SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #694 (61), Friday, August 10, 2001
**************************************************************************


TITLE: Strike Virtually Closes City Port
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Local harbor pilots brought sea traffic into St. Petersburg's port to a standstill on Wednesday by initiating a work action in protest of a federal government decision to ban private pilot services in three major northern seaports. 
 "We are protesting against the government's intention to destroy the service of private pilots, which has existed successfully for the last 10 years," said Andrei Makeyev, a representative of the St. Petersburg Sea Pilot Association in an interview on Wednesday.
 "We demand contact with a presidential or government representative to resolve the situation," he said.
 On Wednesday, more than 100 ships, including 47 oil tankers were stuck on the approach to St. Petersburg, 13 kilometers west of Kronshtadt. Not a single harbor pilot worked that day, and pilots in Kaliningrad and Murmansk joined the action as well.
 Exceptions were made for five vessels on Wednesday, including two passenger boats that were guided into port from the Gulf of Finland after negotiations had been conducted between pilots and Inflot Management, the company responsible for foreign cruise ships. The passenger ships made port on schedule.
 The pilots are protesting a July 17 government decree that did not list St. Petersburg, Kaliningrad or Murmansk among the ports where the activity of commercial pilots is allowed. According to the decree, those ports are considered strategically important.
 "There is crucial, strategically significant sea traffic coming through those ports, and we cannot allow anything serious to happen there, such as people wanting to stop work for some reason, as they have now," said Alexander Filimonov, a spokesperson for the Transport Ministry in a telephone interview on Thursday.
 "Pilots [in those ports] do not pay anything to finance the renovation of harbor facilities and the security systems of ports. They just put all the money in their pockets. Private pilots have already shown that what they do they do to harm the state," Filimonov said.
 Port management has hired 19 state pilots since Wednesday, including one of the 107 commercial pilots who are on strike. Management said that a total of 70 pilots are required to return the port to normal operations.
 Andrei Markerov, a spokesperson for the port's management, said that the new state-employed pilots had carried out more than 100 operations on Thursday, leaving only about 20 cargo ships waiting to enter the port. Markerov said that the remaining backlog would be cleared by Friday morning.
 The striking commercial pilots are concerned that their incomes will be reduced if piloting activity is nationalized. According to Makeyev, pilots now earn an average of about $1,000 per month.
 He stated that commercial pilots in the southern port of Novorossiisk earned about that amount prior to seeing their activity transferred to state control last November. Now pilots who work there are paid state salaries of 5,000 rubles a month, Makeyev said. 
 Dmitry Korchnev, head of the Maxima Maritime Agency in Novorossiisk, said that local pilots earned up to $5,000 a month before they were transferred to state contracts. Now they earn 6,000 rubles.
 Local pilots fear that a similar fate awaits them.
 "There are state wage scales that cannot be ignored. What can a pilot's salary be if, according to state regulations, a government official makes about 8,000 rubles and the president earns just 16,000 rubles a month? Could a pilot's salary be higher?," Ma keyev said.
 St. Petersburg sea port management says it could. The monthly salary of a state-employed harbor pilot would be about 27,000 rubles (about $920), Interfax reported Thursday. 
 According to Makeyev, pilots at the Far Eastern ports of Nikolayevsk-na-Amurye and Nakhodka declared a "pre-strike condition" on Thursday in sympathy with the St. Petersburg action. Pilots from Vladivostok and Vyborg have also expressed solidarity although those ports are not among those the Transport Ministry considers strategically important.
 Alexei Gutsailo, spokesperson for Northwest Region Governor General Viktor Cherkesov, said Thursday that his office is in the process of studying the situation.
 "We are examining some documents, and after that is finished some measures will be taken. I would say something will be undertaken next week," Gutsailo said.
 City Hall could not be reached for comment Thursday.
 Negotiations Thursday between pilots and Cherkesov's inspector, Nikolai Vinichenko, resulted in an agreement that pilots would deliver passenger ships to the harbor. They agreed to this after the Transport Ministry pledged to open direct negotiations with pilots on Friday.
 The commercial firm Volgotanker has suffered the biggest financial losses from the strike, according to the daily newspaper Vedomosti. The paper quoted a company spokesperson saying that Volgotanker was losing $12 million per day.
 Serik Zhusupov, deputy head of the Sea Port Cargo Company, said that companies that work with his firm have lost an estimated 30 million ruble ($1 million) since the strike began.
 "This is very negative and can hardly be called partnership when one organization tries to solve its problems at the expense of the companies it works with. They say that 400 people work with them, but what about the 6,000 who work with the sea port?" Zhusupov said in an interview on Thursday.

TITLE: Kursk Families Haven't Forgotten
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Eleven-year-old Sasha Baigarin, the youngest son of Kursk submarine officer, Murat Baigarin, doesn't eat fish anymore. 
 "Mama, do you think the fish ate our daddy after the explosion?" he once asked his mother, Svetlana. 
 On Aug. 9, 2000, 35-year-old Captain Third Rank Murat Baigarin left his home in Vidayevo early in the morning, about 20 minutes earlier than he usually did before cruises.
 "Are you so tired of me that you are in a hurry to leave?" joked his wife, Svetlana, in the corridor of their two-room apartment.
 "No, I'm in a hurry to come back sooner," Murat answered.
 But he never came back. Murat Baigarin died in the Kursk's first compartment on Aug. 12, 2000.
 Baigarin wasn't supposed to be on the Kursk that day. Officially, his term of service had ended in May 2000, when he entered the post-graduate program at the St. Petersburg Naval Academy. He and his wife had just returned briefly to Vidayevo to pack up their belongings, leaving their two sons in St. Petersburg with Svetlana's parents.
 It came as a complete surprise when he was asked to take one more cruise on the Kursk as an experienced mine-layer. Leaving the apartment that morning, Baigarin was careful to take with him his dress shoes. It is a navy tradition to throw one's shoes into the sea during one's last cruise.
 One year later, Svetlana and her 15-year-old son Igor are standing in the noisy departure hall of the Moscow Station, waiting for a train to Murmansk. Like dozens of other Kursk families from across the country, the Baigarins are on their way to the memorial ceremony for the 118 victims of the accident in Vidayevo this Sunday.
 "On August 12, I expected him to come back," says Svetlana. "I fried him some fish, which was one of his favorite dishes. But he didn't come back that Saturday."
 Baigarina does not eat fish anymore either. She can't forget the smell of frying fish as she stood in the apartment, waiting for her husband to return.
 She first learned about the accident aboard the submarine from the television news on Aug. 14, 2000.
 "I couldn't believe that they said the word 'Kursk.' I called my parents in St. Petersburg every 15 minutes and just screamed," she said. "I thought I was losing my mind."
 Even now, a year later, she can hardly speak about it. Tears strangle her voice.
 The Baigarins spent 11 years in Vidayevo, years full of endless waiting and chronic shortages of money. After 1993, the sailors sometimes went as long as six months with a paycheck. 
 "It's hard to believe, but sometimes there was almost nothing to eat. Submariners' families exchanged what groceries they had to cook at least something. They gave each other medicine when someone's kid was sick," Baigarina recalled.
 Although they had a two-room apartment, they all crowded together in one room because the central heating never worked. Instead, they huddled around two electric space heaters. 
 When Sasha first heard of the accident, he went out and drew a picture of the Kursk on the pavement. Next to it, he wrote a formula for calculating how much oxygen was left on the submarine.
 "One day, he went out there again and suddenly cried, 'Papa's oxygen is gone! Papa is not alive anymore!'" Baigarina said.
 Just before Baigarin shipped out on the fatal cruise, he was able to take nearly six months' vacation with his family. They traveled together to the Urals to visit Baigarin's parents. Baigarin was able to spend a lot of time with his sons.
 "It was probably the longest period of time he ever spent with them," Baigarina said. "He managed to give them more than he ever had before. They went fishing, played soccer, talked a lot."
 Igor, a very serious looking teenager, stands next to his mother, trying to look older, solid, supportive.
 "I loved my dad very much," he says. "He was a very good father, cheerful, attentive, helpful. He taught us to tell the truth if we did anything wrong and not to hide it." 
 Perhaps that is why Igor found it so hard to watch the television reports when the Kursk sank. 
 The last time Murat and Svetlana left St. Petersburg for Vidayevo, they thought they were leaving for just two weeks.
 "I didn't even go to see my father off at the station," Igor recalls. "I said good-bye to him near the metro because I hate to see people off. Now I regret that I didn't go with him."
 Igor said that before his father left, he gave him some advice and instructions that Igor now refuses to reveal. 
 Sasha went to the station with his father that day and recalls that Murat's final advice was, "Study hard."
 Now, Sasha does study hard, and he often tells his family, "When I grow up, I'll get a good education and learn the truth about what happened to Papa's submarine."
 But Svetlana and Igor doubt they will ever know what happened. 
 "There are so many versions that I start doubting all of them," Igor said. 
 Murat and Svetlana met on June 13, 1984, at a dance party. She flirted with several boys that night, but only Baigarin dared to approach her at the end of the evening to ask for her telephone number.
 "At first, I was going to lie, but then I suddenly gave him the correct number," Baigarina said. 
 The couple married in April 1985, when Murat was still a first-year student at the Leningrad Submarine College.
 Baigarina says that a submariner's wife must have incredible patience and the character of an angel. 
 "It is a hard service that left its mark on all of them. Murat was a demanding person and he looked older than his age," she said.
 She never asked her husband to leave the service. She understood that serving aboard a submarine was his life's ambition. Since the first grade, he had been telling people that he would be a sailor.
 "They are all fanatics," she said. "I don't know what they like about it. I was on a submarine once and I didn't like it. The light made my eyes ache and there was that weird smell."
 Since the tragedy, the Baigarins received some compensation payments and a three-room apartment in St. Petersburg. But the children refuse to live there.
 "We have it because our daddy is dead," said Sasha. The family still lives in the one-room apartment of Svetlana's parents: five people, a cat and a guinea pig.

TITLE: Watchdog To Fight Money Laundering
AUTHOR: By Alla Startseva

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Commercial secrets will soon be a thing of the past.
 A financial watchdog with unprecedented powers to force corporations to hand over documents is to be set up to fight money laundering, a senior Finance Ministry official said Tuesday.
 The new body's creation is part of an anti-money-laundering bill that President Vladimir Putin signed into law Monday and which comes into force in February, Deputy Finance Minister Yury Lvov said at a news conference.
 "Banks, securities companies and others will be expected to inform this body directly, without withholding anything under the pretext of preserving commercial or state secrets," Lvov said.
 "The structure will in turn guarantee that any information turned in remains confidential," he added.
 Putin is to determine the form of the body and whether it is to be an independent agency or a structure within one of the ministries, Lvov said.
 The body will require 50 to 200 employees and its creation will cost $6 million. Lvov said it would start operating by the end of 2002 and become fully operational in two years.
 The new law, requiring banks to report large or suspicious transactions by their clients, will bring Russia into compliance with an international convention against money laundering.
 Russia signed the convention in May 1999, but lawmakers took until last April to ratify the treaty, earning the country a slot on a blacklist of 15 countries deemed "noncooperative" in the international effort to fight money laundering. The Group of Seven's Financial Action Task Force, or FATF, in June gave Russia until Sept. 30 to take steps against money laundering or face financial restrictions.
 The law requires banks, insurance and leasing companies, brokerages and other financial institutions to report all cash transactions of more than 600,000 rubles ($20,500) by an individual or company. Transfers of amounts above that sum to or from suspicious locations such as offshore zones will also be affected, as will transactions that are not typical of the individual's or company's activity. Purchases of real estate and antiques are excluded. The body is to report criminal transactions to the police.
 If the body has sufficient evidence that an operation is linked to money laundering, it will have the right to question the relevant parties on the source of funds involved in the transaction.
 Andrew Somers, president of the American Chamber of Commerce, said the new law should satisfy the FATF but went against the grain of other reforms.
 "This legislation should go a long way toward changing the image of Russia, but the creation of another agency goes against the principle of the general process of reducing the number of bureaucratic bodies," Somers said. "But this issue is so important for creating the friendly investment environment for attracting capital that it is appropriate to have a special agency with power."
 Jonas Bernstein, a senior Rus sia analyst with the James town Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, said information obtained by the monitoring body could be misused.
 "The likelihood that the new anti-money-laundering body's powers will be misused is great, given that, as Putin himself admitted last year, powerful business interests continue to use the state apparatus, including the law enforcement agencies, in their competitive struggles," Bernstein said. "So it's a fairly safe bet that at least some of the documents sequestered from companies will be used for extra-legal purposes."
 Analysts were skeptical that the new law and body would be effective in increasing financial regulation.
 "All illegal money is already off-shore, out of jurisdiction, and I don't think this body is going to make a particular lot of difference," said Tom Adshead, an analyst at Troika Dialog.
 Yury Korgunyuk of the Center for Applied Political Studies said the creation of a new body "is a typical, bureaucratic way of resolving a problem."
 &quot;In Soviet Russia, for example, when there was a lack of <i>valenki </i>[felt boots], the government immediately created a body responsible for valenki provision.&quot;

TITLE: Chief Cops Named to 7 Super Regions
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The Interior Ministry on Wednesday named the last of the police chiefs to patrol the country's seven super resgions, completing a week-long process that analysts say is part of a Kremlin drive to reign in the regions.
 Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov on Wednesday presented Major General Boris Uyemlyanin as the head of police for the Northwest Federal District in St. Petersburg.
 Gryzlov said Uyemlyanin, who had earlier served as police chief for the Arkhangelsk region, would consolidate the operations of the Northwest Region's police departments to avoid &quot;unnecessary overlapping.&quot;
 Uyemlyanin, in turn, said he would reshuffle the regional police departments and tackle as his top priorities organized and economic crime and juvenile delinquency.
 Gryzlov said all federal police departments would coordinate the activities of regional police departments.
 The appointment of police chiefs to the seven federal regions, which President Vladimir Putin created from Russia's 89 regions last year in a bid to reduce the powers of regional governors, comes just weeks after parliament passed a Kremlin-backed bill stripping the governors of their right to have a say in the appointment of regional police chiefs. That decision now rests solely with the interior minister.
 Gryzlov picked out the seven federal chiefs and forwarded their names to Putin for approval.
 The only post whose nominee did not get immediate approval was for the Southern Federal Regions, Interfax reported. The original nominee for the post was Lieutenant General Sergei Shchadrin, who had headed the Rostov regional police for two years. Shchadrin turned down the offer. Late last week, though, he was named the chief for the Central Federal Region. The Southern Federal Region police-chief job ended up going to Krasnoyarsk regional police chief Mikhail Rudchenko.
 Political analysts said the federal police chiefs will help the Kremlin in strengthening its powers in the regions, particularly since two important posts - in the Southern and Central regions - are being filled by outsiders.

TITLE: Russian Prosecutors Implicate Tymoshenko
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russian military prosecutors said Wednesday that they have gathered evidence implicating former Ukrainian deputy prime minister Julia Tymoshenko in a murky financial scam that cost the Defense Ministry nearly half a billion dollars in 1996.
 Also Wednesday, the Prosecutor General's Office announced that it has sent evidence to Ukraine that Tymoshenko and her husband, Alexander, violated customs regulations in 1995.
 Julia Tymoshenko, who oversaw Ukraine's energy industry until she was ousted as deputy prime minister earlier this year, denied the allegations.
 &quot;Russian prosecutors don't have a single piece of evidence against me,&quot; Tymoshenko said, according to the Ukrainian news site www.korrespondent.net. &quot;That is why they are passing the criminal cases to Ukraine, where it will be used for political purposes.&quot;
 Tymoshenko, who is an outspoken critic of President Leonid Kuchma and the leader of the Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) opposition party, has been in and out of prison several times this year on corruption charges.
 Deputy Chief Military Prosecutor Yury Yakovlev denied that there were any political implications to the case.
 &quot;There was neither politicking nor bias in our actions,&quot; he told Interfax.
 He said his office passed evidence to the Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office that Tymoshenko had ordered bribes be paid to several Russian government officials as part of a scheme under which Ukraine used Russian money to pay back gas debts.
 He did not elaborate on Tymoshenko's alleged involvement.
 He said, however, that his office was acting in accordance with the 1993 Minsk Convention, under which members of the Commonwealth of Independent States cannot investigate criminal cases against citizens of other former Soviet republics.
 The Prosecutor General's Office, meanwhile, said its evidence showed that Tymoshenko was caught red-handed by customs officials at Vnukovo Airport trying to spirit $100,000 out of the country in July 1995.
 A prosecutor's office spokesperson refused to say why the six-year-old case was being made public only now.
 It was unclear Wednesday if Tymoshenko would face charges on the newly disclosed evidence.
 The Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office refused to comment.
 But Tymoshenko and her supporters said they are convinced that Ukraine and Russia are working hand in hand on the matter. &quot;Russia decided to bet on Kuchma and support him for a third term as president,&quot; Tymoshenko told Korrespondent.net. &quot;Having done that, Russia is assisting in the destruction of Ukraine's opposition.&quot;
 Her Batkivshchyna party claimed Russian prosecutors had acted after Kuchma asked President Vladimir Putin to cooperate in exchange for giving Russian firms better access to Ukrainian markets.
 The fraud scheme that military prosecutors are saying Tymoshenko is linked to has already led to charges being lodged against the Defense Ministry's former finance chief, Colonel General Georgy Oleinik. He was charged with abuse of office in December 2000. Oleinik, who denies the charge, is under house arrest.
 According to Russian media reports, the complicated scheme in which the Defense Ministry lost $450 million worked like this: Russian gas giant Gazprom borrowed $450 million from Imperial Bank and National Reserve Bank in 1995 to pay taxes via the Finance Ministry. Those funds were then sent to the Defense Ministry's finance department, which in turn transferred them to British-based United Energy International Ltd., a co-founder and agent of Ukraine's Unified Energy Systems.
 The money went through this circular route as a way to help the Defense Ministry pay unspecified Ukrainian companies for deliveries of &quot;material-technical valuables,&quot; the media reports said. No such deliveries were ever found in ministry invoices.
 Later, United Energy International wired the money back to Gazprom to pay off part of Ukraine's gas debt.
 Yakovlev said Wednesday that former deputy finance minister Andrei Vavilov has also been charged with abuse of office in the scandal.
 Earlier reports had said Vavilov was a witness and not a suspect in the probe.
 Yakovlev said Vavilov was charged in May this year and his case was sent in July to the Prosecutor General's Office for investigation.

TITLE: Still No Answers in Pushkin Square Case
AUTHOR: By Ana Uzelac 

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A year after a bomb exploded in the underground passageway at Pushkin Square, the place has the feel of an empty gray cement basement. 
 The passages have been renovated but the colorful kiosks have not been allowed to return to the areas damaged by the blast. The only thing there now is a marble plaque commemorating the &quot;victims of the terrorist act&quot; on Aug. 8, 2000.
 But no terrorist has been found, and investigators have not determined the motive for the bombing, which left 13 people dead and 118 injured. Terrorism is only one of three possibilities.
 &quot;The criminal case on the blast in the underground passage at the Pushkinskaya metro station remains unsolved,&quot; the Moscow City Prosecutor's Office said in a statement Tuesday. &quot;Currently there are no people detained for or charged with this crime.&quot;
 The Pushkin Square bombing is one of the most high-profile cases in the city's recent history, and the failure to solve it is all the more glaring in light of city and federal authorities' repeated pledges to do away with terrorism and violence tied to organized crime. So far, the only thing that the yearlong investigation has managed to establish is the sequence of events just before the blast.
 According to the prosecutor's office, the explosive device that tore the passage apart was a mixture of TNT and hexogen combined with nuts and bolts. The press release said a motorcycle battery also was used, presumably as a detonator. The bomb was packed in two containers, a briefcase and a plastic bag, which were left by two unidentified men at kiosk No. 52 at 5:50 p.m., eight minutes before the explosion.
 The men said they would have to change money to pay for their purchases. They were seen running out of the passageway a minute before the blast, which happened at 5:58 p.m.
 Neither of them has been found, even though federal police told Interfax on Tuesday they have received around 20,000 calls from people who thought they saw men who looked like two of the sketches posted around the city.
 The police and prosecutor's office refused to answer questions about the investigation, releasing statements instead. 
 The prosecutors' statement gives the numbers of homes and companies searched (more than 6,000) and kiosks closed (116) as a result of those searches, albeit for reasons not connected with the Pushkin Square bombing. 
 At one point, the probe focused on the so-called Kemerovo gang, the prosecutor's office said. Two of its members were arrested and sentenced to several years in prison after weapons and drugs were found at their homes. &quot;However, their connection to the bombing was not proven,&quot; the release said.
 The investigators said they still have three equally likely possible motives: a terrorist attack, a criminal showdown and the settling of personal accounts.
 Immediately after the blast, Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov hurried to announce that there was a &quot;Chechen trail&quot; to the bombing, and police in the first few days concentrated almost solely on detaining city residents with Chechen names or of Caucasian origin. The federal authorities, on the other hand, insisted from the beginning that all three possible versions should be investigated.
 Svetlana Gannushkina, the head of the human rights group Civic Assistance, recalls being busy at the time recording the numerous detentions of Moscow Chechens and the reports of police abuse that followed. 
 &quot;There is a Russian joke about a person who loses his wallet in the dark and goes searching for it under a street lamp - because at least there is some light there,&quot; she said in a telephone interview Tuesday. &quot;Our police remind me of such people: They went after the Chechens who were registered in Moscow, while the real culprits were already far away.&quot;
 In the days after the blast, people came to the site to lay flowers and light candles for the victims. Long lines of people wanting to donate blood for the injured formed outside medical clinics.
 The city government considered the idea of closing all the kiosks in all the underground passages in Moscow, but soon thought better of it. They are the main source of income for a small army of traders and vendors, and closing them would have left thousands of people jobless as well as cut the city's tax revenues. The idea of banning sales of easily flammable substances in the passages also was considered and then silently dropped. The kiosks under Pushkin Square still sell perfume and nail polish.
 The kiosks were not replaced in the passages closest to the blast site, but farther down the main passageway there are gleaming new kiosks where the reconstruction was finished in May. Vendors complain that their new work places look nicer but are smaller than the old ones. But they also say they feel quite safe working in the passageway. 
 Tamara Ivanovna, a vendor in one of the kiosks in the underpass who witnessed the blast, said the new regulations make her feel safer now that vendors can't leave their garbage in the passage anymore, and strange bags are more likely to be noticed. And the new lighting system guarantees that if something happens, people would at least be able to run out instead of tripping over one another.
 But one thing she is sure of. &quot;A year has passed and they haven't found the culprits. For me that means they will never find them.&quot;

TITLE: U.S. Embassy Sets Up Number for Visa Information
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova 

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The U.S. Embassy in Moscow has set up a toll telephone number for visa inquiries in what it says is a bid to ease the process of applying for American visas.
 Calls to the number, 258-2525, cost $1.60 a minute and are billed to callers' residential telephones. Queries from mobile and work phones are not accepted.
 The number, which the embassy set up jointly with Russian telephone company Direct Star, is the result of months of research into how to improve services at the consulates, then-Consul General Laura Clerici said at a signing ceremony with Direct Star in June.
 She said the research found that the consulate was only able to handle 20 to 30 percent of all calls with its telephone lines.
 The U.S. Consulate has recently been accused of offering inadequate visa services. The Russian Association of Travel Agencies placed the consulate next to last in a list of 31 foreign consulates in Moscow for neglecting to provide clear guidelines for visas. Italy came in last.
 Clerici defended the fee for the telephone calls, saying it was affordable for Russians planning to travel to the United States.
 &quot;People applying for a visa are prepared to pay a limited fee in order to get the information required to get a visa,&quot; she said. &quot;If you cannot pay $1.60 for a call, how can you afford going to the United States?&quot;
 She added that similar systems are used by U.S. consulates elsewhere.
 Michel Mertens, general director of Direct Star, said callers should not get a busy signal since the system has 50 lines.
 Calls are immediately transferred to an automated answering system, where callers can select answers to frequently asked questions or request to speak with a consulate-trained operator.
 Other embassies in Moscow contacted by The St. Petersburg Times said they have no plans to open similar systems.
 German Embassy spokesperson Hansjorg Haber said, however, that the embassy was interested in seeing how the system plays out for the Americans.
 &quot;We are open to the idea,&quot; he said.
 A British Embassy spokesperson said the British consulate has no intention of charging applicants for giving visa guidelines.
 &quot;People pay for the visas, not for information,&quot; he said.
 The spokesperson added that the consulate posts all necessary visa information on its Internet site (www.britemb. msk.ru).
 The U.S. Consulate's toll telephone number is the latest step the U.S. Embassy has taken to improve visa services.
 Earlier this year, the consulate launched a delivery service with Federal Express that picks up passports and returns them with visas within the city limits for 150 rubles (about $5) each way.

TITLE: Hermitage-Guggenheim Museums Set To Open
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LAS VEGAS, Nevada - A pair of museums created by Russia's State Hermitage Museum and New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation will open at the Venetian hotel-casino on Sept. 16.
 The two museums were built by Pulitzer Prize-winning architect Rem Koolhaas in the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino.
 The 5,733-square-meter Guggenheim Las Vegas will feature &quot;special large-scale exhibitions&quot; and stands between the hotel's casino and the parking garage. The 690-square-meter Hermitage Guggenheim Museum will feature art from both the Hermitage and the Guggenheim. The smaller museum's collection will rotate every six months.
 &quot;The Art of the Motorcycle,&quot; which opened at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1998, will feature more than 130 motorcycles and will open at Guggenheim Las Vegas.
 &quot;Masterpieces and Master Collectors: Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings,&quot; featuring 45 masterpieces from both the Hermitage and the Guggenheim, will run from Sept. 16 through March 17, 2002, at the Hermitage Guggenheim.
 &quot;Our intention is to use our permanent collections to create a unique cultural experience,&quot; says Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the Hermitage. &quot;We expect to be reaching a new audience, which, after all, is our mission.&quot;
 Because about 35 million people visit Las Vegas each year, it is easier to bring art to them than to hold hundreds of exhibits across the United States, Venetian chairman Sheldon Adelson said last fall.
 The center would be the fifth Guggenheim branch in the world, joining branches in New York, Berlin, Venice, and Bilbao. 
 Ticket prices are anticipated at $15 a head with discounts for senior citizens. There will be no charge for children.
 The Hermitage Museum and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation closed a cooperation deal last summer, with an eye to building new display space for contemporary art at the Hermitage and a series of museums worldwide to allow them to hold joint exhibits.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Russia in NATO?
 

BERLIN (AP) - German Chancellor Gerhard Schr&ouml;der sees Russia eventually becoming a full NATO member, according to a magazine interview published Wednesday.
 Russia is currently connected to NATO through the NATO-Russia Permanent Joint Council, which was created in 1997. In an interview in Stern magazine, however, Schr&ouml;der said that the council "cannot be the last word in the relationship between NATO and Russia."
 "Thinking in long-term historical dimensions, Russia's NATO membership can't be ruled out," he was quoted as saying.
 President Vladimir Putin is expected to visit Germany in the fall. Putin has also said either Russia should be allowed to join NATO or the alliance should disband altogether.
 
 
Kazakhs Disarm
 

ALMATY, Kazakhstan (AP) - Fire swept through a depot holding most of the Kazakhstan military's ammunition Wednesday, exploding shells and sending rockets flying for several kilometers. A village was evacuated but there were no immediate reports of injury.
 Ammunition was still detonating in a dramatic fireworks display early on Thursday, 10 hours after the fire first broke out, said Meiram Iskakov, the head of the emergencies department of the Karaganda province in central Kazakhstan. He added, however, that "the frequency of the explosions is lessening.''
 Rumbles from huge explosions alarmed the city of Balkhash, a regional capital of 150,000 about 48 kilometers northeast of the depot, prompting many residents to hide in basements in panic, officials said.
 Authorities sent fire engines from around the region and ordered a small field hospital set up nearby.
 Officials said that the cause of the blaze hadn't been determined. Kazakhstan's Defense Ministry refused to comment on the fire, or to say how many people were stationed at the depot or how much ammunition it stored. The regional administration spokesperson said the depot contained ammunition for the entire ground troops and the air force of the former Soviet republic.
 
 
Novosibirsk Murder
 

MOSCOW (AP) - Igor Belyakov, the deputy mayor of Novosibirsk, was shot dead Tuesday in the second fatal attack on a municipal official in two weeks, police said. 
 Belyakov's car came under fire as he was on his way to work from his country house, Interfax said. 
 Belyakov headed the city's consumer market and land committee, said Olga Sedina, a spokesperson for the Novosibirsk City Hall. 
 According to NTV television, Belyakov had recently called for stricter control on trade in the city. 
 The shooting comes just two weeks after Leonid Oblonsky, a Moscow city official who was involved in regulating trade and wholesale markets, was killed.
 
 
Oil Slick Spotted
 

VLADIVOSTOK, Far East (AP) - An oil slick 25 kilometers long was spotted Tuesday off Sakhalin Island in Russia's Far East, emergency officials said. 
 The oil slick is located 100 meters from the shore, near the mouth of the Tambovka River at the island's southern end, a duty officer at the Sakhalin emergency department said. 
 An emergency commission flew to the site to determine the cause, the officer said. 



TITLE: FSB Man Up for Aeroflot Board
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Aeroflot on Wednesday released the list of candidates for its new board of directors, with the surprise inclusion of the FSB's economic- crime chief.
 The new board is to be elected at an extraordinary shareholders meeting in September, at the request of new shareholders linked to Sibneft owner and Chukotka Governor Roman Abramovich.
 The 13-person list for the nine seats in the majority state-owned airline includes the deputy head of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, Yury Zaostrovtsev, along with state officials, company managers and new shareholders.
 Zaostrovtsev, whose candidacy was put forward by the state, is reportedly linked with Siberian Aluminum. Analysts said Wednesday he could be a compromise figure between the interests of the state and new shareholders.
 The extraordinary shareholders meeting, due Sept. 6, was called by offshore company Carroll Trading, which owns a 10 percent stake in Aeroflot.
 The new shareholders, who have managed to accumulate up to 29 percent of the airline, include other offshore companies and are all allegedly connected with Abramovich. They did not manage to put forward their representatives in time for Aeroflot's annual shareholders meeting on May 19 and only voiced their intention to be represented on the board afterward.
 The new shareholders' nominees are Aeroflot Deputy General Director Alexander Zurabov; director of corporate relations at Russian Aluminum Alexander Komrako; and two other businessmen close to the aluminum giant, Prospect Investment's Mikhail Vinchel and Profit House brokerage's Alexander Nemtsov.
 Industry analysts said the new shareholders could win board seats for three of their candidates. Five are expected to go to the state, which, in addition to Zaostrovtsev, nominated First Deputy Property Minister Alexander Braverman, Transport Ministry department head Vladimir Goryachev, Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref, Deputy Property Minister Sergei Molozhavy, Transport Minister Sergei Frank, Deputy Finance Minister Vladimir Chernukhin, and presidential assistant Yevgeny Shaposhnikov. The last spot is expected to go to management's candidate, the airline's general director, Valery Okulov.
 When asked Wednesday about Zaostrovtsev's candidacy, the secretary of Aeroflot's board, Anatoly Brylov, said there was nothing strange about the state nominating an FSB official.
 &quot;It's in the competence of the state to decide who should represent its interests on the board,&quot; Brylov said by telephone. &quot;The board is renewed by one-third every year with various ministries being represented.&quot;
 Brylov added that for four years starting from 1994, a member of the security services had been on the Aeroflot board, but then this practice was abandoned. He would not say why the practice is now being reinstated.
 The FSB refused to provide information on Zaostrovtsev on Wednesday. Local media earlier reported that Zaostrovtsev left the FSB in 1993 after serving in its department of economic counterintelligence. Novaya Gazeta reported last month that he had worked for a number of companies, including Medoks, part of Siberian Aluminum. Siberian Aluminum, a major shareholder in Russian Aluminum, denied Wednesday that Zaostrovtsev ever worked for the company.
 Zaostrovtsev joined the presidential administration in 1998 and later that year returned to the FSB, Novaya Gazeta reported. Having received secret-service training in St. Petersburg, Zaostrovtsev is said to be connected with President Vladimir Putin.
 Government board members were unavailable for comment.

TITLE: Baltika Turning Attention To Eastern Opportunities
AUTHOR: By Alla Startseva

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Having conquered western Russia, the country's largest brewery is looking to the east.
 Baltika is preparing its invasion of beer markets in the Far East of the country and has no intention of stopping there. The St. locally based brewery has its sights set on China - and now even North Korea.
 On Monday, during his visit to St. Petersburg, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il was so impressed by Baltika that he overstayed a scheduled 20-minute visit to the brewery by about an hour. Kim and Baltika's general director Tai muraz Bolloyev, reached a verbal agreement on Baltika becoming the consultant for brewery construction in North Korea.
 After a plant excursion and beer tasting, Kim said he was planning to buy British brewing equipment and asked if Baltika would be willing to give advice.
 &quot;We consider it as a great honor,&quot; said Baltika Vice President Adam Tlekhurai.
 The company has been conducting negotiations for the construction of a new plant in the Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk - and when Kim found out about it &quot;he was very inspired,&quot; another Baltika spokesperson said.
 &quot;Thus, you will be closer to us,&quot; said Kim, Baltika reported.
 Tlekhurai said Baltika plans to invest from $50 million to $60 million to build the new brewery, which is to produce 100 million liters of beer a year.
 &quot;The local market is very interesting for Baltika,&quot; said another Baltika spokesperson. &quot;A part of the production might be exported to the north of China.&quot;
 Andrei Ivanov, an analyst at Troika Dialog, said Baltika was forced to move to the East &quot;because the European market was growing very fast and is now close to saturation.&quot;
 Baltika, which is 75 percent owned by the Scandinavian-controlled Baltic Beverages Holding, has three plants in Russia, in St. Petersburg, Rostov-na-Donu and Tula. In July, Baltika announced plans to invest $360 million building six new breweries in the CIS, including the one in Khabarovsk. According to research agency Business Analytica's data from April, BBH controls 32.6 percent of the national beer market.
 Baltika already has a strong position in the Far East, leading that market with a 20 percent share. Its closest competitors are Khabarovsk's Amurpivo with 13.2 percent, Vladivostok's Pivoindustriya Primoriya with 9 percent and Bravo International with 8.5 percent, according to Business Analytica.
 After his visit to the Baltika brewery, the North Korean leader took away a 5-liter keg in memory of the tasting. Of all Baltika's offerings, Kim's favorites were the premium brew No. 5 &quot;Parnas&quot; and No. 7 &quot;Export,&quot; a Baltika official said.

TITLE: RusAl Facing More U.S. Charges
AUTHOR: By Torrey Clark

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Citing new details from a &quot;financial insider,&quot; a group of companies has filed additional charges in New York against Russian Aluminum and its chief executive, Oleg Deripaska, accusing him of fraud, money laundering, extortion and being an accomplice to murder.
 The plaintiffs are seeking $3 billion for the damages incurred during the takeover of several prized metals assets over the last several years that led to the consolidation of the aluminum industry and the creation of Russian Aluminum, now the world's second-largest aluminum producer.
 The new charges, filed late Friday, are amendments to the original $2.7 billion lawsuit filed in late December.
 New details in the amended suit filed Friday center mainly on testimony from Dzhalol Khaidarov, described as the former financial manager and close associate of Mikhail Chernoi and Iskander Makhmudov, alleged to be Deripaska's associates in the &quot;conspiracy&quot; to acquire Russia's major aluminum-making and other metals assets illegally.
 The plaintiffs, including Base Metal Trading, Alucoal Holdings and the Russian company Mikom, are seeking triple damages under U.S. racketeering laws. They are claiming $900 million in losses from the false bankruptcy of the Novokuznets aluminum factory, or NKAZ, and $100 million from the takeover - &quot;through pure physical force of armed thugs, bribery [and] extortion&quot; - of the Kachkanar vanadium-mining complex, or GOK, both of which are now controlled by Russian Aluminum, or RusAl.
 Mikhail Zhivilo, the former head of Mikom and director of NKAZ, is currently in France. He was arrested earlier this year as part of an extradition request from Russia, but was later released. He is accused of planning the assassination of Kemerovo Governor Aman Tuleyev.
 Khaidarov was ousted as GOK's general director in an armed takeover in January 2000. Chernoi, who is currently under house arrest in Israel on money-laundering charges, and Makh mu dov are plaintiffs, as is Moscow's powerful MDM Bank, which the lawsuit alleges is controlled by Makhmudov.
 &quot;Makhmudov, Deripaska and MDM Bank are directly involved in the laundering of funds through banks in the United States that are ultimately converted to cash and used for, among other things, bribes in Russia as described herein,&quot; the plaintiffs allege.
 Both RusAl and MDM deny the charges. On Tuesday, an MDM spokesperson said Makhmudov has no involvement in the bank. MDM head Andrei Melnichenko told Expert magazine in June that although Makhmudov held a stake in MDM through his company Urals Metals and Mining Plant for a short period starting in 1994, &quot;since the end of 1996, no companies belonging to Makhmudov's group have been among our shareholders.&quot;
 Listed among &quot;defendants and related persons&quot; in the 69-page complaint is &quot;the Chubais team.&quot; The plaintiffs contend that in 1999, Anatoly Chubais ordered Zhivilo to cooperate with &quot;the conspirators&quot; in their efforts to consolidate the aluminum industry.
 Chubais also allegedly told Zhivilo that he was responsible for Tuleyev's appointment as governor of Kemerovo, where the prized Novokuznets aluminum factory is located. Chubais allegedly then told Zhivilo that if he didn't follow instructions he would have Tuleyev transfer control of NKAZ to Deripaska and Makhmudov &quot;by whatever means necessary.&quot;
 The plaintiffs allege that the defendants paid $3 million to Tuleyev to fix the local court proceedings to bankrupt NKAZ and to frame Zhivilo. They also allege that Deripaska, Chernoi and Makhmudov paid $850,000 in &quot;campaign contributions&quot; to Eduard Roussel, governor of Sverdlovsk, where GOK is located, in exchange for helping the defendants take over GOK.
 The suit also names U.S. companies as &quot;victims of the conspiracy,&quot; including Alcoa, Reynolds Aluminum Co., now part of Alcoa, and Transworld, which Chernoi helped found.
 Alcoa's and Reynolds' attempts to buy a controlling stake in the Bratsk aluminum plant in 1998 failed when RusAl took over the plant. At the time, U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was Alcoa's CEO.

TITLE: German Court's Ruling Pits Slavneft Against CB
AUTHOR: By Anna Raff

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A German court has demanded Slavneft pay $2.6 million in loans that it guaranteed to a German bank, but the oil major contends it doesn't have to pay because the guarantee's existence violates Russian law.
 The conflict puts two state-controlled structures at odds with each other. Slavneft, Russia's eighth-largest oil company, is owned by the governments of Russia and Belarus. The controlling packet of Frankfurt-based Ost-West Handelsbank lies in the hands of Vneshtorgbank, which in turn is 99 percent controlled by the Central Bank.
 &quot;We believe that conflicts between two state-controlled companies should be resolved through negotiations,&quot; a Slavneft spokesperson said.
 The saga began in early 1998, when then-Slavneft president Anatoly Fomin signed a letter that guaranteed part of a $6 million loan to Uni-Baltic Oy, an obscure Finnish trading company.
 In a release issued Wednesday, Slavneft conceded that Fomin signed such a letter but stated that the process was plagued by &quot;crude violations&quot; of the company charter. For example, Fomin did not seek board approval before signing off on the guarantee. Also, Slavneft was legally prohibited from taking on foreign-currency obligations without prior approval of Russia's Central Bank.
 Ost-West Handelsbank approached Slavneft about the guarantee on June 10, 1998, and was refused. Its repeated attempts to receive the repayment were unsuccessful, so the bank decided to take Slavneft to court in Frankfurt.
 Fomin was ousted as Slavneft's board chairman in July 1998 after Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Khristenko called the company's tax payments into question. In August of that year, the board voted him out as president while he was on vacation. Fomin spearheaded Slavneft's creation while he was deputy fuel and energy minister in 1994.
 Fomin, now board chairman of Yugra Bank, could not be reached for comment.

TITLE: MTS Arrival Could Open Way for CDMA
AUTHOR: By Leonid Konik

PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: Radiotelecommunications Company (RTK) is aspiring to become St. Petersburg's fifth cellular-telephone service provider. The company already holds a license and now seems to have found the necessary investment to begin operations. The only thing RTK now lacks is the bandwidth required to run its system.
 At present, the firm provides service using the CDMA standard under the Petrosvyaz brand name, but only in four cities in the Leningrad Oblast, with a total of 7,000 subscribers. According to RTK General Director Igor Petrov however, the company has bigger plans.
 &quot;The cellular business in the oblast is just not profitable enough,&quot; Petrov said. &quot;But we are now planning to set up a network in St. Petersburg.&quot;
 Metrosvyaz Ltd., which is registered in Cyprus and owns 50 percent of PTS' stock has come forward with the investment necessary to build the new system. 
 PTK has held the license to operate within St. Petersburg for three years, but the Communications Ministry has maintained that there is no surplus bandwidth in the 800-Megahertz range to assign to it.
 But Petrov thinks that the roots of the company's inability to procure the bandwidth are not only technical, but also political in nature. Officially, the CDMA standard has not been cleared for cellular-service usage in Russia, but operators are generally able to get around this restriction.
 RTK seems to be banking on the fact that until June Petrov had been working as the deputy chief of operations at Gossvyaznadzor for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast. Gos svyaz nadzor is the federal agency that monitors the telecommunications sector.
 But some analysts question how good RTK's chances are at effectively competing in the St. Petersburg market.
 &quot;It's not easy to break into a market that is dominated by Telecominvest [through North-West GSM] and where [Moscow-based] MTS will soon arrive,&quot; Anton Pogrebinsky, an analyst with J'son & Partners, said. &quot;It will all depend on how well they are able to mobilize their lobbying resources.&quot;
 &quot;The position of their investor, Metrosvyaz, used to be very strong, but it has weakened somewhat.&quot;
 Technically, St. Petersburg already has one provider operating on the CDMA standard. St. Petersburg Telecom, which provides AMPS-based cellular service under the FORA trademark, also formally announced that it was kicking off a CDMA system last September. But the actual taking on of subscribers has not gotten underway.
 St. Petersburg Telecom acting general director Victor Sadovnikov says that FORA expects to be granted a license to operate a system on the GSM-1800 standard in the city and, as such, plans to develop further the CDMA system have been put on hold. If, as he expects, FORA does get a GSM license, then that would free up the CDMA bandwidth that RTK presently lacks, and RTK's Petrov says that discussions between the two companies are already underway.
 Should RTK work out a deal with FORA for the bandwidth, the size of the investment required to put its system into operation would be relatively modest.
 According to Alexander Andreyev, technical director at FORA, the installation of 30 base stations would be sufficient to provide coverage for the entire St. Petersburg area. With each of the base stations costing between $60,000 and $100,000, the total cost of the undertaking, including the price for a central switching station, would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 million.
 By comparison, MTS this year alone plans to pour $50 million into their St. Petersburg network, covering the cost of installing 120 base stations.

TITLE: Vimpelcom Pushing Ahead With Regional Development
AUTHOR: By Elizabeth Wolfe

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Trying to catch mobile subscribers outside its home town, Vimpelcom-R, the regional arm of the country's second-leading operator, plans to pour as much as $530 million through 2004 into building a regional network, a company official said Wednesday.
 Beyond the lucrative capital, less than 2 percent of the population uses mobile phones, and cellular operators are increasingly chasing potential customers everywhere they can find them, from Belarus to the North Caucasus and across Siberia to the Far East.
 &quot;Traditionally, the Russian regions are considered hopeless. You can do business in Moscow and a few romantics say in St. Petersburg as well. Now we think the situation has changed,&quot; said Stanislav Shekshnya, general director of Alfa-Eco-Telecom, a Vimpelcom shareholder, at a news conference Wednesday.
 Vimpelcom has 95,000 subscribers outside the Moscow region, just over 1 percent of its subscriber base, with licenses for four of Russia's seven federal regions. No. 1 cellular operator Mobile Telesystems has 2 million subscribers, 228,000 outside Moscow.
 The company expects a 30 percent to 35 percent market share in the regions, compared to around 40 percent in Moscow, said Alexei Mischenko, general director of Vimpelcom-Regions, the subsidiary responsible for development outside Moscow.
 The $530 million investment includes $200 million in vendor financing and assumes the possibility that Vimpelcom and strategic partner Telenor of Norway will exercise their option to invest $117 million into Vimpelcom-R. In May, when Alfa Group paid $247 million for blocking stakes in Vimpelcom and Vimpelcom-R, Telenor and Vimpelcom got the option to jointly invest another $117 million into the regions.
 Shekshnya said in about five years the value of Vimpelcom-R would reach that of its parent, and the two companies may merge.
 Until Alfa came on board with cash, analysts had doubted the strength of Vimpelcom's regional prospects. It still lacks a license for St. Petersburg, though the Communications Ministry has said it will issue a third license when penetration reaches 10 percent, which Shekshnya said should happen by year's end. Before the end of 2002, commercial launches are planned for Saratov, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk and Rostov-na-Donu.
 With St. Petersburg holding Telecominvest and MTS both making moves across the country, Vimpelcom could not have waited much longer to roll out a network, some analysts said.
 &quot;The first mover will enjoy a significant competitive advantage,&quot; said Andrei Braginsky, an analyst at Renaissance Capital.
 The potential of the regions is still up in the air, and companies are looking at slow and steady growth rather than a boom.
 &quot;We've always underestimated the amount of money that is available for something that people really want,&quot; said Tom Adshead of Troika Dialog.
 MTS is considered to be the furthest along, starting earlier than the rest of the pack and with substantial capital behind it.
 While only 2.4 percent of Telecominvest's subscribers are located outside the Northwest Region, a spokesperson said they are negotiating to cooperate with companies holding licenses in the regions where Telecominvest currently has no presence: Moscow and the Urals.
 Another potential hot spot is the Northern Caucasus, where Vimpelcom and Telecominvest, through Mobicom-Kavkaz, both have GSM licenses. MTS majority shareholder Sistema has had its eye on another prize in the region - Kuban-GSM, the country's largest operator outside Moscow and St. Petersburg with more than 200,000 subscribers. But this week Telenor was reported to be in talks with Kuban-GSM. Shekshnya said those negotiations began before a contract was signed at the end of May tying Telenor's and Alfa Eco's future telecoms forays in Russia to Vimpelcom.

TITLE: Fed Issues Gloomy Report On State of U.S. Economy
AUTHOR: By Martin Crutsinger

PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - The U.S. economy was still mired in a slowdown during July, and manufacturing companies' weakness was spilling into other areas, the Federal Reserve said Wednesday.
 Analysts said the exceptionally gloomy report sets the stage for a seventh interest-rate cut when Fed policy-makers meet on Aug. 21.
 The Fed's latest survey compiled from reports from its 12 regional banks found slow growth or none at all in most parts of the country.
 &quot;The overall message from this report is that the economy is moving sideways at best,&quot; said Lynn Reaser, chief economist at Banc of America Capital Management Inc. &quot;The tone was very negative.&quot;
 The economic gloom had an impact on Wall Street on Wednesday where the Dow Jones industrial average fell 165.24 to close at 10,293.50, its lowest close in 11 sessions. The NASDAQ composite index fell 61.43 to 1,966.36, a 3 percent loss and its weakest finish since July 24.
 The Fed survey, known as the beige book for the color of its cover, found little sign of a pickup although it noted that home sales, helped by low mortgage rates, had remained at high levels.
 Economists said the Fed's description of a listless economy was consistent with the June-July time period when the survey was taken, a period that many of them believe will reflect the low-point for the yearlong economic slowdown.
 &quot;As dark as this report is, it is what you would expect as the economy bottoms out,&quot; said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Bank One in Chicago.
 Most economists predicted that the Fed, which cut rates for a sixth time on June 27, would lower rates again at the Aug. 21 meeting.
 Most were forecasting another quarter-point cut, matching the June reduction, instead of the half-point moves the Fed had been making.
 However, Merrill Lynch economist Gerard Cohen said the tone of the Fed report raised the possibility that the Fed could resume cutting rates by a half-point with further reductions in the fall.
 Economic growth, as measured by the gross domestic product, slid to a barely discernible 0.7 percent annual rate in the April-June period, the weakest quarterly performance in eight years.
 David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's in New York, said he expected the economy would recover gradually with growth coming in at 2 percent in the current quarter and 3.5 percent by the fourth quarter this year.
 &quot;People always lose patience waiting for Fed rate cuts to take effect because they forget that it takes a long time to turn the economy around,&quot; Wyss said.
 The Fed's new survey, which was based on information collected in June and July, showed the U.S. economy skirting close to a recession.
 &quot;Sustained weakness in the manufacturing sector spilled over to other businesses, with many [Fed] districts indicating declines in demand for office space and trucking and shipping services,&quot; the Fed survey said.

TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Not Interested
 

NEW YORK (AP) - US Airways on Wednesday dismissed a sweetened offer from a New York-based holding company, saying it had no plans to consider the proposal from Global Airlines Corp.
 Global, which earlier this year tried, but failed to buy Trans World Airlines, said it would pay $2.01 billion, or $30 a share in cash and stock, for the Arlington, Virginia-based airline. Global Airlines also said it would assume $8 billion in debt.
 The offer marked an 11 percent increase over Global's initial Sunday bid.
 "Nothing has changed," US Airways Executive Vice President Lawrence M. Nagin said in a statement issued Wednesday night.
 "Accordingly, US Airways Group has no plans to deal with your letter, including meeting with you or contacting any third party at your request in connection therewith," the statement said.
 On Monday, US Airways, which called off its $4.3 billion merger with United Airlines on July 27, dismissed the previous $27-a-share offer made by Global Airlines and its chief executive, Emil Bernard.
 
 
Tokyo Down
 

TOKYO (Reuters) - Tokyo stocks dove on Thursday as investors, stunned by steep falls in U.S. technology issues, pulled out of info-tech stocks, driving the Nikkei average down 3.36 percent, its biggest one-day loss in four months.
 Adding a further blow to market sentiment was Nikko Salomon Smith Barney's cut in its target prices for Japan's core telecoms shares including NTT DoCoMo Inc. This followed Merrill Lynch's downgrade on six European telecoms issues a day earlier.
 The tech-sensitive Nikkei share average ended down 409.11 points or 3.36 percent at 11,754.56. It was the lowest finish since July 30 when it hit a 16-year closing low of 11,579.27.
 The broader TOPIX index dropped 32.98 points or 2.71 percent to 1,184.94, its lowest finish since July 30.
 Thursday's Nikkei slump was the biggest one-day drop since April 9 when the average lost 4.05 percent, again under the influence of worries about info-tech stocks.
 
 
Systems Buy
 

MILPITAS, California (Reuters) - Solectron Corp., the world's largest electronics contract manufacturer, said on Thursday it had agreed to buy Canada's C-MAC Industries Inc. in a $2.7 billion deal, enhancing its system-solutions offerings and expanding its diverse portfolio.
 Under terms of the deal, Solectron will offer 1.755 of its shares for each outstanding common share of C-MAC. Based on Solectron's closing price of $17.20 on Wednesday, the deal is valued at $30.19 per share of C-MAC common stock, or about $2.7 billion, including the assumption of debt, Solectron said in a statement.
 Solectron did not immediately specify the level of debt it was taking on. Representatives from Solectron and C-MAC did not immediately return calls seeking comment.
 Separately, Solectron said it now sees an additional fourth-quarter restructuring charge of up to $210 million, on top of a $50 million restructuring charge announced in June. 



TITLE: A Dangerous Defense
AUTHOR: By Jon Wolfsthal

TEXT: BUSH administration officials have become fond of describing missile-defense opponents as being unable to escape &quot;Cold War thinking.&quot; Yet by pursuing missile defenses so aggressively, President George W. Bush may himself prevent the development of the &quot;new strategic framework&quot; with Russia that he has tried to champion. Rather, he may reinforce a world where relations are defined by the size and sophistication of nuclear arsenals. Despite Bush's stated intention to reduce U.S. nuclear forces to the lowest levels consistent with national security, the nuclear arsenals in both countries are at Cold War levels and postures.
 Changing this situation is a precondition if the tone captured by Bush and President Vladimir Putin in Genoa is to be translated into real progress on strategic issues. 
 To escape the Cold War mindset, it is useful to understand where both the United States and Russia are historically in terms of their respective nuclear arsenals and what those forces might look like if the administration unilaterally proceeds with its still-nebulous plans for missile defenses. A quick review of current forces shows how both countries remain trapped in Cold War postures and how deployment of missile defense will make escaping this situation even more difficult.
 The United States and Russia currently deploy 7,200 and 5,600 strategic nuclear weapons respectively. While this represents a significant drop from the deployment high points of the Cold War, these numbers are historically very high. For example, the 7,200 deployed U.S. weapons is the same number the United States deployed in 1958, the year Nikita Khrushchev became Soviet leader, and the year after the launch of Sputnik. The Russian arsenal of 5,800 is the same size as the one the Soviet Union deployed in 1980, the year following the invasion of Afghanistan. No one would argue that the numbers of strategic weapons deployed today reflect the nature of the U.S.-Russian relationship, and there is a solid consensus in both countries that the arsenals should be reduced.
 The consensus quickly breaks down, however, when specifics are mentioned. Russia and the United States have signed the START II Treaty - still not ratified - that would limit the strategic nuclear arsenals in both countries to 3,500 weapons each. Presidents Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin laid out the target of 2,500 deployed weapons each at their Helsinki summit in 1997, but the Bush administration's opposition to negotiated arms-reduction agreements - and several other international agreements and negotiations - suggests it does not feel bound by any targets set by the preceding administration.
 Russia has been pressing for an agreement to limit the arsenals to 1,500 in each country. This number would resemble the arsenals deployed by the United States in 1954 and the Soviets in 1967. Moreover, this target reflects the downward trend of Russian forces driven by the rapidly aging nature of their arsenal. In sum, Russia wants the United States to cut its forces because Russia's own are going down of their own accord. Russia would like to invest its scarce resources elsewhere.
 The United States, and specifically the Joint Chiefs and U.S. Strategic Command, have twice balked at going down below the 2,500 level, citing concern about their ability adequately to deter other countries with fewer than 2,500 strategic nuclear weapons. While agreement on the 1,500 weapon target was unlikely only a few weeks ago, one possible implication of the Bush-Putin agreement at the G-8 summit in Genoa to link talks on offensive reductions and defensive deployments may be a greater likelihood of agreeing to that level for both sides - if Bush can convince the military services to go along.
 What to make, then, of missile defenses? Russia has been stating - and demonstrating through missile tests - that the unilateral abrogation of the ABM Treaty and the deployment of missile defenses by the United States will lead it to reverse the downward trend of its deployed nuclear forces. Current projections show that due to the aging of launch systems and U.S. financial assistance, the Russian arsenal of deployed strategic weapons could drop to 1,086 weapons by the year 2010 (the same number it deployed in 1966).
 However, by extending the life of some of its aging systems and ramping up production of its latest land-based missile, which is capable of carrying three or four warheads, Russia could deploy as many as 3,600 weapons by the end of the decade. Thus, the worst case for U.S. defense planners is that Russia could increase its nuclear arsenal by 350 percent over projected levels in the face of unilateral moves by the United States to deploy missile defenses.
 It is not certain that Russia would deploy this many weapons, since these numbers assume a maximum effort by Russia to maintain larger forces. The projection, however, shows a worst-case situation, an approach similar to that adopted by the administration with regards to the ballistic-missile threat facing the United States from states such as North Korea. Thus, any consideration of deploying missile defenses should take into account the extent to which the nuclear arsenals of established nuclear states will grow (or fail to shrink) as a result of deploying missile defenses.
 If the administration is serious about seeking a new framework where nuclear weapons are not a major factor in the U.S.-Russian relationship, then it should focus on economic and political areas of agreement and cooperation, instead of making decisions that force missile defenses and offensive weapons to the top of the bilateral policy agenda. Bush's advisers should realize that Russia will react to U.S. deployments of missile defenses by maintaining its arsenals at artificially high numbers, increasing the nuclear threat - accidental or otherwise - to the United States and undermining their very rationale for defenses.
 
 <i>Jon Wolfsthal is an associate of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. He contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times. </i>

TITLE: Porn Is Not as Much Fun As I Expected
TEXT: SINCE retiring as editor of The St. Petersburg Times, I have already held and lost one other job without anybody even knowing about it. I refer to the day when I became Russia's unofficial commissioner for pornography.
 This seemed to me to be necessary upon reading a recent article in this newspaper explaining that while pornography is illegal in Russia, erotica is not. It's not difficult to see how this has the capacity to cause some fairly major legal headaches. More problematic is picturing the middle-aged, Soviet-trained bureaucrats in City Hall sitting in a smoke-filled, darkened room watching some video or other and trying to determine whether all that thrusting and pounding is pornographic or merely erotic. What would be their criteria? What does it take to titillate a middle-aged, Soviet-trained bureaucrat?
 So I decided to help them out by coming up with a few guidelines, and to that end, I bought a dirty film for the first time in my life.
 That I had never done so before was not out of any dislike of pornography/erotica <i>(au contraire), </i>but through sheer old-fashioned shyness. I was afflicted again - acutely - when I went to the video store, strictly in the name of sociological research, to purchase a suitable motion picture in the appropriate genre for analysis.
 After half an hour of going cross-eyed as a result of looking at the rack of skin flicks while pretending to stare at the Schwarzenegger section, I settled on &quot;Sailor Sex&quot; in deference to this town's maritime traditions. To draw attention away from my purchase, I was also forced to buy four other films, bringing the bill to around 600 rubles. Dedication costs.
 I cracked open a beer, shoved in the video and sat down with a notepad and a receptive mind, trusting that &quot;Sailor Sex&quot; would provide me with the necessary insight and inspiration to clear up this legal conundrum once and for all. I was to be disappointed.
 Instead of the bonkfest promised so graphically on the back of the box, someone had taped over the original film, replacing it with an extraordinarily unpornographic, unerotic home video of a man in a sailor costume and a young lady dressed as a Russian peasant, performing distant and out-of-focus oral sex on one another in a rural setting that looked suspiciously like Valaam - although how on Earth they would have got filming permission on a monastery island is beyond me. (<i>&quot;Batyushka,</i> we'd like to shoot a few blowjobs on an 8-millimeter Sony near those hermit cells and cheat people out of 59 rubles. Do you mind?&quot;).
 I yanked it out of the machine and marched down to the store, until the essential folly of this hit me. How did I think the staff of a Russian video shop would react to an irate Englishman storming in, pounding his fist on the table and screaming, &quot;I wanted 'Sailor Sex,' not amateur fellatio!&quot; 
 Sod it, I thought, went home, and resigned as commissioner for pornography. I'll stick to being a consumer.
 
 <i><strong>P.S. </strong></i><i>While we're on the subject, I would like to point out that it was not I who was responsible for the unfortunate error in last week's column. I am well aware that the word for influence (of the cosy political kind) is blat, and not the expletive/term of abuse that actually appeared. Those who missed it can well imagine the mistake. The copy editor responsible has been executed. </i>

TITLE: It's Time for The State to Police Itself
TEXT: LIKE anyone with any common sense at all, we fully support efforts to combat money laundering and illegal capital flight. Russia's failure to comply with the international convention against money laundering and its place on the blacklist of &quot;noncooperative&quot; countries are certainly obstacles to economic development and integration into the global economy.
 Therefore, to a considerable extent, we are pleased by news this week that President Vladimir Putin has signed into law an anti-money-laundering bill and that an agency will be created to track suspicious financial operations and prosecute lawbreakers.
 However, we share the legitimate concerns of those who fear that the state is still too weak and too strongly influenced by private interests to investigate the information that it receives fairly and objectively. In fact, we doubt whether the state will even be able to safeguard the information it is given responsibly.
 Putin himself, in numerous statements including his most recent state-of-the-nation address, has admitted that state organs - including law enforcement agencies - are often used as tools in private conflicts. We wonder whether the president will remember his own counsel when he is setting up this new agency and, for instance, will give the Audit Chamber oversight over this agency and stipulate particularly stiff criminal penalties for corruption within it.
 Moreover, while we applaud the government's seemingly earnest efforts to crack down on money laundering, we can't help but think that now might be a good time also to put its own house in order. If, for instance, the state can compel banks and other commercial structures to release financial information to it, presumably under the threat of criminal prosecution, then there should be no reason why the Duma or the Audit Chamber cannot be given subpoena powers to pry similar information from the state itself and from public officials.
 The public is obviously tired of hearing reports of state agencies ignoring requests for documents presented by the Audit Chamber. The public is tired of hearing about the scandalous reports the chamber files that are never investigated or prosecuted.
 The anti-money-laundering initiatives present an excellent opportunity to take the fight against state corruption to a new level as well. With any luck, the result will not only be a reduction of state corruption - which itself will do as much to bolster economic development as cracking down on money laundering - but also a brilliant public relations coup, as the administration will be widely seen to be as devoted to policing itself as it is to policing others.

TITLE: Global eye
TEXT: <strong>Over a Barrel
</strong> Entertain conjecture of this shocking scenario: A cowed and compliant legislature passes a program that takes more than $30 billion from the country's public treasury and gives it to the wealthiest, most powerful interests in the land. What's more, the program was drawn up in secret by the very people it will benefit: the friends, business partners and financial backers of the country's leaders, who had recently taken power despite losing the popular vote in a national election.
 Where could such a cynical manipulation of the political process occur? It would have to be in some third-rate banana republic, right? Some Potemkin democracy run by a ruthless elite, some sadly degraded country riddled with corruption, where cronies and insiders milk their government &quot;connections&quot; while the powerless people make do with crumbs, right?
 Right you are: It was indeed the United States of America, where last week the House of Representatives passed the &quot;national energy plan&quot; devised by President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and a mysterious roster of &quot;energy consultants&quot; whose names the administration refuses to divulge, even to Congress, Reuters reports.
 Of course, the bill has squat-all to do with sane and thoughtful policy-making for the 21st century; it's simply a smokescreen for one of the biggest welfare payouts in American history: $33.5 <i>billion </i>in tax breaks and outright cash subsidies to the energy industry - Big Oil, King Coal, Lord Nuke and Mighty Gas.
 Yes, that's the same energy industry that's already glutted with record-breaking profits - and the same energy industry that pumped $69 million into campaign coffers last year. Most of that patriotic largess went to Republicans, with the oilmen in the White House getting the heftiest share. But there was enough gravy left over for a few key Democrats too - hence the 36 party stalwarts who jumped ship to join the GOP majority in passing the historic boondoggle.
 This payback for the legalized bribery humorously known as &quot;campaign finance&quot; was cleverly obscured by media hoo-rah over a side issue: opening the Alaskan Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil-and-gas exploration. The House said O.K., but there's little chance the Democratic-controlled Senate will approve any such drilling at all. Both sides know this, but the sideshow allows them to posture for their core supporters while the bill's true goal - massive tax breaks for an already massively wealthy industry - is smuggled into law.
 It was neatly done, but what else would you expect? These guys are pros - in every sense of the word.
 
 <strong>Chill Factor
</strong> Speaking of giving people the business, our old friends Barrick Gold Corporation won a great victory for freedom last week.
 That's <i>corporate </i>freedom, of course. The Canadian mining conglomerate used a U.K. court to force an American journalist to remove material from his Web site because it contained an article criticizing the company, CBS.com reports.
 As Eye readers will recall, Barrick has been using Britain's loosey-goosey libel laws to pressure the U.K.'s Observer newspaper into censoring Gregory Palast's reports on the company's political activities. Last week, facing massive costs from Barrick's deep-pocketed, long-term legal siege, the newspaper capitulated - and Palast's offending piece was summarily removed from his American Web site.
 Palast's crime was detailing Barrick's use of an obscure 19th-century U.S. law to gobble up prime public land for a mere $10,000 - from which they extracted $10 billion in gold. The scheme was approved in the waning days of President George H.W. Bush's administration. Daddy George then went on to a bit of richly rewarded consultant work for Barrick, schmoozing various dictators to cut sweetheart deals for the company. Barrick later reciprocated by pumping $148,000 into GOP coffers during Baby George's presidential run.
 There's nothing technically illegal about this kind of civic lubrication, of course (see above item); as Ross Perot would say, it's just &quot;interestin.'&quot; But Barrick claimed the reporting of these indisputable facts caused them &quot;great embarrassment and distress.&quot;
 Palast also had the temerity to mention public allegations made by Amnesty International that a Barrick subsidiary in Tanzania had used death squads to kill 50 independent miners when they refused to get off company land. Barrick denied these allegations and said they didn't own the subsidiary at the time of the killings; Amnesty International said it couldn't verify the allegations because the Tanzanian government is blocking an independent investigation.
 By reporting the indisputable fact that the allegation had been made and the indisputable fact that Barrick had denied it, Palast and the Observer had, the lawsuit said, &quot;seriously damaged&quot; the poor, suffering billion-dollar behemoth - which, by the by, is set to become the world's second-largest gold-mining firm later this year if its merger with American-based Homestake Mining is approved by the, er, Bush Administration.
 Gee, wonder if the merger will go through? We may never know, of course - if Barrick doesn't want us to.
 
 <strong>War Games
</strong> Meanwhile, Golden Boy Bush is broadening U.S. military involvement in the quagmire of Colombia's cocaine-fueled civil war, using legislative hugger-mugger to send more hired guns to the Andean jungles.
 Last month, the House (<i>them </i>again!) quietly increased the number of mercenaries for the covert war, Reuters reports. Now Goldie can hire more geniuses like the U.S. &quot;contract ops&quot; whose antics led to the death of an American missionary and her child earlier this year - a tragicomedy of errors detailed in a government report last week.
 The contractors were helping Peru fly drug-interdiction missions on the Colombian border. But the Yanks lacked one essential skill for such work: They couldn't speak Spanish. When the missionary plane was spotted, the contractors were reduced to pidgin jabbering and making machine gun sounds with their lips in an attempt to communicate with the Peruvian fighter jet on its tail.
 The jet fired; the plane went down. The woman and her infant daughter died. No doubt we'll be seeing lots more of such competence as Goldie plays with his new toy soldiers in Colombia.
 But wait - Bush speaks Spanish, doesn't he? Maybe we could pay <i>him </i>to go down there.

TITLE: where jazz greats learn to play
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Kvadrat Jazz Club, which once again changed its location last year, is now based in the Kirov Palace of Culture, a sinister-looking constructivist building standing in the middle of nowhere.
 This boat-shaped monstrosity was built in the 1930s by architect Noah Trotsky, who was also responsible for the so-called &quot;Bolshoi Dom,&quot; the home of the secret police, on Liteiny Prospect.
 The atmosphere inside is strikingly different - warm and full of energy. The younger musicians who gather at Kvad rat on Mondays to jam for themselves and their friends for free are different from arrogant jazz masters, with plenty of good spirits and friendly faces.
 The place, which holds 40 fans, was packed by young musicians and their girlfriends when visited on Monday. They reacted enthusiastically to solos by their colleagues or boyfriends on stage. 
 With only eight tickets sold for a mere 30 rubles each on that particular night, Kvadrat is clearly a non-commercial venture.
 Prices at the bar are fairly cheap, with Nasha Vodka costing 10 rubles a shot, while the most expensive item on the menu is 65 rubles.
 &quot;Not so many outside listeners gather [in the club]. It's more musicians with their girlfriends - to play and make arrangements for work,&quot; says Natan Leites, Kvadrat's founder and manager. &quot;They play for free here. In all the other places they play for money.&quot;
 Aspiring musicians come to Kvadrat to meet and play with other musicians, and the most talented stay with the club for years.
 &quot;If a musician is of a decent enough level, capable of playing with them [Kvad rat's musicians] - he'll join in a jam and continue to play with them,&quot; says Leites. &quot;If he's not good enough, the others will look at him in such a way that he won't want to play himself.&quot;
 Kvadrat, the city's oldest surviving jazz club, on the scene since 1964, brought up generations of jazz musicians. Now it attracts some of the youngest, although some of them are already pretty well-known.
 The club was based at the Kirov Palace of Culture between 1966 and 1986, when the building started to fall apart. &quot;The roof fell down and the fifth- floor [where Kvadrat's office was located] was inundated with pigeons,&quot; says Leites. After almost 15 years the club returned to the Kirov in February 2000.
 Now repaired and also housing a casino, billiard club and furniture shop, the building still shows some traces of dilapidation, as it is only partially painted and has the occasional tree growing out of its cornices.
 The cafe is only the visible part of Kvadrat. It also has a rehearsal room on the third floor where jazz players can practice for free.
 &quot;If you look at the history of jazz, you'll see that almost all the stars went through Miles Davis or Charlie Mingus in the 1960s or Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers,&quot; says Leites. 
 &quot;Blakey used to say, 'I don't make anybody stay. If a musician wants to do his own music, he can leave. Musicians bring other musicians [to the band] themselves.' His ensemble was known as a 'jazz academy.' The same is true for us. People gather experience at the club, grow up and then they leave.&quot;
 Tenor saxophonist Yevgeny Strigalyov, one of the musicians who took part in Monday's jam, is now a fairly well-known player who writes his own music and leads his own band. However, he is also a frequent sight at Kvadrat.
 Kirill Bubyakin, who also plays tenor saxophone, is one of Kvadrat's brightest hopes. &quot;He already plays well, but how well he <i>will </i>play is difficult to imagine.&quot;
 Playing at Kvadrat for free, musicians make their livings performing at restaurants. &quot;It's bloody money in some places,&quot; says Leites. &quot;At Staraya Tamozhnya, they have to play five hours with a 10-minute break [every hour]. But sometimes they manage to find better jobs.&quot;
 However, the situation at local restaurants has changed for the better over the past few years. &quot;The public has changed a little,&quot; says Leites. &quot;Two or three years ago, it was only gangsters and it was unpleasant for people to work there. Now musicians say they can play popular jazz melodies which give them an opportunity to improvize.&quot;
 &quot;But if people want to make good money, they have to prepare pop projects and leave the business. Many do. For instance, [Kvadrat's] bassist and drummer play with [Moscow pop singer Leonid] Agutin.&quot;
 If the life of a jazz musician is so difficult, what makes young people want to play jazz in the first place?
 &quot;It's interesting and difficult enough,&quot; says Leites. &quot;One has to know how to play. It happens that jazz is played by those who want to play well, who want to improvize. And it's great. Those who want to make money won't play jazz.&quot;
 
 <i>Kvadrat is located atr 83 Bolshoi Prospect on Vasilievsky Island. It opens at 8 p.m. on Monday (a concert ending in a jam) and Thursday (piano-jazz night). Tickets cost 30 rubles. Watch for &quot;Art Cafe&quot; in the left part of the building. See the Club Guide and Gigs for more details.
 Check out Kvadrat's official site at www.jazz.mn.ru </i>

TITLE: train museum gets central
AUTHOR: by Galina Stolyarova

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Warsaw Station is crowded with trains and steam engines of various ages, designs and colors. The trains all stand still, but there is no strike. The reason behind the colorful sight is that the station that sent the first Russian trains to Europe in 1862 has been turned into a railroad museum.
 Boasting 77 exhibits, the museum is one of the country's largest collections of railroad-related items. The first steam engine in Russia was built in 1833, while the museum's oldest locomotive - produced by the Kolomensky factory for North-Caucasian Railways - dates back to 1897 and is one of the oldest trains in the country. Weighing 42 tons, it could travel up to 45 kilometers per hour.
 Financed by 73 organizations related to the Oktyabrsky Railroad, the museum has grown as a result of nearly 20 years of work by veterans of Russian railroads who have tracked down and restored all kinds of memorabilia.
 The display's highlights include a rail-mounted artillery piece produced in 1938, which the Soviet Army used until 1991. The actual gun was dismantled from the renowned Russian battleship, the Empress Maria.
 Also on display are cars from typical suburban trains of mid-20th century and cargo train cars from early 1900s.
 The vast majority of exhibits were made in Russia, but you can see a wooden carriage produced in Koenigsberg in 1942, which, according to the sign, was &quot;captured during World War II.&quot; All of the items, in fact, are accompanied by very informative notes telling you about each exhibit's history and specifications. For those seeking even more historical details, guided tours are available.
 Before occupying the Warsaw Station, the museum was located near the small Shushary Station on the outskirts of St. Petersburg for more than 10 years, thus attracting little attention. Judging from the number of visitors at the opening last Sunday, the collection will definitely benefit from its new central location.
 There were armies of children climbing the steam engines and carriages, screaming and asking to be photographed. Some of the visitors were disappointed, however, to see all the carriages and cabins locked up, making it impossible to sit down or explore the history of the Russian railroads from the inside. Some of the cars even have curtains drawn over the windows, leading one to suspect that the interiors have not been restored.
 
 <i>The St. Petersburg Railroad Museum is open daily from 10:00 a.m. to 17:00 p.m. The cost for Russians is 20 rubles for adults and 10 rubles for children. Tickets for foreigners ostensibly cost 100 rubles (50 rubles for children), but it may be possible to bargain your way in. </i>

TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: Alhough he died 11 years ago, Kino's mainstay <strong>Victor Tsoi</strong><i><strong> </strong></i>is still an idol for teenagers who could hardly even speak when the singer died in a car crash on Aug. 15, 1990. Pilgrims from distant regions come to St. Petersburg to spend time at the hero's grave at Bogoyavlenskoye Cemetary.
 Two events will fight for the attention of Tsoi fans on the anniversary this year. While the Lensoviet Palace of Culture traditionally stages a screening of various Tsoi footage, both from documentaries and feature films, Yubileny Sports Palace will offer three hours of Kino songs performed by one of the many Kino tribute bands, Victor.
 Those who have been at Tsoi film screenings in past years say that fans get as excited by what they see on the screen as they would from the real thing, waving with their lighters and breaking their chairs. 
 &quot;The leader of <strong>Leningrad, </strong>Sergei Shnurov, was killed today,&quot; claimed the band's official Web site Sunday, sending some Le nin grad fans into shock. The more cynical ones thought it was one of Shnu rov's trademark PR stunts, but he insists that it was not.
 &quot;If it was, I wouldn't speak to you yet,&quot; said Shnurov Wednesday. &quot;Such PR stunts should be done in a stronger manner. I would organize a funeral. It was someone's idea of a joke, and there are plenty of people like that now. It's a pity they don't think about relatives.&quot;
 The site, which was closed for a few weeks, has now been repaired and updated. The most impressive addition is a 22 Mb MPEG video of &quot;Do You Love Me.&quot;
 Leningrad had even more trouble with the release of a CD called &quot;Ya Bukhayu, No Mogu Uskoritsya&quot; (&quot;I Do Booze, But I Can Speed It Up&quot;) while Shnurov was on vacation last month. The 28-track recording turned out to be culled from the unfinished material for Leningrad's upcoming album and will probably affect its content, depending on how widely the bootleg was distributed.
 &quot;It is working material. It's not clear if all of it would have been included on the album. Some would, some wouldn't,&quot; said Shnurov.
 The recording is already a rarity, as it is being hunted by the local RUBOP (Organized Crime Fighting Unit), which was hired by the band's label, Gala Records.
 According to Shnurov, the as-yet untitled album will be released in December, although &quot;Pulya Plus&quot; - the full 24-track version of Leningrad's debut album - will appear earlier, probably in October, and will be promoted with a special concert.
 Last Friday Leningrad appeared at the massive Nashestviye festival near Moscow to play to an estimated 100,000 fans. Because of the extensive use of four-letter words in their songs, the band was edited out of the televised version of the festival.
 &quot;That's O.K. On the other hand, we played with no cuts and were almost detained by local police,&quot; Shnurov said.
 Despite a promise not to perform in St. Petersburg until September, Shnurov will appear at Faculty on Aug. 24 in what he describes as &quot;a now usual solo gig with the guitar.&quot;
 
 <i>- by Sergey Chernov </i>

TITLE: ottalino: it's the real thing
AUTHOR: by Simon Patterson

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: While there is a large number of Italian restaurants in this city, few of them seem particularly concerned at getting the authenticity factor right. It's common enough to find shashlyk, borshch and other such very non-Italian items on the menu. While Ottalino also doesn't seem to have any pretensions in this department, heralding itself as a restaurant of &quot;Italian and European food,&quot; there is little doubt that this is the genuine thing, a restaurant that offers the sort of food you would be served in Italy, as opposed to the boring generic pizza-and-pasta selection found all over the world.
 The interiors are perhaps not very promising, with a huge number of tables that seem more suited to a <i>stolovaya </i>kind of atmosphere, not exactly designed for intimate conversation. Fortunately, there was only a handful of diners when we visited - including three Italians, a fact that speaks for itself in the restaurant's favor.
 The trilingual menu is extensive and intriguing, with a large selection of antipasto - we opted for the Caponata siciliana, a mixture of peppers, tomatoes and eggplant (110 rubles), which we shared. A selection of delicious Italian bread was also brought to us, as we drank the perfectly acceptable red house wine (500 rubles for a carafe). The alcohol is certainly the most expensive feature of the menu, with a large selection of wines of the world, from Germany to Georgia, all guaranteed at least to double the price of your meal.
 I followed with the caraceto soup (80 rubles), a beef broth with bread floating in it, which I judged to be good honest Italian peasant fare - an imaginative menu addition and a welcome alternative to minestrone. My dining companion chose the gnocchi (110 rubles), served with plenty of basil and delicious tomato-and-herb sauce.
 For my main course, I chose the &quot;pink fillet on a mirror,&quot; (280 rubles) which was not a bad translation, as the Russian was the same, but turned out to be a rare and very tender fillet of beef, although there was no mirror in sight.
 My dining companion had the beef fillet with mozarella and bacon (280 rubles), which was also pronounced delicious.
 As we sipped our cappucinos (30 rubles), we pondered on why the restaurant wasn't quite an unqualified success. Presumably, given that it has just opened, it has yet to find its style. While the food is hard to fault, the atmosphere is perhaps a little bland, and a rethink is needed in the way the tables are laid out. But with such exquisite food, and the fact that they offer breakfast for 60 rubles and business lunches for 150, we decided that we would probably be paying Ottalino a visit again in the near future.
 
 <i>Ottalino, 33 Ulitsa Marata, 164-5686. Open 7 days a week, 10 a.m. until the last customer leaves. Dinner for two with wine, 1,430 rubles ($49). Credit cards accepted. </i>

TITLE: a great writer's apprenticeship
AUTHOR: by Irina Shumovich

PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: While many great Russian writers of the 19th century had family fortunes to back their literary inclinations, Anton Chekhov had no such luck. In the early 1880s, as a young medical student at Moscow University, he supported himself and his family by writing hundreds of short stories for popular Moscow and St. Petersburg magazines.
 Continuing the flow of stories for publication, while at the same time as studying medicine and living in cramped conditions with his parents, siblings and lodgers, cannot have been easy. In a letter to his friend Nikolai Leikin, Chekhov complained &quot;Allah alone knows how hard it is to maintain my equilibrium, and how easy to slip and lose my balance.&quot; But however burdensome it must have been, writing for magazines only sharpened the budding playwright's quill. Reading <strong>The Undiscovered Chekhov, </strong>in which 43 of these stories appear, I was often struck by what good training this must have been. His power of observation, his deep understanding of human emotions and his ability to create and diffuse dramatic situations are already apparent in these early works.
 The pieces in the book range from one-page sketches to stories with a properly developed plot, and are very different both in structure and literary quality. Some, like &quot;On the Train&quot; or &quot;Village Doctors,&quot; are mere observations of human behavior, often with good dialogue and a witty twist. Others are crafted in unusual and interesting ways. &quot;A Fool; or, The Retired Sea Captain: A Scene from an Unwritten Vaudeville Play&quot; is written as a dialogue in a play through which the story unfolds. &quot;From the Diary of an Assistant Bookkeeper&quot; consists of eight entries in a journal that spans 23 years and depicts, with carefully chosen detail, the life of a hopeless yet hopeful assistant bookkeeper, who never relinquishes his dream of becoming a bookkeeper or of finding a new treatment to cure his catarrh. &quot;Sarah Bernhardt Comes to Town&quot; represents the town's philistine reaction to the appearance of the great actress, through the telegrams and notes that its inhabitants exchange after seeing her act.
 Humor and attention to detail foreshadow the writing genius Chekhov would develop in later years. In &quot;On Mortality&quot; he dishes out delightfully satirical social observations, for example, describing <i>bliny </i>&quot;as plump as the shoulders of a merchant's daughter.&quot; In stories such as &quot;The Good German,&quot; unexpected twists show the young Chekhov's skill at creating a real drama and then resolving it with a stroke of the pen.
 But rich as these pieces are in wit and detail, they are neither as grabbing nor as masterful as many of Chekhov's later, and better-known stories and plays. In fact, their appeal might well be limited to Chekhov scholars and students of creative writing, eager to observe the unfolding of his literary talent. Two stories, however, &quot;In Autumn&quot; and &quot;At the Pharmacy,&quot; stand out as far superior to the rest.
 The most powerful and accomplished story in the collection, &quot;In Autumn,&quot; tells of the tragic love of a squire for a town woman, which leads to his bankruptcy and ruin.
 The tale begins on a cold rainy day with various characters gathered at Uncle Tikhon's tavern. One of the visitors is the main character of the story, aged about 40, dressed in &quot;dirty and shabby but respectable&quot; clothes, the description hinting at something unusual about to unravel. Then comes a masterful description of the suffering of a person addicted to alcohol and torn between his desperate desire for a drink and his once dignified soul. He is begging Tikhon for a glass of vodka that he has no money to pay for: &quot;I humbly beg you! I implore you! I'm demeaning myself ... Lord, how I am demeaning myself!&quot; he says. Chekhov skilfully contrasts the sympathy he prompts the reader to feel for this unusual character with Tikhon's total indifference to his suffering, &quot;Give me money, and you'll have your vodka,&quot; Tikhon says. This indifference to suffering builds up into a real drama when a group of pilgrims refuses him a drink he is begging for &quot;from deep within [his] guts.&quot; Chekhov constantly emphasizes the moral suffering of the character - once he blushes, another time he feels ashamed, then he bursts into tears. At the top of his emotional despair the poor man performs his final &quot;despicable deed&quot;: He hands over to Tikhon a small gold medallion with a portrait of a woman. The description of him drinking away the medallion is one of the most powerful moments of the story: &quot;His eyes flashed, as much as his strength allowed his drunken, bleary eyes to flash, and he drank, drank with feeling, with convulsive pauses. Having drunk away the medallion with the portrait, he lowered his eyes with shame and went to a corner.&quot;
 Later a peasant comes to the tavern, recognizes in the drunken scoundrel his former master, Semyon Sergeyich, once a wealthy and powerful landowner, and tells the tragic story that led him to the state in which we first meet him. With characteristic distaste for the tension left by high tragedy, Chekhov ends the story by anticipating spring and hoping that it will bring relief. Such defusion of drama is unusual in Russian literature and is perhaps among the traits that make Chekhov so appealing to British readers.
 In &quot;At the Pharmacy&quot; Chekhov again presents indifference and callousness in the face of human suffering. One Svoykin is so ill that his mouth is on fire and foggy images tumble about like clouds before his eyes, yet the pharmacist does not even acknowledge him, reading his newspaper all the while. And when Svoykin is 6 kopeks short of the bill, the pharmacist refuses to give him the medicine. 
 Throughout the book we see characters overwhelmed with envy, meanness and gluttony. The reader learns of the hopelessness of their aspirations and the worthlessness of human life. In &quot;First Aid,&quot; a group of peasants rescues a drowning man. When they pull him out of the water he is talking nonsense but otherwise seems none the worse for his accident. But in an effort to reinvigorate him, on the orders of a tipsy sergeant and other meddlers, the peasants throw him into the air from a rug, then rock him from side to side, then try to tickle him with burned leaves before rubbing him until finally he dies. The smell of burned leaves and alcohol hangs in the air. A passerby declares &quot;What a pity!&quot; and drives on.
 Apart from the literary skill and at times genius evident in Chekhov's early work, what's so fascinating in these stories is the picture of the Russian life that emerges from them. Chekhov makes sharp observations of human weaknesses and presents a picture of people unable to communicate. In &quot;A Serious Step&quot; we see a husband who &quot;badly wants to pat the sobbing old woman on the back, but he is too proud.&quot; 
 Peter Constantine is to be commended not only for his translations, which show respect for both language and culture, but also for unearthing these stories in the New York Public Library. As he points out in his introduction to &quot;The Undiscovered Chekhov,&quot; these are the stories that made Chekhov famous in his day: Without them it is impossible to know him as a writer.
 Nevertheless, the collection is more than a mere study in Chekhov's development. Some of the stories have very skilful plots. Others are powerful and accomplished, but reading all of them makes one think what a sad place Russia has been. 
 
 <i>&quot;The Undiscovered Chekhov - FortyThreeNewStories,&quot; translated by Peter Constantine. 212 pages. Published by Seven Stories Press, $16.95.
 Irina Shumovich works in London for the BBC World Service. </i>

TITLE: one diary that's fun to watch
AUTHOR: by Kenneth Turan

PUBLISHER: The Los Angeles Times
TEXT: &quot;It's only a diary,&quot; Ren&eacute;e Zellweger's Bridget Jones innocently whines about the red-covered volume she confides her secrets to, but who in the world does she expect to believe her?
 Starting as a London newspaper column by Helen Fielding and morphing into a novel and a sequel that have together sold 5 million copies and counting in 32 countries, &quot;Bridget Jones's Diary&quot; and its candid and witty tales of a thirtysomething's romantic woes became such a phenomenon that the London Evening Standard grandly announced that its protagonist &quot;is no mere fictional character, she is the Spirit of the Age.&quot;
 So when it came to turning this bona fide cultural sensation into a film, a lot of significant players were part of the mix. Top British actors Hugh Grant and Colin Firth (both of whom are mentioned in the book) are Zellweger's male co-stars, and two of that country's cleverest screenwriters, &quot;Four Weddings and a Funeral&quot; and &quot;Notting Hill's&quot; Richard Curtis and &quot;Pride and Prejudice&quot; adapter Andrew Davies worked with Fielding on the script. Four heavyweight companies from three countries (Miramax, Universal, Studio Canal and Working Title) flash their logos on the screen before we even get a glimpse of an actor.
 Instead of being suffocated under all this attention or suffering overly much from the liberties the film admittedly takes with her diary, Ms. Jones prospers. The dramatic feature debut for filmmaker Sharon Maguire (a documentary director and apparently the inspiration for Bridget's friend Shazzer), &quot;Bridget Jones's Diary&quot; is cheerful, cheeky entertainment, a clever confection that makes jokes about Salman Rushdie and literary critic F.R. Leavis and survives its excesses by smartly mixing knock-about farce with fairy-tale romance.
 It could do none of this without a performer who is definitely not a Brit, the Texas-born Zellweger. An unlikely choice for the part (she had to learn what turns out to be a serviceable British accent from scratch and add a by-now-celebrated 10 kilograms to play the pudgy Jones), the actress turns out to be the kind of ideal match that producers fantasize about.
 Still best known for her co-starring work with Tom Cruise in &quot;Jerry Maguire,&quot; Zellweger's strongest suit is her vulnerability, the empathy she unerringly creates by having her feelings play nakedly on her face. Taking on a character identified with and embraced by so many, the actress is very much who she is supposed to be on screen.
 Given that &quot;Bridget Jones&quot; is largely a comedy of embarrassment, it's critical that Zellweger is both a hugely game performer, willing to look bad in intentionally unflattering costumes, as well as someone with a gift for being a plucky wreck. To watch her alone in her apartment, drunkenly singing along with Jamie O'Neal on &quot;All By Myself,&quot; is to know everything worth knowing all at once.
 Bridget may be her own worst enemy, a woman with a gift for self-sabotage who drinks too much, smiles too hard and puts her foot wrong at every opportunity, but she soldiers her way through with zest and spirit. Maybe she is &quot;ever so slightly less elegant under pressure&quot; than Grace Kelly, but her resilient good-heartedness never deserts her for long.
 It is this essence of the character, rather than literary fidelity, that &quot;Bridget Jones&quot; is successfully focused on. Key central elements from the book do remain, but many things - critical details from the kind of sweater worn in a key scene to the kind of man Bridget's mother is attracted to - are changed. The screenwriters have both pared down the book and pumped up selected elements, like the rivalry between the two men in Bridget's life. They've also strengthened the book's charming parallels to &quot;Pride and Prejudice,&quot; down to having Firth, who played Mr. Darcy in the BBC version of the Jane Austen novel, expertly play the modern Mark Darcy here.
 Introduced in &quot;my 32nd year of being single,&quot; publishing house publicity assistant Jones has a tart tongue and a vivid imagination. Locked in a perpetual battle with her weight, disgusted with &quot;smug marrieds&quot; and their know-it-all satisfaction, terrified of dying fat and alone only to be eaten by huge dogs, she begins a diary, both to keep a record of, and to get a handle on, her life.
 One of Bridget's first resolutions, however, turns out to be a tough one: &quot;Will find nice, sensible boyfriend to go out with and won't continue to form romantic attachments to any of the following: alcoholics, workaholics, commitmentphobics, peeping toms, megalomaniacs&quot; and so on into the night.
 Human rights barrister Mark Darcy doesn't fall easily into the Mr. Right category. His dark good looks are hampered by an awful sweater provided by his parents and he's the favorite of her parents (the very funny Gemma Jones and Jim Broadbent), who are soon to have romantic problems of their own. Plus he's undeniably haughty and he's got an attractive and very lean legal partner (the reliable Embeth Davidtz) who wants to extend the relationship into other areas.
 Bridget, if she is honest (and she is nothing but), knows she's much more attracted to her boss, Daniel Cleaver, &quot;a bona fide sex god&quot; who is also so much the office scoundrel he practically has a Mr. Wrong sign pasted on his back. Does this stop Bridget? Obviously not.
 As the irresistible Mr. Cleaver, Hugh Grant (who is skewered in the book for his Sunset Boulevard assignation) presents one of his best, most satisfying performances. Giving in to his dark side, he gets to play the worst possible version of the kinds of enticing men he's been previously cast as. With Grant in the part, there's never any doubt why Bridget finds it so difficult to disregard her better judgment and stay away.
 Finally, however, it is Zellweger as Jones who almost wills this film to succeed. There are flat patches, some situations verge on being overdone, you can see the plot twists coming, but with this spirited a performance in the title role, it's hard to protest too much. Bridget Jones' search for inner poise may be doomed, but her film is anything but.
 
 <i>&quot;Bridget Jones's Diary&quot; is currently screening at the Avrora cinema. </i>

TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Afghan Visas
 

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (Reuters) - Afghanistan's ruling Taleban said Thursday that entry visas would be granted to foreign diplomats seeking to visit jailed aid workers accused of promoting Christianity.
 "We will not refuse them visas, we are ready to give them visas,'' the Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) quoted Taleban Deputy Foreign Minister Maulvi Abdul Rahman Zahid as saying.
 AIP gave no indication when the visas would be issued or whether the diplomats from Australia, Germany and the United States would be able to meet their jailed nationals.
 Twenty-four staff from the German-based relief agency Shelter Now International - including four Germans, two Australians, two Americans and 16 Afghans - have been detained by the Taleban since Aug. 5 on charges of trying to convert Afghans to Christianity.
 
 
Reagan Daughter Dies
 

LOS ANGELES (AP) - A president's daughter whose political ambitions went unfulfilled, Maureen Reagan established her legacy as a tireless crusader against the disease that forced her father into seclusion.
 The oldest child of former president Ronald Reagan and his first wife, actress Jane Wyman, traveled the country nearly nonstop in the final years of her life, ignoring her own declining health as she spread the word about Alzheimer's patients and their caregivers.
 "I consider this his unfinished work,'' she once told the Sacramento Bee. "If this were any other disease, my father would be out telling people what they needed to know.''
 On Wednesday, at age 60, she lost her own health battle against skin cancer. Maureen Reagan died at her home in Granite Bay, near Sacramento.
 Her death brought an outpouring of condolences from former presidents, political officials and Alzheimer's activists.
 
 
Porn Ring Busted
 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. officials said on Wednesday they had dismantled "the largest known commercial child-pornography enterprise'' ever, with 100 arrests over two years after an undercover investigation of a Texas company that distributed child pornography over the Internet.
 They said the two-year investigation, called "Operation Avalanche,'' began in early 1999 with the discovery of a company called "Landslide Productions Inc.'' in Fort Worth, Texas.
 It took in as much as $1.4 million a month, with most of the money coming from subscriptions to child-pornography sites on the World Wide Web, the authorities said.
 The couple who owned and operated the company were sentenced in federal court on Monday, with the husband getting life in prison and the wife getting 14 years.
 
 
Death Penalty Sought
 

HOUSTON (Reuters) - Prosecutors said on Wednesday they will seek the death penalty for a Texas mother accused of drowning her five young children in a bathtub - a decision that came hours after Andrea Yates pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to capital-murder charges.
 Investigators say Yates, 37, drowned her five children, aged 6 months to 7 years, on June 20 and then called police and her husband moments later to confess what she had done.
 "I have decided to allow my prosecutors to seek the death penalty,'' Harris County District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal said.
 Rosenthal said he believes jurors should be in a position to consider the full range of punishment.
 
 
Unrest in Kashmir
 

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India announced a series of measures Thursday to step up security in Hindu-dominated areas of Kashmir that have been roiled by militant violence since last month's fruitless peace-seeking summit with Pakistan.
 Slamming Islamabad for waging a "proxy war of multiple dimensions,'' Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani said the government had decided to extend the area in which soldiers have sweeping powers to arrest, detain or shoot suspected lawbreakers.
 "Government is determined to thwart the nefarious designs of the terrorists and their mentors across the border and not to let the counter-insurgency grid be thinned out,'' he told the lower house of parliament.
 
 
Aid Caravan Stopped
 

BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - Seventy international peace activists trying to deliver food aid to a war-torn region of northern Colombia were forced to alter their route on Wednesday after suspicious townsfolk refused to let them pass, organizers said.
 Boatloads of activists from 11 countries spent Tuesday holed up in the river port of the small town of San Pablo in the south of Bolivar Province trying to convince local people to allow them to pass through on their mission to deliver food aid to 30,000 families as part of their three-week "life caravan.''
 But local protesters accused the activists - 55 foreigners and 15 Colombians - of being sympathizers with leftist guerrillas fighting a 37-year-old war and refused to let them out of the port, activists said.
 
 
Ethiopian Aggression?
 

MOGADISHU, Somalia (Reuters) - Somalia's provisional government said on Wednesday that Ethiopian troops had crossed the border, in the largest of several recent incursions, to try to capture the southern port of Kismayu.
 Ethiopia's government denied the accusation, saying it did not have a single soldier on Somali territory.
 Officials of the transitional national government (TNG) of President Abdiqassim Salad Hassan said Ethiopian soldiers had entered Baidoa town, a base for Somali militia groups allied to Addis Ababa, on Tuesday on their way further south to Kismayu.
 Officials said the Ethiopians had invaded to support Somali warlord General Morgan, who first captured and then lost Kismayu this week in a battle against an alliance of clans loyal to Abdiqassim's government.
 
 
European Cocaine
 

LONDON (Reuters) - Europe faces a growing threat from cocaine smugglers because demand for the drug in the United States has leveled off, according to a major British police report released on Wednesday.
 And in Britain, home-grown criminals are increasingly expected to supplant traffickers from Colombia and Jamaica by sourcing drugs in Europe, the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) said.
 It rated hard drugs such as cocaine, heroin and ecstasy as the biggest threats now faced by British law enforcement agencies from organized criminal gangs. 



TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Guerin To Get $5.1M
 

BOSTON (AP) - Boston Bruins forward Bill Guerin was awarded the second-largest amount in NHL arbitration history Wednesday, a one-year, $5.1 million contract.
 Guerin had asked for about $6 million for one year, while the Bruins offered half that.
 Guerin's hearing was last Wednesday, but arbitrator Richard Bloch asked for a continuance because he had two other hearings to decide.
 Guerin earned about $3.5 million last season, when he had 40 goals and 45 assists in 85 games with Edmonton and Boston.
 The biggest arbitration award, $7 million, went to Philadelphia Flyers forward John LeClair last year. 
 
 
Impending Retirement
 

OAKLAND, California (AP) - Bret Saberhagen, who spent 21 months working his way back from shoulder surgery to the major leagues, will retire at the end of the season.
 The Boston Red Sox put Saberhagen on the 15-day disabled list Wednesday because of tightness in his right shoulder. The two-time Cy Young winner lasted only four innings the previous night.
 "That's it, I'm all done," Saberhagen said after Boston lost to Oakland 6-1 Wednesday night.
 "I still feel I can do a good job, but it's just not the same. I feel great about what I've accomplished, and I'm not giving up on this year by any means," he said.
 Saberhagen was 1-2 with a 6.00 ERA in three starts this season, his first appearances in the majors since shoulder surgery in 1999.
 
 
'Black Betsy' Sold
 

SAN JOSE, California (Reuters) - "Black Betsy," the favorite bat of banned baseball legend "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, was sold for $577,610 in an internet auction, eBay reported on Wednesday.
 While the purchase price for the famous bat did not approach the $1.3 million paid for a Honus Wagner trading card or challenge the $3.05 million paid for Mark McGwire's record 70th home run ball, it was a record for a baseball bat.
 "I am not surprised that the sale of "Black Betsy" has set a record for the most valuable bat. It is undoubtedly a significant piece of baseball history," said Vince Malta, authenticator for Professional Sports Authenticator.
 The bat, which Real Legends put up for auction for family members of the late baseball great, was purchased on Tuesday night by sports-memorabilia collector Rob Mitchell.
 Jackson was one of baseball's greatest players and his .356 lifetime batting average is still third all-time behind only Ty Cobb (.367) and Rogers Hornsby (.358).