse is that of a journalist whose disappearance sparked a political crisis, a prosecutor said.
The findings confirmed the conclusion by Russian experts that the headless body is that of Georgy Gongadze. However, the experts could not determine the cause of death because the head has not been found and because of the time that has elapsed, said first deputy state prosecutor Mykola Harnyk.
He said the death occurred two to three months before the body was found in November.
Gongadze, an outspoken critic of alleged high-level corruption who edited an Internet newsletter, went missing in mid-September. Opposition movements soon accused President Leonid Kuchma of involvement in his slaying, citing audio recordings allegedly made by a fugitive presidential bodyguard.
TITLE: Young and Old Drink to Russia's Day of Victory
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Once again, thousands of people thronged the city center on Wednesday to meet with friends, drink, sing, make noise and celebrate an event that happened almost 50 years before many of the revelers were even born.
Victory Day, marking the anniversary of the Soviet Union's triumph over Nazi Germany, has been for many the most important of Russia's myriad holidays. Figures of the number of Soviet citizens who perished during the war vary, with conservative estimates placing it at 25 million and other estimates as high as 40 million. About one out of every three people who died during World War II was from the Soviet Union.
During the late Soviet period, when many had become more cynical about most official state holidays, Victory Day was different. It was the people's holiday, and an event marked by solemnity.
But the scene along the Neva River on Wednesday evening was far from solemn. Crowds lined both banks of the river, covered Palace Bridge and nearly filled Palace Square to watch the fireworks display that traditionally caps off the day's events.
For the most part, the majority of the crowd was younger and, as always, they raised their bottles and cheered with every explosion.
"I think that for most of the younger people, Victory Day is more of a party than anything else," said Nina, 20, who chose not to give her surname, while standing in a line to buy beer. "I think, of course, that it's different for those people who lived through the war."
The way the younger generation observes the holiday rankles with many who were alive at the time of the conflict. Vadim Bulgakov, 78, who served during the war, took part in the official memorial ceremony held earlier on at the Pis ka ryov skoye Cemetery, and he feels that the day's meaning has been lost by many young people.
"The younger generation doesn't observe the holiday very well," Bulgakov said. "We even have some, not a lot, but some, who take part in fascist meetings and wear fascist symbols."
"A lot of it has to do with alcohol," added Mikhail Fyodorov, 79, who also served. "It's a Russian tradition and, in general, I don't think it's a bad tradition. The problem is that some people just don't know when to stop."
The ceremony that was held at Piskaryovskoye, where more than 420,000 people who perished in the Leningrad Blockade and 70,000 soldiers are buried, showed a very different side of Russia's observance.
An honor guard stood atattention as thousands observed a minute of silence, and then a steady procession of representatives of various organizations came forward to lay wreaths at the foot of the memorial to the Motherland.
St. Petersburg Governor Vladimir Ya kovlev, Leningrad Oblast Governor Va lery Serdyukov and Viktor Cher ke sov, governor general of the Northwest region, were among those who laid wreaths, as were representatives from various other political and national organizations.
And then, once the official procession had finished and the participants had all filed out of the cemetery, police allowed the crowd that had gathered to watch through, and thousands walked solemnly to the monument to lay their own flowers.
To Fyodorov, this is the only way things could be.
"We made history with our own hands," he said. "We not only fought here, but spilled our blood on the earth, on the earth of Leningrad."
But Bulgakov worries that time may weaken the idea of Victory Day. "In general, I think that the holiday has kept its importance, but a lot of this comes from the veterans," he said. "It's no secret that every year there are fewer of us."
"But, if we pass this tradition to the current generation properly - teach them that it was a great victory - then they will care for this as we did," he added. "They will bring flowers here and honor our memory."
Anton, 22, who also chose not to give his surname and who was a member of the military honor guard at the ceremony, said that the meaning of the day is strong for the young and the old.
"While that generation is still alive, we [can see who lived through it]," he said. "But even when they're gone, I don't think that this event will ever be forgotten."
One such living example is Viktor Sadovnikov. After the official ceremony, Sadovnikov, who himself served in the war, stood off in another part of the cemetery with his wife, children and grandchildren. The family had gathered at the grave of Sadovnikov's brother, Alexander. Alexander died in the hospital in 1942 at the age of 20 from wounds he received in battle.
The family had laid flowers on the gravestone, which bears the picture of the young soldier, and were drinking juice and vodka and having a lunch of sandwiches.
"My great uncle is buried here, so we come every year," said Sadovnikov's 15-year-old grandson, also named Alexander. "It's a tradition in our family."
"We drink to the memory of all the people who fought against the Nazis and are buried here," he said. "All of the soldiers of the world fought so that our generation could live in peace."
Sadovnikov himself thinks that the idea of comradeship should still be remembered, and is sad that more recent history has led many to forget that, at the time, the Soviet Union was allied with many of the nations it would later square up to during the Cold War.
"During the war, the feeling of friendship and brotherhood with the other Allied countries was real," he said. "But then it was ruined by the politicians and slowly faded."
It's a sentiment with which Fyodorov agrees. "All of those convoys that arrived from the West to Murmansk and Arkhangelsk - there was real feeling of brotherhood among those sailors."
Other Allied countries, the United States and Great Britain in particular, made significant deliveries of war supplies and food to the Soviet Union during the war. In particular, a significant number of trucks used by the Red Army to carry men and supplies were delivered through these programs.
The feeling of brotherhood was also stronger within the country, as national and religious distinctions lost much of their meaning for a people confronted by a common enemy. At the ceremony, wreaths were also laid by organizations representing Russia's Jewish, Muslim and Asian communities, to name just a few.
"We were all the same and together at that time," Fyodorov said. "I was in a group of five soldiers - a Russian, a Ukrainian, a Belarussian, and two Uzbeks - we were all the same."
Nonetheless, Fyodorov thinks that the West's sense of the Soviet Union's role in the war is inadequate. "Russia paid for this victory with 40 million lives," he said. "The allies aren't right when they speak of it as their victory."
"When they landed in Normandy on D-Day in 1944, we had already fought our way into Europe."
Fyodorov's views on the Soviet Union's role in the war illustrates another idea at the center of an understanding of Victory Day - patriotism.
Later on Wednesday, that patriotism was clearly on display as veterans and military bands marched in a parade down Nevsky Prospect from Ploshchad Vosstaniya to Palace Square. Spectators lined up five or six deep on either side of the route to applaud and shout "Thank you!" to the veterans, many of whom wore their old uniforms and decorations.
But Sadovnikov says that after the parade the character of the holiday simply changes for the worse, and the role of patriotism can turn negative.
"The young, in the guise of patriotism, do some stupid things," he said. "The police can't really do anything to control them and the city just ends up littered with empty bottles."
But Lena, 18, who also chose not to give her last name, doesn't think this is entirely the case. "I don't think it's fair at all to say that the younger generation doesn't understand the meaning of Victory Day," she said. "It's just that the younger generation is different than the others".
"Of course, there's the unpleasant side of all the drinking. But there is also a large number of young people who understand the real meaning of the holiday very well."
"The Soviet Union won the war, and we should show our respect for that - the Soviet Union carried the war on its shoulders."
And Lena said that the fact that the Soviet Union won the war isn't necessarily the most important thing. "Personally, I think that the day is more about remembering those who fought and died than about the victory. The idea of the victory is important, but remembering those who died comes first."
Staff writer Andrey Musatov contributed to this article.
TITLE: Rumor Mill Swirling Around Mechel Steel
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Swiss-based steel trader Glencore International AG is selling its 65 percent stake in No. 6 steelmaker Mechel and has completed the sale of a 20 percent stake to an unknown buyer thought to be close to coal producer Yuzhny Kuzbass and its partner AO Koks.
"Twenty percent has been sold," an official close to Mechel said Thursday. "But it is not clear whether the buyer intends to resell the stake or build it up to the size of a controlling one."
Officials at Yuzhny Kuzbass and AO Koks denied allegations they were the driving force behind the acquisition, as media had reported.
Sergei Malyshev, deputy director of Yuzhny Kuzbass, said by telephone from Kemerovo that the company was not buying Mechel.
"We have no relation to either Yuzh ny Kuzbass or Mechel," said Yev geny Zubitsky, director of pig-iron producer Tulachermet and son of Boris Zubitsky, State Duma member for Unity and owner of AO Koks, a company with strong interests in Kemerovo-based coal companies and an owner of Tulachermet.
Officials at Chelyabinsk-based Mechel played down rumors that Yuzhny Kuzbass is building a holding company, which would incorporate several enterprises of in one production chain, from coal producers to steelmakers. Yuzhny Kuzbass produced 11.25 million tons of coal in 2000.
Earlier, Mechel president Alexei Ivanushkin had been quoted as saying he was supporting the idea of a holding.
Chelyabinsk Governor Pyotr Sumin has been promoting holding companies as a solution to the region's economic ills. Sumin has said he wanted to merge coal maker Chelyabinskugol and power producer Chelyabenergo and set up a metallurgical holding that will include No. 2 Magnitogorsk steel mill, No. 8 Nosta steelmaker, Mechel and several other metal companies.
Last year, Mechel rolled out 2.87 million tons of pig iron, 3.67 million tons of steel and 2.78 million tons of rolled steel. Its annual sales in 2000 surged 94 percent to 15 billion rubles ($535 million), while net profit was up 1,100 percent to 1 billion rubles.
Ivanushkin, who was in Glencore's headquarters in Moscow, declined to comment. Officials at Glencore's Swiss headquarters were unavailable.
Odds are high that Glencore, a privately owned company with a turnover of $48 billion in 2000 and assets of $10.2 billion as of December last year, soon will complete the sell-off of its Mechel holding, whose market value stands at a meager $20 million at the current bid price of $6.50 per share on the Russian Trading System index.
"Many trading companies are selling their stakes in local enterprises at a profit," says Mikhail Seleznyov, analyst with United Financial Group.
"This has been a growing trend recently - they keep their trading business but sell production assets."
TITLE: Golden Tel Unfazed By 1st-Quarter Results
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MOSCOW - Telecoms and Internet provider Golden Telecom has announced that its first-quarter net loss widened from the same period last year but maintained its forecast for strong EBITDA growth for 2001.
The company said that its Internet subscriber base had tripled to reach 101,035 from 33,644 since the end of the first quarter of 2000, following the acquisition of Internet service providers, making the company Russia's biggest ISP.
"We are very pleased with our first-quarter results, which came in at the high end of our expectations," Golden Telecom president and chief executive Stewart Reich said in a statement made on Tuesday.
Golden made a consolidated first-quarter net loss of $3.9 million on total revenues of $32.3 million, compared with a $3.3 million net loss on revenues of $24.3 million in the same period in 2000.
Revenues were slightly down from the $32.5 million in the fourth quarter last year.
"The increase in net loss was due largely to the increase in amortization of intangible assets and goodwill as a result of our acquisitions," Golden said.
Funded by a $150 million war chest from its initial public offering, Golden last year began to realize its plans to offer an AOL-style Internet content and access package by acquiring several Web properties, ISPs and a Web design bureau.
Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization rose to $4.9 million from $3.8 million, a 29 percent rise year on year.
In a conference call later Tuesday, Reich said the company was on track for EBITDA growth of 20 percent to 25 percent in 2001, adding that it would become clear by the end of the second quarter whether it would hit the high end of the target.
EBITDA rose 9 percent quarter-on-quarter from $4.5 million.
Renaissance Capital telecoms analyst Andrei Braginsky said that he was disappointed by the quarter-on-quarter revenue decline, but that it was positive overall.
"The financials themselves are not that impressive," Braginsky said, "but ... there is upside in the stock, and there are obvious opportunities for the company."
Braginsky said he was encouraged by Reich's optimism on consolidating Sovintel, a competitive local exchange carrier in which it holds a 50 percent stake.
Deutsche Bank telecoms analyst Iouli Matevossov said: "The results have demonstrated that they have clearly good growth and good EBITDA. ... I am a strong believer in this story, so I think the share price will go up."
Earlier Tuesday, Reich said a consortium led by Alfa Group would buy nearly 50 percent of Golden.
The consortium has agreed to buy the stake from current 63 percent owner Global TeleSystems.
Alfa Group will pay $110 million for a 43.8 percent stake, and Barings Vostok Capital Partners and Capital International funds will pay $15 million for a 6 percent stake.
TITLE: Reports Claim Abramovich Purchased Stake in Aeroflot
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: Companies linked to Sibneft and Russian Aluminum are believed to have acquired more than 25 percent of shares in No. 1 airline Aeroflot.
Roman Abramovich, a controversial businessman and politician, holds large stakes in both Russian Aluminum and the Sibneft oil company. Abramovich, however, refused to comment on the situation.
Representatives of Sibneft, Russian Aluminum and the Chukotka region, of which Abramovich is governor, deny he purchased the blocking stake. "It is complete nonsense. Roman Arkadyevich is accused of wanting to buy all Russian enterprises. It's not true," said Vladimir Ruga, press secretary of the Chukotka governor.
Sibneft press secretary Alexei Firsov insists the oil company does not have any shares of Aeroflot on its balance.
However, an associate of Abra mo vich confirmed that structures close to the oligarch had bought the blocking packet of the shares of Aeroflot. "As far as I know, the scheme for purchasing the shares was exactly the same as that which was used for buying the shares of ORT," he said, referring to the fact that shares were bought from companies owned by controversial businessman Boris Berezovsky.
Sibneft-controlled companies already own 29.3 percent of Aeroflot, a government official said. That stake cost Sibneft shareholders $120 million, the official said. "The shares were bought on the free market from private shareholders, for example from companies close to Boris Berezovsky - Andava and others," said the official.
Companies owned by Berezovsky have from 2 percent to 7 percent of Aeroflot shares, said Yulia Zhdanova, an analyst at United Financial Group. Berezovsky, however, said no companies connected to him hold shares of Aeroflot and, thus, could not have sold them.
TITLE: Lenoblast To Cut Staff, Raise Wages
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Leningrad Oblast administration is about to become leaner, while its support workers are in line for a pay hike.
The oblast's governor, Velry Serdukov, issued an order on April 25 to cut administrative staff by 15 percent while, at the same time, granting custodial and other support staff a 35 percent raise in wages. According to oblast officials, the move is part of a larger movement to reduce the size of bureaucratic bodies in Russia.
"The order is part of a nationwide effort to cut bureaucratic over-staffing," said Aleksander Veretin, head of the Leningrad Oblast's press center. "It was issued in accordance with President Putin's state-of-the- nation address in the Duma, where he said that there needs to be cuts in local government."
Putin made the speech on April 3, addressing a number of topics, ranging from the situation in Chechnya to economic conditions in the country.
According to officials with the oblast administration, the facts that it will save money by reducing its staff while, at the same time, granting pay raises to other workers, are unrelated.
"The money going to the custodial staff is not the result of the pending layoffs," Valentin Sidorin, a public-relations advisor to the governor, said. "The money for the pay raises will come from other budget resources."
He also said that the average wage of a custodial worker is presently about 1500 rubles (about $51) per month and that the idea to reduce staff and raise wages is not only the result of Putin's wishes.
"There are just too many people involved in the process of distributing funds here," Sidorin said. "Right now we have 10 people making decisions for every 5 million rubles we spend, and we simply want to lower that number of people."
Some analysts question whether the move to cut staff will bring positive results in the way the administration functions.
"Cutting staff by 10 to 15 percent was common in the Soviet Union, but after a year the figures would just return to their previous levels," Leonid Kesselman, a political scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, said. "Cutting staff doesn't solve any problems. The problem lies within changing the functions of government structures, not making them smaller."
"The administrative system needs to be drastically simplified," he added. "Bureaucratic problems can be solved by getting rid of posts that exert too much control and hinder economic development."
"As long as the positions exist, the problems will too."
But Sidorin disagrees.
"This is not the first time we've cut jobs, as we did it in 2000, and before that in 1998," he said. "We let go 75-to-80 year olds who were just putting one piece of paper on top of another and not moving them anywhere, and nobody has replaced them yet."
The decisions concerning which staff to let go will be the responsibility of the heads of the administration's various committees, which number 25 and employ about 1000 people.
"Committee heads will require their subordinates to describe their duties," said Sidorin. "Whether or not they retain their jobs will depend on that description and on the opinion of the committee heads as to their importance in the administration."
The order says that the required cuts must be completed by May 25.
TITLE: Mailbox
TEXT: Dear Editor,
I read the letter by Alex Lupis [Letters, April 27], and once more came to the conclusion that our compatriots abroad have the wrong impression about freedom of the press in Russia. Nobody here will say that the press is completely free, because, as everywhere, it depends on the person who's paying. But even more, nobody in Russia, including your fairly objective newspaper, is saying that NTV was an independent television station.
Of course, Alex Lupis can't know that, but let him answer one very simple question: Would any American monopoly company owned by the state give a loan to, or pay the debts of, an independent TV station to different foreign banks?
In fact, NTV was the most pro-government TV station, and its owner, Vladimir Gusinsky, was a master of the information racket, using it to buy hugely expensive properties abroad. After Vladimir Putin was elected president, Gusinsky and his Media-MOST outlets suddenly turned anti-government, because the information racket wasn't paying anymore. So NTV started complaining about press freedom and accusing Putin of harming it without any proof.
Unfortunately, some gullible people like Alex Lupis believe such propaganda. Lupis even rebukes Boris Jordan for his attempt at saving NTV and making it truly independent from the state.
I live in St. Petersburg, but my relatives live in the Vologda region. I visit my 82-year-old mother almost every month in the small town of Sokol, near Vologda, and see with my own eyes how much better life has become since Boris Jordan was made the owner of a wood-processing plant in that town. Everyone in the Vologda region considers him a savior, because he managed to give new life to the forest industry in this vast region.
So Alex Lupis should not believe in the false accusations against Boris Jordan made by Mr. Gusinsky and his proxies.
Russia needs patriots like Jordan, people who were born in countries where capitalism was well developed, but who feel very close to the Motherland of their ancestors, who dreamed about the kind of Russia that Boris is helping to build.
Vyacheslav Sheetov
St. Petersburg
Dear Editor,
I should say that I read The St. Petersburg Times with pleasure twice a week, but the article ["Legal Wranglings: Dealing With the Police," April 3] was not, in my opinion, entirely successful. At times, the criticism leveled against the "police" was fair, but I feel that the scoundrels in uniform described are a small minority. Why did the writer of the article not once give a positive description of the police, who must carry out their duties as the law requires regardless of financial reward - 2,000 rubles a month - irrespective of health, sacrificing personal time and sometimes at the cost of their own life?
Furthermore, at the end of the article there was some contact information about a lawyer that was in effect an advertisement. At least the writer gave the contact information for the Department for Internal Investigations and the Special Police Squad.
I hope that the writer will take into account my desire to see the good side of the police and its work brought to light.
Oleg Stolyarov
Senior lieutenant
St. Petersburg Police
Dear Editor,
In your editorial piece of May 8, you rightly comment upon the impression that NASA may not be entirely straight-faced in its complaints regarding the first paying guest of the International Space Station.
However, I feel that you missed the key issue. Tito booked to fly on Mir. The Mir mission was terminated due to pressure from NASA, which felt that it was interfering with Russia's commitment to the ISS (this question is debatable).
Tito had booked Mir, but was then passed on to the next possible option, the ISS, incidentally paying the cost of two manned launches.
The ISS represents a huge investment for all the governments involved. I am glad that at least one independent taxpayer, a U.S. one at that, had a chance to see how his money was spent. Tito is most definitely an advocate of the manned space program and one that NASA should welcome rather than criticize.
Tito trained as an engineer and was hardly going to be trying to open any doors or turn on any switches without permission. That he was a distraction, I am certain - but probably not a significant one. I feel sorry for the NASA contingent of the crew, who had to put a face to NASA's dire restrictions.
The commercialization of space flight is inevitable. It is a credit to the Russians that they helped make the flight possible. At least Tito's money will be used to benefit others through the Russian space program.
Hugh Kennedy
Frankfurt, Germany
Dear Editor,
In the middle of the 20th century, Russia kicked off the space race by teaching the United States an unexpected and valuable lesson in the placement of satellites, then humans, into space. How fitting it is that 40 years later Russia should up the ante by teaching the United States a wonderfully ironic lesson about capitalism in space.
Robin Glennie
Ontario, Canada
Dear Editor,
Hail to the Russian Space Agency! The Russian space program has done it again!
First, the Russians sent the first satellite, Sputnik, into orbit, inaugurating the space era. Then recently they sent the tourist Dennis Tito to space, advancing a new era of tourism in space.
Russians have the unique hearts and souls to carry the mentality of Tsiolkovsky, "the father of modern space exploration," and to go where no tourists have gone before. We admire the Russian Space Agency for defying bureaucracy-bloated NASA and for promoting tourism in space. Thanks to the Russians for giving our individuals the freedom to leap outward to the final frontier - space without obstacle.
Jeffrey Nelson
Arlington, Virginia
Dear Editor,
I congratulate the Russian Space Agency for giving Washington a much-needed schooling in the fields of privatization and free enterprise. The advancements in our endeavors to utilize space can only be advanced with cash. That fact is as cold and hard as the hull of a Soyuz. It is money more so than scientific capability limiting our progress. Washington is crying with embarrassment. Not because of a new torpedo or a spy scandal, but because we were second to you Russians with, of all things, a hustle. What a laugh.
I hope we will soon follow suit. Add a few more rooms to that station. Make it more cost efficient, or just build a whole darned resort up there.
Eric Graham
Birmingham, Alabama
TITLE: Still MAD
TEXT: IT used to be the left that ridiculed MAD, the nuclear strategy of "mutually assured destruction." The anti-nuclear movement of the early 1980s blindsided the political establishment like the anti-global-trade movement of the past couple of years. Ronald Reagan's original "Star Wars" proposal was an act of political jujitsu, attempting to co-opt public fear of the nuclear standoff on behalf of military hardware instead of treaties or (worse) unilateral disarmament.
This didn't work - mainly because the hardware didn't work. But strategic defense, and ridicule of MAD, became essential elements of the American conservative theology. The flame of faith was kept alive through the cold 1990s by movement monks at Washington think tanks and devotional conferences around the world. Silent prayers were said in the offices and boardrooms of defense contractors throughout the land.
Now, the second coming. President Bush doesn't pretend or imagine, as Reagan did, that strategic defense can be an "invisible shield" that would free us from all physical danger of nuclear attack (and thus, if we wished, from all moral danger of having to threaten one). Nevertheless, in his speech Tuesday, he twice described the "grim premise" of MAD as a historical relic.
It is not. As long as we have no Reaganesque perfect shield, we still live in the world of MAD. And as long as we live in that world, MAD complicates the case for strategic defense in ways Bush does not acknowledge. MAD is underappreciated. It is not simply a matter of the nuclear powers agreeing to hold each other hostage. In fact "agreeing" has almost nothing to do with it. The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), which is getting so much attention, did help make the nuclear stalemate somewhat less costly and nerve-racking. But the stalemate itself - our ability to destroy any other nation in the world, and at least one other nation's ability to destroy us - would exist without the ABM treaty and will exist even if we walk away from it.
Furthermore, under the theory of MAD, we leave ourselves vulnerable in certain ways not because we have no choice, and not because we've agreed to do so, and not because protecting ourselves might upset the Europeans, but because it is in our own unilateral self-interest. Specifically, it is important to be vulnerable to a "second strike" - that is, a retaliatory strike by an arsenal crippled by your potential "first strike." Why? Because you don't want anybody with nukes pointed at you to think they have to use 'em or lose 'em. As long as they can rain cataclysmic damage on us by striking second, they have no more incentive than we do to strike first.
The concern in the 1980s was that strategic defense would never be good enough to protect against a massive first strike, but might be good enough to protect against a crippled second strike. If America had the ability to strike first and then be invulnerable, any nuclearized enemy in a crisis would face the choice of either starting a nuclear war or accepting defeat. The approach of such American invulnerability might even cause such a crisis, as other nuclear powers faced the prospect of being effectively demoted out of the nuclear club.
It's true that the world is different now. Russia is hardly the enemy that the Soviet Union was, and there are new - or at least newly noticed - threats from so-called rogue nations and kooky dictators. But that also does not change the basic logic of MAD.
President Bush says he wants to negotiate radical mutual reductions in the nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia. Good luck to him, by all means. But is he prepared to negotiate away our ability to launch a damaging first strike? If not, any defense that might work even against a crippled retaliation is a danger to the United States as well as to Russia.
And then there's China - a major unofficial target of the whole Star Wars II enterprise, and leading contender for the starring role in Cold War II, which hopeful ideologues are penciling in for later in this decade. If that should happen, the perverse-but-solid safety-from-vulnerability logic of MAD will apply in full force. So we can't have a perfect invisible shield. And we don't, or shouldn't, want an imperfect invisible shield good enough for Round 2 against Russia or China or any other grown-up nuclear power. It would be nice to have a strategic defense system just good enough to snare an incoming nuke from an Iraq or Afghanistan - and no better. But even that dream defense would work only if the bomb is delivered via ICBM, which may be less likely than BMW or UPS.
There's no good reason for theological objection to strategic defense. But when you add up all the situations where it can't or shouldn't be allowed to work, factor in the odds that it won't work at all, and start thinking about the cost, its theological enthusiasts seem to be making a leap of faith the country needn't follow.
Michael Kinsley, editor of Slate, contributed this column to The Washington Post.
TITLE: Children Need Wider Safety Net
TEXT: IRA, the girl with the abusive father who wound up in a city crisis center for young children and teenagers, in some ways got lucky. Somebody caught her when she was falling.
There are thousands like her, in St. Petersburg and in the country as a whole, who have Ira's problems: a family suffering from the enormous pressures of post-Soviet society, alcoholic parents, domestic violence. ... Too many of them can recite a depressingly familiar litany of woes, and too many miss the tiny safety net.
The list goes on - drugs, education and employment worries, financial problems, AIDS, the temptations of crime - but there are not enough remedies. Schools, especially state schools, are ill-equipped to help, unable to employ child psychiatrists who can talk to youngsters about their worries, and unable to rely on the old Soviet after-school organizations like the Pioneers which, even if they came with ideological baggage, at least provided children with something to do outside of the classroom and the home.
Even inside the family, according to the city's chief psychologist, the parental response to a mentally troubled child is to try and cover the problem up, so that no one will know, and so that no one can feel ashamed. This is not necessarily because parents don't love their children, but rather because parents are confronting a whole new question.
It doesn't take a psychiatrist to see that this is a recipe for future disaster. Children want and need support, want and need reassurance that they are not alone in the world, so that they can develop the confidence to deal with it as they become adults.
Faced with an unfamiliar but rapidly growing problem, the country will - as psychiatrists themselves say - have to turn to the government for assistance. It is up to the state to widen the safety net for kids.
Quite apart from getting its economic house in order, in a country where the average wage is still pathetically low, and in which average life expectancies have fallen dramatically since the end of the Soviet Union owing to poor health care (and the kind of alcoholism that fueled Ira's father's abuse), the state needs to open its eyes and the eyes of the people.
It should encourage open debate of mental illness and its causes. It should pay closer attention to its schools, introducing education on drugs and employing more psychiatric help. It should move to clean up state orphanages, the scenes of some of the worst child abuse.
And it should take its own head out of the sand, because until it does so, no one else will.
TITLE: Yet Another New Job for Cherkesov?
TEXT: ST. PETERSBURG seems incapable of living without political rumor, so here's the latest: Northwest Governor General Viktor Cherkesov could soon be on his way to Mos cow to fill the shoes of the prosecutor general, Vla di mir Ustinov.
Ustinov - who was a surprise pick as prosecutor, edging out a St. Petersburg man, Dmitry Kozak, at the last minute - has reportedly fallen out of favor with the president after derogatory remarks about privatization and reforming the legal system.
One newspaper this week went so far as to name the person who it thought would be Cherkesov's successor as Northwest governor general - Mikhail Prusak, the governor of the Novgorod region. But Prusak, who was in St. Petersburg recently, has himself flatly denied the suggestion - and was surprisingly cheeky about doing so. "I have never informed on anyone [for the KGB]," he said, in reference to Putin's and Cherkesov's security-service pasts, "and God save me from doing do."
In fact, Prusak said that doesn't even support the division of the country into seven federal super regions.
"You can't lump together Karelia and Kaliningrad, or the Komi republic and St. Petersburg, because these are regions with a completely different way of life," he said.
"The idea was wrong from the very beginning. I would be a very strange person if I now agreed [to be a governor general]."
Cherkesov has done what politicians tend to do with rumors - denied it. He even came out with the standard "I'm-gonna-make-a-big-list-of-all-the-jobs-I've-been-rumored-to-have-been-offered" remark.
On the other hand, he has made no secret of his criticism of Ustinov - unusual for a state representative, and all the more so for one so close to Putin. "If we look at the future, Ustinov is defending ideas that are on their way out," he said last week.
The sources of the latest rumor are standing their ground: Maybe Prusak doesn't figure, they say, but Cherkesov is packing his bags.
Now, if all this - and previous columns - seems to be taking us out of the city and toward Moscow, then there is a reason. Putin's ties with St. Petersburg have brought the city to the national forefront more than at any time since 1991. First under former president Boris Yeltsin, and then after he retired, more and more natives of the northern capital have gone south. Most of them - including Putin - were not well-known politicians before the trip to Moscow, but all of them now have an influence on the life of the country as a whole.
Such rumors du jour, therefore - many of which are based on Putin's tendency to surround himself with former fellow travelers in the espionage service - illustrate the point that St. Petersburg feels the ripples of more or less all movements on a federal level.
Another interesting whisper is the possible replacement of Alexander Voloshin, the head of the presidential administration, with Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the FSB. With Cherkesov as prosecutor, pretty much all the country's law enforcement and military bodies would be in the hands of the Putin faithful.
TITLE: An Inside Story on Paying Taxes
TEXT: PAYING taxes in any country is hardly pleasant. But in Russia it puts you directly among the ranks of the country's lunatics and the troublemakers.
"How could you not tell us that you pay taxes?" an accountant at one organization yelled at me after I asked for a certificate of my earnings. "Now they will come after us!"
I felt bad about this. They did too: Since then I am persona non grata in that office.
Being a freelance journalist, I have to gather certificates (spravki) of my income from organizations that publish my work. Some are already accustomed to the procedure. Others - well, they don't really understand why I bother. "Why do you need it?" they ask.
I used to reply with an entire list of explanations about why I pay my taxes, such as, "My daughter goes to a public school," or, "I have been driving for years, and the roads are so bad."
Do I really believe that my taxes will go to schools or roads? Puh-leeze! After all, I am a journalist. (But maybe, after bureaucratic pockets are lined, some of the money will get through?)
Anyway, I no longer go for explanations of this sort. Offering them, you feel like - well, like a lady who has burped in the midst of a high-ranking gathering. Nowadays, I just mumble something about how for my own sake I never play games with the state (which is true), or about a colleague who once in the midst of an "information war" decided to gather dirt on me and turned to my tax office (which is also true), or about Nikolai Ivanovich, an employee of my local tax office who happens to be a regular and careful reader. That's true too, and last year, while I was submitting my tax declaration, Nikolai Ivanovich said, "By the way, I saw your big-big feature story in Nezavisimaya Gazeta. But ... I do not see it on your [income] list." I felt proud, but ashamed as well. I had to explain to him that the majority of Russian newspapers do not pay real money to outside writers: a mere 469 rubles ($16) for a 12,000-word feature, minus 12 percent tax.
Nikolai Ivanovich does not read much English. So a document that declares how much money I made working for an overseas magazine was of no use to him. "What is this magazine's INN?" he asked. The INN is the number assigned by tax authorities to any organization that exists in this country. But the office from which I brought that report happened to be located in New York City, and thus did not have an INN. "What am I going to do with this?" Nikolai Ivanovich asked me.
After an hour of debating with him, of examining issues of the magazine where my stories were published, and of converting dollars into rubles, we discovered the proper space on the ninth page of the tax declaration where I could write in the amount earned on which I was to pay a forty percent tax. I simply felt like a complete idiot.
Then there are the tax deductions. As a self-employed writer, I have the right to subtract 20 percent from my overall income. In theory I can subtract as much as 36 percent. But only in theory. In reality, to get the 36 percent you have to prove that train or airline tickets were expenses connected to an article, and you have to bring the respective spravki from the relevant publication. You also have to convince Nikolai Ivanovich that you need paper for your printer to print the article, and an e-mail account to send an article electronically. I never succeed with convincing him of this. Never.
Thus, I aimed for what looked within reach - the 20 percent deduction. This is not easy either. Even though that exemption is written in the law, you have to deliver a written request to the tax office boss begging him or her to allow you to apply the law to your particular case. Last year, it took me calling a tax minister on his mobile to get results. This year, just talk of me making such a call led to a deal.
"How am I going to put your request into the computer?" asked Nikolai Ivanovich.
"Why on earth do I have to write such a request if the law allows for such an exemption?" I replied.
"You do not understand," Nikolai Ivanovich said. "Law is one thing, procedure is another."
Exhausted after three hours of arguing, calculating and converting, I was too exhausted to bother asking: Why?
Yevgenia Albats is a Moscow-based independent journalist.
TITLE: One Day, Travel Agents May Rule The Heavens
TEXT: FOR a mere $20 million or so, you can stuff yourself into a cramped, smelly chamber, strap yourself to a long cylinder filled with explosive liquids and risk your life as someone - safely shielded in a building some distance away - sets the whole contraption alight. That's reportedly what Dennis Tito did, buying a seat aboard a Russian rocket and purchasing the honor of being the first space tourist. Unfortunately for Tito, that title has been sold more times than the Brooklyn Bridge.
The strongest claim is more than a decade old. On Dec. 2, 1990, Toyohiro Akiyama, a reporter with the Japanese television station TBS, lifted off aboard a Soyuz rocket - very similar to the one that catapulted Tito into orbit - and docked with Mir shortly thereafter. The week-long stay set TBS back tens of millions of dollars.
The following May, Helen Sharman became the first British spacefarer when she visited Mir. Though the United Kingdom was supposed to pick up the tab, most of it was paid for by a Moscow bank.
Space mavens soon knew the going price for a rocket ride. In 1999 many journalists smelled trouble when the Russian firm Energia announced that businessman Peter Llewellyn was paying $100 million to visit the aging station - between five and 10 times the usual price. Sure enough, the "deal" fell through within weeks.
Mir, the main source of pride for the Russian space effort for more than a decade, was also a boon for advertisers. Over the years, the station's cosmonauts have filmed commercials for bananas, milk, pretzels and even Pepsi. In February 1998, the humiliated-looking crew hawked space pens on a home shopping network.
But don't think that Russia has a monopoly on space tourism and commercialization - though the United States tends to give joy rides to politicians rather than to entrepreneurs. On April 12, 1985, NASA launched Senator Jake Garn aboard the space shuttle Discovery. Thanks to this flight, he apparently earned the nickname "Barfin' Jake."
And let us not forget the famous second space flight of Senator John Glenn. If you don't think that he was a tourist, consider the fact that an undisclosed medical reason rendered him ineligible for some of the experiments he was supposedly sent up to perform.
Russia's space program has embraced capitalism, while America's does favors only for its own version of the Politburo. If the Hilton Hotel chain ever completes its design for a lunar or an orbital resort (yes, the corporation has floated the ideas) I think it's a pretty safe guess which country is going to provide transportation. After all, a mere hundred senators can't fill up an entire Hilton.
This comment originally appeared in The Washington Post.
TITLE: The Silent Must Bare Guilt for Crimes Against Humanity
TEXT: WHERE were the people of the United States of America on Feb. 25, 1969? Where were they on that fateful night long ago when Lieutenant Bob Kerrey and the men in his Navy SEAL unit were killing as many as 20 unarmed civilians in the hamlet of Thanh Phong in Vietnam? Where was every one of the adults of the United States at that very moment when innocent women and children halfway across the world were dying?
This is the fundamental question that seems not to have been asked thus far as American citizens continue to debate just what Bob Kerrey did so many decades ago. It is true that other doubts being voiced are just as important: Did Lieutenant Kerrey deliberately order the slaughter of those civilians or was it just one more accidental atrocity in a brutal war that left more than 2 million Vietnamese dead? Why did Kerrey, who would eventually become a U.S. senator from Nebraska, keep quiet all these years about the deaths that he claims have been haunting him since that raid? Just what exactly was he doing there anyway, in a country that was not his, under a sky that he did not recognize, closing his ears to the cries of fellow human beings screaming in a language that he could not understand?
And how does this fit into a pattern of American intervention in favor of ferocious dictatorships around the world in the fight against communism? How many more incidents like this one still lurk in the undergrowth of memory ready to surface and corrode the people of the United States, reminding them of this war that they lost and that will not go away?
This intense focus on Senator Kerrey and on what really transpired that night is certainly necessary and unavoidable. As someone who has campaigned for accountability regarding crimes against humanity in my native Chile as well as in so many other unfortunate lands, I would be the last person to suggest that we dodge the issue of personal responsibility for this kind of outrage. At the moment when the United States is demanding that Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic be extradited to The Hague, the Netherlands, to face international judgment for his possible participation in brutalities carried out by his troops, it would be the epitome of hypocrisy to overlook or not to scrutinize similar offenses committed by the United States military. The life of one innocent Vietnamese baby is just as valuable as the life of one Bosnian or Kosovar child or a little girl from Nebraska, for that matter.
And yet to limit our examination of the past only to the officer who gave the order or the soldier who wielded the knife or even to their commanders who did not investigate the incident, is to evade the need to explore the more elusive complicity of the larger collective in whose name those orders were given, those shots were fired, or an old man's throat was slit. To understand what truly happened during that moonless night in the Mekong Delta we must interrogate the responsibility of the country that sent those young men into war; we must ask why it took 32 years for this story to be told; we must wonder about how many people then did not want to know of this and other crimes; we must figure out why, once the war was over, most Americans - even many of those who had, to their honor, magnificently opposed it - could continue to live comfortably without that knowledge; we must dissect the thousands of days and nights of silence that piled up like dead photographs inside the American people in the many years that have followed.
Where were they, those faraway bystanders, on Feb. 25, 1969? Where have they been since then, all through the days and nights that Kerrey was alone with his horrifying secret? Now that the knowledge is out in the open, what are they going to do with it? Not only with the news of the atrocity itself, but with the more terrifying knowledge of their indifference to what was going on, that unbearable indifference that could be considered a greater crime than murder itself, because people who violate human rights can always argue that there were mitigating circumstances, reasons for losing their control. But Kerrey's compatriots cannot proclaim that they were under extreme duress when so many of them closed their eyes to what was happening around them. They were not in fear of their lives, they did not stumble with loaded guns and chaotic minds in the panic of darkness, they were not acting under orders when they preferred to remain ignorant of what was being perpetrated on their behalf, nobody forced them to leave Kerrey to face his ghosts all by himself in the heart of his endless nights.
Why did a majority of the American people not care about such an atrocity then? Or better, yet, do they really care now?
These are not the sort of questions I should be asking only of the people of the United States and, sadly, they cannot refer only to the events of the past.
The century we have just escaped was filled with unspeakable acts of terror and extermination magnified by technology and the power of the state, and all through it, along with the few people who protested and refused to collaborate and were courageous or lucky enough to save their dignity and separate themselves from the madness, there were many more, so many countless others, who turned their backs on the remote or nearby devastation that was being visited on their fellows, be it in Stalinist Russia or Nazi-occupied France or the streets of Jakarta, Indo nesia, under Suharto or the mountains of Anatolia, Turkey, when the Armenians were being annihilated or in a dark cellar in Johannesburg, South Africa, or in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where a man walked toward a naked woman tied to a cot holding an electric prod in his left hand.
My hand trembles to write this, but I am convinced that it was only because of these vast and hushed armies of the silent that such violations of our species could be carried out with impunity, only because of the shrugged shoulders, the averted eyes, the general apathy, that those events of horror could afterward be forgotten and erased. And repeated.
I ask these questions therefore of the damaged brotherhood we call humanity. I ask these questions of myself.
Where was I on May 8, 1994, when I read that 200,000 Rwandans had been killed in the last six weeks? Where was I, who calls myself a human-rights activist, two months later, on July 28, 1994, when the toll in Rwanda had risen to 1 million men, women and children slaughtered? What did I do to stop that genocide?
Heaven help me: Why did I not care about this? Bob Kerrey and his men were not alone, after all, in the hut of death that night long ago in Thanh Phong.
Ariel Dorfman is the author of "Death and the Maiden." He contributed this comment to the Los Angeles Times.
TITLE: tiger lillies: they're big in russia
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Frenetic songs about deviant sex, murder and suicide, performed by a crazed trio driven by accordion and operatic vocals - what can be more appropriate for a Russian club-goer?
The U.K. band The Tiger Lillies, which caused a stir in Moscow last year, has returned, but this time it is set to conquer St. Petersburg.
The Lillies' early Russian fan Sergei Shnurov of Leningrad admitted he was influenced by the band's recordings.
"Before recording [the album] 'Mat (Bez Elektrichestva)' I listened to The Tiger Lillies during the whole summer [2000]," said Shnurov. "'Mat' was mainly recorded under the influence of [the band] and it can be heard on the album."
"It seemed very strange and quite anarchistic in a way - I really had a fantastic time," said The Tiger Lillies' vocalist and accordion player Marten Jacques about his days in Moscow in a telephone interview last week.
Unlike with any other Western bands, the Moscow club public immediately felt a kindred spirit.
"I think perhaps the accordion is one thing," said Jacques who was a long ago inspired by a video of a Russian singer playing accordion on a bridge (he doesn't remember the name, though).
"As a matter of fact there's quite a lot of passion and emotion in music and it's something which probably appeals to the Russians," said Jacques. "I actually listen to some Russian songs and there's a reference to Russian music in my music."
The band's name goes back to the time Jacques lived in London's Soho and wrote numerous songs about lowlife populated with prostitutes and drug dealers. Tiger Lilly is a name of both a mythical prostitute and a flower.
"It's just a name - not really specifically named after anything," said Jacques.
The Tiger Lillies' passionate songs, one of which rhymes "waiter" and "masturbator," immediately evoke Weimar Republic cabaret and such names as Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill.
"All my life I have listened to various styles of music and styles and whatever, and I just take different elements and put them all together and hopefully create something that is unique," said Jacques.
"So Brecht and Weill are two people which I really admire among many others. There are many other influences as well."
Jacques also cites gypsy songs and the French tradition of chanson, from Edith Piaf to Jacques Brel, but the "comic side of what we are doing is probably English," he said.
The theatrical aspect of the band, which once took part in a drama performance, is strongly felt in its music and stage act.
"I pull a lot of faces and we use a few props and stuff when we perform, we wear makeup sometimes," said Jacques.
Although some articles say that David Byrne was impressed by the band or even "discovered" it, Jacques dismissed it as an exaggeration.
"It's not really true. He saw a video clip of the band, and he agreed to have us play on a bill [with Byrne's label Luaka Bop's artists] some six or seven years ago. And he described the drummer as looking like James Joyce."
The Tiger Lillies' gloomy subject matter probably scares away pop fans, but as Jacques once said, the band's audience are "people who don't fit in." He believes it is about the same as for David Lynch's and Jim Jarmusch's films.
"I'm trying to sing about dark, murky, sinister things because it interests me and I think it's more creative to me as an artist, it's more interesting [to sing] about strange subjects than writing love songs," said Jacques, who devoted one of The Tiger Lillies' albums to zoophilia.
"We're not really a rock and roll band at all, and we don't really get any attention from that area - of the music press. Really we're very much separate from that, we're actually quite far away from that world," he said.
"I have no antagonism towards rock music as such. There's jazz, rock and folk music - what we do isn't just really fit into any of those categories."
Leningrad's Shnurov attributed The Tiger Lillies's phenomenal popularity in Moscow to the tastes the club public there. "In Moscow they are fans of 'hyper-live' music, when everything is not very concise and it's live in a hypertrophied way - sort of doubly live," he said.
The Tiger Lillies in concert at the Manezh Exhibition Hall, 1 Issakevskaya Ploshchad, at 8 p.m. on May 16. Tel. 314-82-53. Tickets cost 150 rubles.
TITLE: avoiding the curse of the sequel
TEXT: If you've been looking for a film like "The Mummy Returns," "The Mummy Returns" is the film you've been looking for.
A new and much improved version of 1999's "The Mum my," this sequel is a shrewdly conceived and efficiently executed Saturday afternoon popcorn movie. Both pleasantly old-fashioned and packed with up-to-date computer-generated special effects, the film's constant plot turns, cheeky sensibility and omnipresent action sequences have no trouble attracting our attention and holding on.
Appropriate for a story that pivots on reincarnation, writer-director Stephen Sommers has returned from "The Mummy," as have stars Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz.
Experience, as ads used to say, is a great teacher, and "The Mummy Returns" cast and crew benefited considerably from having that first film under their belt. Fraser, one of the few actors who can be convincing in both doofy and intrepid modes, is ideal to play soldier of fortune Rick O'Connell in this sequel set in Egypt and London in 1933.
Though no one looks a minute older, eight years have allegedly passed since the previous adventure, and O'Connell and Egyptologist Evelyn (Weisz) have taken that opportunity to marry and produce a young son named Alex (Freddie Boath).
Sommers, who seems to have evolved into a real Egyptology buff, has come up with a rather complex back story for "The Mummy Returns." It begins in 3067 BC and not a year sooner and allows for a brief wordless cameo from pro wrestling star the Rock as a fearless warrior named the Scorpion King.
Defeated in an attempt to take over Egypt, the King sells his soul to Anubis, one of the gods of the Egyptian underworld, for enough jackal-headed warriors to help him gain the victories he thirsts for. But far too soon all those fighters turn into so many grains of sand, a magical army that, along with their king, can be awakened every 5,000 years and take over the Earth.
Hoping to piggyback on that phenomenon is Meela, the reincarnation of Anck-Su-Namun (Patricia Velasquez), the star-crossed lover of the terrifying mummy Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo), who caused so much trouble the last time around. She hopes to bring Imhotep back from the dead one last time, for if he can beat the Scorpion King two falls out of three, he can command the King's warriors and conquer the world without so much as a by your leave.
Key to this elaborate plan turns out to be an impressive piece of gold jewelry called the Bracelet of Anubis that gets uncovered by the intrepid Evelyn, who has an uncanny sense of where things were in ancient times. Are these visions, hallucinations, memories of a previous life, or a side effect of being the only 1930s Egyptologist to run around the desert in low-cut tops?
Trying to keep the bad guys from the bracelet are two veterans of "The Mummy," John Hannah as Evelyn's rapscallion brother Jonathan and Oded Fehr as Ardeth Bay, the leader of the Medjai, a benevolent desert brotherhood that comes off like an armed and dangerous version of the Shriners.
In telling this story, writer-director Sommers has not neglected to throw in a lot of old fashioned elements to make us feel at home, including chests that really shouldn't be opened, birds that deliver messages and scenes reminiscent of the Biblical pageantry of "The Ten Commandments." That's not to mention floods, fires and enough action elements to allow for cutting between four separate conflicts in the film's climactic section. It may be, as one character puts it, "the old end-of-the-world ploy," but it's fun to see it done with the energy "The Mummy Returns" brings to this twice-told tale.
TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: As the SKIF Festival brought us one of the finest moments of Azeri folk music as personified by singer/musician Alim Kasimov last month, this month will provide a chance to listen to some of the best folk music that Armenia has to offer.
Djivan Gasparyan, described as one of Armenia's greatest musicians and a living legend, will come to play a one-off concert in the city on May 24.
According to Worldmusicportal. com, Gasparyan is the foremost virtuoso of the duduk, an oboe-like instrument dating to Armenia's pre-Christian times, that is made of apricot wood and capable of sustaining drone notes for long periods of time.
"The duduk's range is only one octave and requires considerable skill to play, its dynamics being controlled by constantly adjusting lips and fingers," the site continues.
"The duduk has a warm, soft, slightly nasal timbre and is used in folk songs and dance music. In the hands of a master such as Gasparyan, the instrument becomes a vehicle for the haunting and meditative music that eloquently evokes the Armenian landscape and its people."
Gasparyan was born in 1928 in Solag, a village near the Armenian capital Yerevan. He began to play the duduk at six, gaining much of his knowledge by listening to the great masters.
In 1948 he joined the Tatoo Altounian National Song and Dance Ensemble, and also had his first professional engagement as soloist with the Yerevan Philharmonic Orchestra.
Gasparyan won gold medals in four worldwide competitions organized by UNESCO. He is also a composer and singer as well as being a professor at the Yerevan Conservatory.
He has collaborated with Lionel Richie and Peter Gabriel and has recorded soundtracks for the movies "The Russia House," "The Crow" and Atom Egoyan's film "Calendar."
The concert will take place at the Conservatory, but ticket details are not yet available.
Aperitif Club, the mysterious place which has functioned at the Nabokov Museum since April, now has a Web site - which can probably help you to get a pass to this rather closed society.
Launched with a one-off local show by the Italian lounge act Montefiori Cocktail, Aperitif Club now opens once or twice a month and offers some kind of similarly unique entertainment.
"Aperitif is kind of light stimulator," says Nabokov Museum director Dmitry Melkov.
"I'd like Aperitif Club to stimulate easy, pleasant communication and bring about a relaxed mood," he says.
"The music we offer is also easy. People come for an hour or two and then move on to another club as we are not open all night."
The club's members include artists, musicians and businessmen, which mix at the parties - there is no strict dress code here.
Although the large portion of Aperitif's Web site demands authorization (the password is known to members only), it allows the possibility to write to the owners and apply to join.
"We don't guarantee membership, but we guarantee that we will consider each request," said Melkov. Check out the site at www.aperitifclub.spb.ru.
Aperitif Club's next event will feature Finland's electronica band Avvikko on May 19.
- by Sergey Chernov
TITLE: face control
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Black-light bowling, thumping music and beeping metal detectors - there's something exciting for the New Russian in all of us at M-111 (Mos kov sky Prospect 111).
The club - which spans two floors and includes a restaurant, multiple bars, billiards, disco, and let's not forget, more bowling than you can shake a stick at - is located in a looming multi-storied building, not far from the Moskovskiye Vorota metro station, which also houses a complex of furniture showrooms and warehouses. Entry is - you guessed it - 111 rubles, or free before 10 p.m. weekdays.
After a stony-faced type gives you the metal detector treatment on the ground floor, you will be ushered upstairs via elevator. Don't get off on the wrong floor and end up wandering the furniture warehouse. (There seem to also be cameras everywhere, and there will be an additional security check upon your departure, so don't even think about waltzing out with that sofa-bed.)
Entering the club itself is no less scary. After checking your coat, you are issued a plastic card resembling a credit card - but no, this does not mean that the M-111 staff will pick up your tab. The card is to be used instead of "real" money while you are in the club - you pay the entire bill when they swipe it upon your departure.
With all its apparent convenience and modernity, there are drawbacks to the card - which my clubbing companion and I quickly discovered as we spent several minutes frantically doing the math, trying to determine whether or not we would be able to cover the tab for our dinner orders.
Overall, we declared the restaurant a bit steep, but the food very tasty. Just be careful with the English translations: I ordered the cheapest fish on the menu (140 rubles), which was labeled sudak in Russian (perch), but "salmon" in English (and turned out, of course, to be the former). Additionally, my companion's dish was supposed to be served "by mushrooms" - but of course was not.
Overall, as my companion suggested, the person behind the M-111's decor must harbor a special fondness for sci-fi movies - with the space-ship like interior, and the waitresses dressed in full-body, glowing white and neon-orange outfits that gave me flashbacks of the Greenpeace crew's anti-toxic suits I had witnessed just weeks ago. (Be sure to wear your own white and neon attire, as most all of M-111 is flooded with black-lights, including the 16 bowling lanes.)
The restaurant is located on the upper floor and encircles a small disco area, so in addition to the moves of the toxic-suit waitresses, we were treated to the antics of dancers who dared to become our dinner-time entertainment - which, for the most part, consisted of a couple of tiny toddlers who strayed onto the floor to strut their wobbly stuff.
As the music eased from Mariah Carey to more thumpy house, we finished our drinks and wandered over to check out the bowling action. The spinning neon bowling balls pulsate for a rather psychedelic effect, even if you just choose to watch as we did. Costs per hour are: 240 rubles weekdays (Monday through Thursday) from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m., and 480 rubles from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.; weekend (Friday through Sunday) cost is 360 rubles from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m., and 660 rubles from 5 p.m. to 6 a.m.
If you're interested in more serious action, M-111 will be hosting the St. Petersburg Bowling Federation's Baltic Cup Tournament starting Friday, May 25. Entry fee for all is the same ($80), though we noticed that, for some very strange reason, top prizes for men and women ($1,000 and $800 respectively) are not.
Next to the lanes are several rows of billiard tables - just about the only non-glowy items in this club, and a somewhat welcome relief for over-exposed eyes. Prices run from 100 rubles per hour all day on weekdays and weekends from 12 p.m. to 8 p.m. to 150 rubles on weekends from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.
After handing over our plastic cards to be swiped under the glare of more cameras, we paid our tab and escaped - feeling a bit as if we'd done something risky (even though we put that sofa-bed back in place).
M-111 Bowling Club, 111 Moskovsky Pr., Tel.: 320-44-27, Metro Mos kov skiye Vorota. Open 12 p.m. to 6 a.m. Call in advance to reserve a lane or table.
TITLE: a victorious lunch venue
AUTHOR: by Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: May 9 undoubtedly belongs to the list of Russia's most important holidays, providing a rare opportunity for the country's citizens to feel good about themselves and proud of the nation's achievements, so it is indeed important to spend the day in a suitable manner.
Though most of my day was spent with my family, I reserved some time to see a good friend for lunch. Having spent quite a while choosing a place for a Victory Day meal, we were surprised to realize suddenly that the solution was an obvious one.
Back in the days of World War II, when Leningrad was under siege, Hitler was so sure of the Russian defeat that he even planned a banquet to celebrate the German victory. The banquet was supposed to take place at the Astoria Hotel.
So we headed to Davidov's restaurant, located at the Astoria's ground floor, to the left from the main entrance.
My friend and I were greeted by the restaurant's friendly staff dressed in traditional Russian shirts with collar fastenings at the side, and we were seated near a large window overlooking St. Isaac's Square.
The restaurant's elegant creamy interiors, soft furnishings, quiet music and attentive yet not obtrusive service make for a very relaxing atmosphere.
It was nice to see the Victory Day connection working as we noticed a war veteran with his medals on and his family or friends among the visitors.
Scanning Davidov's excellent menu was a pleasure. The weather was too hot to order a soup, though borshch (served with vatrushka) and ukha (served with an open-topped pasty) sounded particularly appealing.
The restaurant predictably offers an extensive selection of vodkas which we ignored, and opted for mineral water with lemon and ice.
Davidov's menu provides a very tempting variety of pelmeni, and we shared a portion of lightly fried lamb pelmeni ($5) served with sour cream and mild salsa. We enjoyed our choice very much, and recommend the dish to both those new to Russian cuisine and experienced pelmeni connoisseurs - as is the case with one of us, who has always been particularly picky about them, spoiled by her grandmother who makes unbeatable Sibe ri an pelmeni.
It was hardly possible not to order fish as well. Choosing between grilled sturgeon, trout fillet in champagne sauce, and pike-perch fillet in saffron sauce was almost painful. The battle was won by the trout ($16) served with broccoli, and fried zuccini, which was tender and delicately cooked. My friend went for a bowl of excellent mushroom ragout ($7.50) with chicken pieces soaked in a creamy sauce, and was happy with her choice.
Surprisingly enough, there was some space in our stomachs left for desserts, so when our waitress came to seduce us with chocolate and white chocolate cream desserts, along with two dozen more displayed on a small cart which she wheeled to our table, we couldn't resist. My dining companion and I both happen to have a sweet tooth, which explains why we couldn't refrain from ordering a dessert trolley ($16 for two). The trolley comprised rich and filling banana cake, a cream-cheese dessert (or paskha - a sweet cream-cheese dish with raisins, lemon peel and almond strips usually eaten at Easter), and samples of tender white chocolate cream and semolina berry dessert.
All in all, dining in Davidov's restaurant gives you more than sophisticated cuisine and an elegant environment. It is a whole experience, and it doesn't take a Victory Day to get to know the place.
Davidov's Restaurant, 39 Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa, Astoria Hotel. Lunch for two without alcohol, 1,346 rubles ($46.5). Open from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. Credit cards accepted.
TITLE: Israelis Retaliate for Bombing
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Israel fired surface-to-surface rockets at Gaza City police headquarters and the offices of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement Thursday in retaliation for a roadside bomb that killed two Romanian workers employed by Israel.
Dozens of people were hurt in the shelling, most of them lightly, doctors said. A 3-year-old boy had cuts on his face and ears after being hit by shards of glass.
At least four rockets struck Gaza City on Thursday afternoon, sending black smoke into the air. Palestinian policemen ran out of the walled security headquarters in the center of town, while ambulances rushed inside, even as rockets crashed down with loud booms.
Palestinian Planning Minister Nabil Shaath said Arafat was not harmed in the attack, which he called "a war of terror Israel has declared on the Palestinians."
Palestinian police Lt. Ahmed Abbas said he was sitting on a chair in the courtyard when one of the rockets hit. He said he was thrown into the air and the ground shook under his feet.
The Israeli army said the rockets were fired in retaliation for the killing of the Romanians earlier in the day. The Romanians, employed by Israel, had been working on the border fence when a roadside bomb went off. A third worker was injured by the blast.
Three rockets hit the Palestinian police headquarters, and a fourth struck Fatah offices about 400 yards east of Arafat's seaside headquarters. The facade of the Fatah office's second floor was knocked out and black smoke came out of the building.
On Wednesday, the bodies of two Israeli boys, one an immigrant from Maryland, were found bludgeoned to death by rocks in a cave in the West Bank.
The boys, Koby Mandell, 13, and Yossi Ishran, 14, had gone on a hike near their home in the West Bank settlement of Tekoa on Tuesday, and were seized, presumably by Palestinians, and killed. Newspapers quoted police as saying the boys' heads were so badly disfigured that facial identification was impossible.
"Stoned to death," read the headline in the Yediot Ahronot daily Thursday, using the single Hebrew word "Skila," which refers to one of four forms of capital punishment in ancient Jewish law.
Koby's family immigrated and settled in Tekoa in 1996. Twenty-one Palestinians were arrested in connection with the killing.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said he was revolted by the killings of the Israeli teenagers. "It was a heinous deed in which children were intentionally attacked," Sharon said.
Asked whether Arafat was still a potential negotiating partner, Sharon said that "anyone who causes the killing of Israeli citizens cannot be a partner." If violence stopped, Israel would be ready to resume peace talks, Sharon said.
Arafat, when asked about the killings, responded by saying that Palestinian children have been victimized by Israel.
In an apparent response to the explosion in Gaza on Thursday, Israeli bulldozers razed Palestinian farmland and a police station near Kissufim, the fifth incursion into Palestinian territory in two days.
Overnight, Israeli troops destroyed four homes and a Palestinian police station in the Rafah refugee camp, and 12 Palestinians were hurt.
TITLE: 'Cannibal' Scholar Subject of New Film
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: LOS ANGELES - He looks like such a nice, sweet, mild-mannered little old man: twinkling eyes, broad nose, stooped shoulders, an engaging smile.
It is hard to believe this elfin gent, too timid to touch a dead mouse, once engaged in cannibalism and has been dining out on the tale ever since.
Sometimes, Tobias Schneebaum recalls the morsel of human flesh he bit into 45 years ago had a taste redolent of pork: forbidden flesh even if he had not once studied to be a rabbi. But today he says he does not recall. "Do you remember every meal you ever ate?" he asked a visitor the other day, before he ordered a salami sandwich because "[he felt] like eating meat."
He insists this cannibalism thing is a bit overblown as it was only one bite, a long time ago, and fails to sum up his life one way or another.
At age 80, Schneebaum is basking in the newfound fame that comes with being the subject of a first-class documentary film, "Keep the River On Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale."
Twice, the gay former painter, primitive-art expert and cruise ship raconteur lived among some of the world's most primitive peoples, feeling more at home with them, he says, than in his native New York.
He got so close to them, including indulging in an active sex life with the tribesmen, that he helped spark a debate on just how far a Westerner should go while cruising Stone Age societies. Schneebaum wanted to go more native than he ever did and get fitted with a bone through his nose, just like his childhood hero, the Wild Man of Borneo, might have had.
He lived among the Asmat headhunters in Indonesian New Guinea and Amarkaire cannibals in the Peruvian jungle but had no intention of ever going back to either place - especially Peru, which had become his own personal "Heart of Darkness."
But he was cajoled into returning by the brother-sister filmmaking team of David and Laurie Gwen Shapiro, who spent six difficult years making a film of his life after discovering and falling in love with his book, "Keep the River on the Right."
They said deciding to make a movie of it was one of the few things they ever agreed on. They were so inspired, in fact, that they immediately grabbed a phone book, found Schneebaum listed and called.
Soon they were photographing him shopping at his local supermarket, talking to tourists aboard a cruise ship and lecturing to Barnard College students in front of the majestic Asmat carvings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
One highlight of the film is Schneebaum's reunion with the Asmats, which has him shedding tears of joy as he finds a former lover who tells the camera how proud he was to have been with Tobias. The other highlight is his returns to Peru, an up-river journey filled with palpable fear and trembling.
In 1955, Schneebaum won a Fulbright scholarship to study the great ruins of Machu Picchu. He walked into the jungle instead, keeping the river on his right, and wound up living with a small band of cannibals who made him their brother, adopting him and letting him partake in an omni-sexual world where, unlike home, there were no distinctions made between straight and gay.
The man who had felt out-of-place in 1950s New York, where homosexuality was treated as a forbidden subject or a criminal act, found himself among the most caring people he had ever met - until he went with a hunting party to invade another village and watched a mass slaughter ensue.
He says one of the hunters had him push a spear into an already dead man. Afterward, around a campfire, pieces of flesh were passed around and Schneebaum ate what he thinks was a chunk of heart.
The experience unnerved him and he abandoned his newfound friends and walked out of the jungle, covered in body paint.
"Ever afterward I have had nightmares in which I am screaming, 'Help me,' but I do not know to whom I am screaming," Schneebaum said in an interview, making clear that it was the slaughter and not the cannibalism that bothered him.
He went back to Peru with the Shapiros and figured out where the tribe he lived with were now - something the trio considers a miracle.
Before arriving, a clearly nervous Schneebaum loses his temper and lashes out at the filmmakers for bullying him into doing something he does not want to do. He warns them that one slip could cost him his ability to walk, and they build him a special staircase so he can walk up to a muddy hilltop.
Once in the village, he finds people who remember him and call him by the tribal name he was given, "Habe," a word he thought all these years meant "incompetent" since he could not do anything the tribesmen could do, like shoot an arrow.
But a translator tells him it means: "Come here." After all these years, Schneebaum finds out a small truth from a tribe that has "become civilized" by missionaries.
The men and women of the tribe now wear clothes and no longer feast on their enemies. They are happy to see him and a proud Schneebaum says, "They said that of all the people who came to see them, only Tobias came back." The fearful journey to a Joseph Conrad-like "Heart of Darkness" had become instead a happy homecoming. Schneebaum gives both tribes photos he took when he lived among them - the only photographic record they will have of those times because the missionaries had them destroy the earlier pictures because of their nakedness.
TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Blair Leading Polls
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's main political parties traded tax jibes on Thursday as a fresh set of opinion polls put Prime Minister Tony Blair streets ahead of the opposition with only four weeks until election day.
A MORI poll for The Times newspaper suggested Blair's rating was still heading skywards with a huge 24-point lead over the opposition Conservatives, but a Gallup poll for the Daily Telegraph showed a narrowing of the gap to 17 points.
Either way, Blair's Labor Party remains firmly on course to win a second consecutive term of power with a landslide victory at a June 7 poll similar to the crushing 179-seat parliamentary majority it claimed in 1997.
Trying to narrow the gap, Conservative leader William Hague tried to grab the mantle as the party of low tax - one which has traditionally conferred victory in British elections.
No Extended Ceasefire
SKOPJE, Macedonia (Reuters) - Macedonia's prime minister on Thursday ruled out a long-term cease-fire with insurgents, even if this meant forming an emergency coalition government without the party that has demanded an end to the shelling.
Prime Minister Ljubco Georgievski said the army would continue to shell mountain villages held by ethnic Albanian insurgents because laying down arms would allow the guerrillas to resurface elsewhere in the country for a fresh assault.
He said he would hold final talks on forming a national unity government designed to undercut the rebels on Friday and told the ethnic Albanian Party of Democratic Prosperity (PDP) this would be their last chance to sign up.
The PDP wants a total halt to shelling as well as the withdrawal of all fighters and phased return of police to the conflict zone under foreign monitoring.
Afghan Refugees Dying
JALOZAI CAMP, Pakistan (AP) - Afghan children living in squalor in northwest Pakistan are dying daily, mostly of dehydration and heat stroke in temperatures pushing 35 degrees Celsius, doctors said Thursday.
Sixteen people died just this week, most of them children.
"We left one hell to come to another one," said Saeed Ullah, one of 80,000 who fled drought and war in Afghanistan and now live in the Jalozai Camp in northwest Pakistan.
There are no trees and water has to be trucked in daily. The refugees have been living in tents made of plastic sheets, although some canvas tents were received recently.
Health facilities are sparse - the camp didn't have an ambulance until Wednesday.
The United Nations has been pressing Pakistan to allow it to register the refugees in Jalozai Camp, which is the first step toward relocation and better assistance.
More than 200,000 new refugees have come to Pakistan since last September, most of them driven from their homes by drought and war.
Ants Threaten Homes
BEIJING (AP) - The city that is home to China's famed terra-cotta warriors is under attack by ants that are gnawing their way through ancient landmarks and shops, a state newspaper said Thursday.
Xi'an, on China's central plains, has been plagued by white ants for centuries, but the problem has grown in recent years, the China Daily said. Efforts to find other species to prey on the insects have failed.
The terra-cotta warriors - a life-size army of soldiers, horses and chariots - were found in the 1970s in the 2,200-year-old tomb of Qin, China's first emperor, on the outskirts of Xi'an, a former imperial capital.
Ants have destroyed shops on one of the city's busiest streets and forced others to close, the newspaper said. They have damaged 17 of Xi'an's 24 ancient buildings, including a mosque, a pagoda and a museum.
The ants eat food in homes, burrow into clothes and gnaw wood and electrical cables.
Castro Ends Iran Visit
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Cuban President Fidel Castro ended a three-day visit to Iran Thursday, saying he had found new friends and was optimistic about future relations between the two nations.
He received an official farewell at Tehran's Saadabad Palace from President Mohammad Khatami.
"This was a memorable visit for me. ... I leave with optimism about future ties," he said.
After bidding Castro farewell, Khatami said: "This visit was not about exploring new issues, but about expressing the two countries' will to strengthen ties."
Castro has received something of a hero's welcome in Iran, where his 40-year struggle against the United States is admired. Both countries are under unilateral U.S. sanctions and, year after year, both appear on Washington's list of countries that are considered sponsors of terrorism.
In a joint statement made on Thursday, the two countries condemned terrorism as well as the sanctions. They also called for establishment of an independent Palestinian state and the return of all Palestinian refugees to their homeland.
Aid Pilot Killed
KHARTOUM, Sudan (Reuters) - Sudan's Islamist government has accused rebels of killing a Red Cross pilot on an aid mission in the south, the independent al-Ayam daily reported on Thursday.
The Danish pilot was killed when his plane came under fire over southern Sudan on Wednesday.
The Red Cross said a blast rocked the plane after it descended to counter a cabin pressure problem on a routine flight from northern Kenya to a government-held town in southern Sudan encircled by rebels.
The co-pilot died almost instantly from a severe head injury. The other pilot managed to fly the plane back to Kenya.
The Red Cross said it had no information about who fired at the plane, but rebels who have waged an 18-year-old war for autonomy and secular rule said the government was responsible. The Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) said the attack happened just north of the government-held town of Torit, 200 kilometers west of the Kenyan town of Lokichokio.
An estimated 2 million people have died in the civil war that in broad terms pits the mainly animist and Christian south against the Muslim-dominated, Arabic-speaking north.
TITLE: Iverson Scores 54, Philadelphia Ties Series
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: PHILADELPHIA - Allen Iverson scored a team playoff-record 54 points to lead the Philadelphia 76ers to a 97-92 win over the Toronto Raptors that tied their Eastern Conference semifinal series at 1-1.
Iverson scored 19 straight points for his team in the fourth quarter as he rebounded from a poor 11-of-34 performance in game 1 with perhaps the best game of his career.
The guard made 21 of 39 shots - mostly from the perimeter - and nine of nine free throws and was simply too hot to hold for Raptors guards Alvin Williams and Chris Childs.
Iverson's points haul broke the previous team playoff record of 50 scored by Billy Cunningham against Milwaukee on April 1, 1970.
He also shattered his NBA postseason high of 45 against Indiana in game 2 of the opening round, and scored the most points in a playoff game since Michael Jordan had 55 for Chicago against Washington on April 27, 1997.
Iverson scored 20 points in the second quarter as Philadelphia erased a 14-point deficit. But it was the fourth quarter when he took over the game in a style reminiscent of Jordan.
With 8:52 remaining, Iverson drilled a three-pointer for an 80-75 lead. That began a stretch of 19 straight Philadelphia points by the NBA scoring champion.
He turned back every challenge from the Raptors, who received 28 points from game 1 hero Vince Carter. They tied it twice in the fourth quarter but could never get the lead because they could never stop Iverson.
"It's very frustrating for me personally," Williams said. "It is my job to get him stopped. For my man to score 54 points, I am not sure how many points his team had, but it is just ridiculous on my part."
"He made a pledge to me," Sixers guard Aaron McKie said. "[He said], 'I missed those jump shots the other night, but I'm playing the way I want to play. I'm not settling for anything. I'm going to take what I want to take.' That is what he went out and did."
Iverson said: "I always feel like the only person who can stop me is myself. The first game, I took what they gave me. They gave me wide-open jumpers. I took a lot of quick shots. Guys weren't in rebounding position.
"Tonight, I said, 'Whatever they give me, I'll just take whatever I want. Don't settle for anything. If I want a layup, try and get it, if I want a jumper and they are playing me to drive, take the jumper.'"
McKie said: "How many guys are you going to see come into a playoff game and just dominate, at six feet [180 centimeters], doing what you want to do on the floor?
"It's a beautiful thing. I'm just so proud of him. I'm at a loss for words just watching his performance. He carried us the whole game."
San Antonio 104, Dallas 90. In Dallas, the San Antonio Spurs moved to within one win of the Western Conference finals with a 104-90 victory over the demoralized Dallas Mavericks on Wednesday. On the back of double-doubles and smothering defense from "Twin Towers" David Robinson and Tim Duncan, the Spurs dismantled the Mavericks to go 3-0 up in the best-of-seven series.
San Antonio's playoff path thus far has been very similar to the one they took in 1999, which led to the NBA championship.
Just as in the first round two years ago, San Antonio ousted Minnesota in four games. And just as in the second round in 1999, the Spurs have won the first three games and appear poised for the sweep.
In the last two games the Spurs have done it without Derek Anderson, their second-leading scorer during the season, after he suffered a separated right shoulder in the opener.
He is out for at least three weeks but his athleticism and three-point shooting has hardly been missed.
Robinson had 19 points and 14 rebounds and Duncan added 18 and 14. The duo combined for three blocks and backstopped a defense that limited Dallas - one of the best-shooting teams in the NBA - to under 35 percent (33-of-95) from the field.
TITLE: Avalanche, Devils Victorious in Deciding 7th Games
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: DENVER, Colorado - The Colorado Avalanche set up a meeting with the St. Louis Blues in the Western Conference finals by crushing the Los Angeles Kings 5-1 on Wednesday to win their best-of-seven series 4-3.
Chris Drury sparked a four-goal third period as the top-seeded Ava lan che advanced to the conference finals for the third straight year. Nelson Emerson's goal with 89 seconds left in the second period lifted Los Angeles into a 1-1 tie and silenced the sellout crowd at the Pepsi Center.
But Drury got Colorado back on track 3:03 into the third, scoring his 17th career playoff goal and eighth game-winner. Rookie Ville Nieminen added a power-play tally and Shjon Podein ended a 14-game postseason scoring drought before Milan Hejduk found an empty net with 3:35 remaining.
An improbable playoff run finally ended for the Kings, who rallied from a 2-0 deficit in the first round against Detroit, and got back-to-back shutouts from Felix Potvin to force a seventh game against the team with the best record in the regular season.
New Jersey 5, Toronto 1. In New Jersey, the Devils, forced to test their championship mettle, passed with flying colors as they crushed the Toronto Maple Leafs 5-1 in a do-or-die game 7 on Wednesday to reach the Eastern Conference finals.
Faced with a second consecutive win-or-go-home situation and finding themselves down a goal after the first period, the defending Stanley Cup champions showed up with their "A" game in the second period, beating Toronto's goaltender Curtis Joseph four times to bury the Leafs.
Patrik Elias, who had been surprisingly quiet earlier in the series, scored twice in the four-goal burst after Sergei Nemchinov had leveled at 1-1 with a powerplay goal just 92 seconds into the middle session. Scott Stevens and John Madden also scored for the Devils, who await the winner of Thursday's game 7 in Buffalo between Dominik Hasek and the Sabres and Mario Lemieux's Pittsburgh Penguins.
The Devils, who eliminated Toronto in six games at the same stage last year, needed the full seven this time after falling behind 3-2 in the series. They forced a seventh game with a 4-2 win in Toronto as the Leafs, whose Stanley Cup drought now stretches to 34 years, squandered perhaps their best chance to oust the holders.
TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Stampede Kills 126
ACCRA, Ghana (Reuters) - Thousands of desperate relatives besieged a morgue in Ghana's capital on Thursday to search for victims of a soccer stampede that killed at least 126 people in Africa's worst football tragedy.
Authorities promised an inquiry into the disaster, which spectators said was triggered by police firing teargas after fans hurled missiles at the end of Wednesday's game between Ghana's two leading teams, arch-rivals Hearts of Oak and Asante Kotoko.
It was the soccer-mad continent's third deadly stadium disaster in a month, raising questions over Africa's hopes of hosting the 2010 World Cup finals.
Ghana's state news agency said 126 dead had been reported by officials at six hospitals in Accra. Local Joy FM radio said at least 130 people had died, including several Muslims taken for immediate burial in accordance with Islamic rites.
Soccer Coach Shot
GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador (Reuters) - Ecuador's national soccer coach, Colombian Hernan Dario Gomez, was in stable condition on Wednesday after being shot in the leg, and police were holding a soccer club president in connection with the attack.
Hundreds of fans took to the streets waving national flags to protest the attack on Gomez, a quasi-hero in this poor Andean country for bringing the national team near to qualifying for the 2002 World Cup.
He was shot late on Tuesday in a cafe at the Hilton Colon hotel in this coastal city, and police detained Joselo Rodriguez, president of Second Division club Santa Rita.
"He [Rodriguez] was identified as the author of the shooting of Hernan Dario Gomez and was detained last night," police spokesman Manuel Sar mi en to said.
Gomez suffered a broken nose in the attack, details of which were sketchy.
Domi Apologizes
EAST RUTHERFORD, New Jersey (AP) - Scott Niedermayer shook hands with Tie Domi in a hallway shortly after the New Jersey Devils defeated the Toronto Maple Leafs 5-1 in game 7 of the Eastern Conference semifinals on Wednesday night.
"Right after the game he came up to me and shook my hand and said a few words to me," said Niedermayer who missed the final three games of the series after sustaining a concussion when he took a vicious elbow from Domi late in game 4.
Domi was suspended for the rest of the playoffs because of the hit. He also will miss the first eight games of next season since Toronto was eliminated in this round.
"Maybe I have a bit of a problem with what happened," Niedermayer said of the ugly incident in which he was hurt. "Still, I have respect for how he phoned me. To come up like that and shake my hand, you have to respect that."
Niedermayer said Domi asked how he was feeling and said, "I wished it didn't happen."
TITLE: Bayern, Valencia To Battle for European Cup
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: MUNICH - Bayern Munich still bears the scars of its heart-breaking defeat in the 1999 final, but it is upbeat about winning the Champions League for the first time in 25 years.
"This could be Bayern's year," said vice president Karl-Heinz Rummenigge after his club beat holders Real 2-1 in the second leg of the semifinal for a 3-1 aggregate win.
Bayern president Franz Beckenbauer believes his team has more than justified its place in the final against Valencia in Milan's San Siro stadium on May 23.
"We're delighted to be in a European final again. If you beat Real Madrid and Manchester United twice, then you have earned your place in the final," said Beckenbauer.
Bayern has not won Europe's premier club competition since the last of three consecutive triumphs in 1976.
Few will ever forget their defeat in the 1999 final against United in Barcelona when they conceded two goals in injury time to lose 2-1.
They could make this season one to remember as they are also on course for their third straight Bundesliga title, trailing leaders Schalke 04 on goal difference with two matches to play.
Bayern banished some ghosts from the past when it overcame Real - its conquerors at the same stage last year - after disposing of Manchester United in the quarterfinals.
Bayern have made up for the anguish of that fateful night in 1999 by beating United twice in this year's campaign. Coach Ottmar Hitzfeld described the two victories over Real Madrid in the semifinals as "sensational."
"My team put in a fantastic performance. And we are a team that can always score goals at home," said Hitzfeld.
However, he was sanguine when assessing Bayern's chances against Spanish clubValencia.
"We showed how fit we'll be in the final today [Wednesday] and we have strong attacking capabilities. We've had a good Champions League," said Hitzfeld.
Midfielder Mehmet Scholl, who shone on Wednesday despite suffering from a sore ankle, also warned against getting too excited, particularly after the 1999 final.
"We haven't done it yet. Valencia are a dangerous side with excellent players. We have a brutal game ahead of us," Scholl said.
The Spanish side, which crushed England's Leeds United 3-0 in Tuesday's semifinal second leg in Spain, will be desperate to erase the memories of last year's disappointing performance in a 3-0 defeat by Real in Paris.
The German champions can take great heart from the win over Real. Madrid coach Vicente del Bosque complained how difficult it was to break down their defense.
"That was a notable but not a great performance by us. We had very strong opponents. Bayern played with five defenders and we couldn't get around that," del Bosque said.
While Bayern occasionally found the pace and trickery of Real left-back Roberto Carlos hard to counter, solid defending by Ghana's Sammy Kuffour, Germany's Thomas Linke and Sweden's Patrik Andersson kept Real out.
Bayern can welcome back inspirational playmaker Stefan Effenberg for the final after suspension, even though Champions League debutant and England under-21 international Owen Hargreaves was an able deputy in midfield alongside Scholl.
TITLE: Johnson Strikes Out 20 Reds
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PHOENIX - Twice before, Randy Johnson had fallen one strikeout short of the coveted 20 mark, so when he finally reached it, his emotion burst through.
He thrust his glove into the air, shouted to the sky, then lifted his hat to the cheering crowd.
"It's much like a no-hitter," Johnson said Wednesday as he reflected on his Tuesday-night masterpiece. "If it happens, it was meant to be. If it doesn't happen, well you just say you still gave it all you had.
"There are only two other players in the history of baseball who have done it," Johnson said. "There's a great deal of satisfaction in doing it."
Johnson joined Roger Clemens and Kerry Wood as the only pitchers to strike out 20 in nine innings. Clemens did it twice. The record for most strikeouts in a game is 21, set by Tom Cheney, who pitched all of a 16-inning game for the Washington Senators back in 1962.
Because the Diamondbacks and Reds were tied 1-1 when Johnson left the game after nine innings, his accomplishment will be listed by the Elias Sports Bureau, baseball's official record keeper, as second under most strikeouts in an extra-inning game, behind Cheney's 21.
He will not be listed as co-holder of the record for most strikeouts in a nine-inning game. In Johnson's mind, though, he shares that record with Clemens and Wood.
"I think I do, so when someone says I don't, well I did what they did in nine," Johnson said. "I'm not losing sleep over it. I know what I did. I'm not making a big deal out of it."
Mark Grace, who played first base behind Wood and Johnson in their 20-strikeout games, said whatever Elias says is irrelevent.
"Anybody who knows baseball realizes he did the same exact thing that the other guys did," Grace said, "and it was a fabulous accomplishment."
Johnson was satisfied he made the right decision when he told Arizona manager Bob Brenly his night was done after nine innings.
"I don't know how many pitches I had, but it wasn't really too important to go out for the 10th inning and possibly put the team in a situation to lose," Johnson said.
The Diamondbacks won 4-3 in 11.
Johnson threw 124 pitches, 92 for strikes. Brenly was satisfied he came out at the right time.
"I just asked him, 'How are you doing?'" Brenly said. "And, by the look on his face and the exhale of breath that he gave me when I asked him that question, I thought he'd had enough. He was physically and mentally spent."
Diamondbacks catcher Damian Miller said Johnson had command throughout.
"His slider was the best I've seen in the three years I've been here," Miller said. "It was devastating. I mean, sometimes I couldn't catch it, it was so good."
Johnson had a simple line - three hits, no walks. He retired the first 13 batters before the Reds nicked him for a run in the fifth on an RBI single by Ruben Rivera. But Cincinnati rookie Chris Reitsma matched him, allowing just seven hits and one run in eight innings.
Johnson's departure after nine innings almost backfired. Reliever Russ Springer walked two and gave up a two-run sacrifice fly to Alex Ochoa in the 11th as the Reds took a 3-1 lead.
But Arizona came back. Grace's two-run double tied it and then Danny Graves walked pinch-hitter Matt Williams with the bases loaded, forcing in the winning run.
Johnson struck out the side in the fourth, seventh and eighth innings, and fanned two batters in the first, second, third, fifth and ninth. His only one-strikeout inning was the sixth.
His sixth strikeout pushed him past Bob Gibson for 11th place all-time. Then he matched his personal best (19) by striking out Deion Sanders to start the ninth, and reached 20 when Juan Castro went down swinging for the final out.
The 20 strikeouts gave Johnson 92 for the season and 3,132 for his career. He twice struck out 19 in 1997 games for Seattle, in a 4-1 loss to Oakland and a 5-0 win against the Chicago White Sox.
"I'm in great company," Johnson said, "but now I know what they've had to do to get there. The thing that blows me away is I've got 3,000 strikeouts, and Nolan Ryan has 5,700. That puts things in perspective."