SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #730 (97), Friday, December 14, 2001
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TITLE: U.S. Renounces 1972 ABM Treaty
AUTHOR: By Barry Schweid
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - In an historic break with Russia, U.S. President George W. Bush served formal notice Thursday that the United States is withdrawing from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a move effective in six months.
 
"I have concluded the ABM treaty hinders our government's ability to develop ways to protect our people from future terrorist or rogue-state missile attacks," Bush said from the White House.
 "Defending the American people is my highest priority as commander in chief, and I cannot and will not allow the United States to remain in a treaty that prevents us from developing effective defenses," Bush said.
 Bush emerged from a meeting with his National Security Council to make the announcement with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Joint Chiefs Chairperson General Ri chard Myers and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
 "The Cold War is long gone," Bush said. "Today we leave behind one of its last vestiges. But this is not a day for looking back. This is a day for looking forward with hope of greater prosperity and peace.
 "We're moving to replace mutually assured destruction with mutual cooperation," Bush said.
 Bush said he and his top advisers, before making the decision public, had gone over the same issues he had discussed with the Russian president - "my friend President Vladimir Putin," Bush called him - over several meetings this year.
 "President Putin and I have also agreed that my decision to withdraw from the treaty will not in any way undermine our new relationship or Russian security," Bush said.
 The U.S. ambassador to Moscow delivered formal notice of Bush's decision to Russian officials, according to a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
 The brief legal document invokes Article 15 of the 29-year-old treaty to give Russia six months' notice of Bush's intentions. The official said Bush has, in effect, pulled out of the treaty with the notification, though the United States cannot conduct missile tests barred by the treaty for six months.
 Formal notice was also given to Ukraine, Kazakstan and Belarus, former Soviet states that signed memoranda of understanding tying them to the pact under the Clinton administration.
 Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov said the decision was regrettable because it undermined global strategic balances - but he was not concerned about Russia's security.
 "Russia needn't be concerned with its defense systems," said Kasyanov, who was in Brazil for a two-day visit. "Maybe other countries should be concerned if the United States chooses to abandon the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty." 
 Bush, who campaigned last year on building the kind of missile-defense shield banned by the treaty, said the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks made his cause more urgent.
 "Today, the events of Sept. 11 made all too clear the greatest threats to both our countries come not from each other or other big powers in the world but from terrorist attacks who strike without warning or rogue states who seek weapons of mass destruction," Bush said.
 The president emphasized his appreciation of Russia's help in the U.S.-led war on terrorism and he reiterated his pledge to reduce America's nuclear arsenal, a commitment Putin had sought and won when the two presidents met last month in Washington.
 Putin cautioned last winter that jettisoning the treaty could lead to the unraveling of three decades of arms-control accords. China has warned a new arms race could ensue.
 But, according to Bush administration officials, Putin assured Bush during their October talks in Washington and Crawford, Texas, that U.S.-Russian relations would not suffer, even if Bush pulled out of the treaty. Bush tried to strike a deal with Putin that would allow the United States to move to a new phase of testing in the U.S. missile-defense program. Putin had sought authority to sign off on U.S. missile tests, but the request was rejected, administration officials said.
 The next scheduled step is the beginning of construction next spring of silos and a testing command center near Fairbanks, Alaska.
 The Bush administration intends to cooperate with Russia at least to the extent of informing Moscow of steps being taken to advance the missile-shield program.
 That's not likely to stop Russia from taking retaliatory steps. A senior Russian lawmaker predicted Russia will pull out of the START I and START II arms reduction treaties.
 "We believe that offensive and defensive tools of nuclear deterrence must be linked," said Dmitry Rogozin, chairperson of the Duma International Affairs Committee, according to Interfax news agency.
 Such a spiral of withdrawals would be dangerous-and predictable, said Senator Carl Levin, chairperson of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
 "Unilateral withdrawal will likely lead to an action-reaction cycle in offensive and defensive technologies, including countermeasures," he said. "That kind of arms race would not make us more secure."
 Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said it could rupture relations with U.S. allies and with Russia and China. He called withdrawing from the treaty "a high price to pay for testing that's not required this early" for missile defense.
 Senator Joseph Biden, chairperson of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also said abrogating the treaty could lead to a new arms race.
 "About eight months ago, they were taking about weaponizing space," Biden said Wednesday. "God help us when that moment comes."
 Bush has condemned the treaty as an impediment to mounting a U.S. defense against missile attack now that the Cold War is over. Rumsfeld has been deferring tests that might violate the treaty.
 The treaty, negotiated during Cold War tensions between the United States and the old Soviet Union, prohibits the development, testing and deployment of strategic missile-defense systems and components that are based in the air, at sea or in space.
 It is based on the proposition that stripping a nuclear power of a tough missile defense would inhibit it from launching an attack because the retaliation would be deadly.

TITLE: Bush Administration Releases Bin Laden Tape
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: WASHINGTON - Osama bin Laden contentedly recalled the Sept. 11 suicide attacks against America on a videotape released Thursday by the Pen tagon, saying the destruction exceeded his estimates and the event "benefitted Islam greatly."
 
The hijackings were "a martyrdom operation," Bin Laden said in a conversation with two aides and a Saudi sheik, but those who carried them out didn't know the precise details until just before they boarded the planes.
 The tape, amateurish in quality, was released as part of a Bush administration effort to support claims that bin Laden was the mastermind behind the attacks. The translation of the Arabic conversation was provided by the Pentagon.
 In it, bin Laden discussed some of the planning that led to the attacks, and recalled tuning in to the radio to hear American news broadcasts of the attack.
 "They were overjoyed when the first plane hit the building," he said of others listening with him that day. "So I said to them: 'Be patient.'"
 He said, "At the end of the newscast, they reported that a plane just hit the World Trade Center."
 "After a little while, they announced that another plane had hit the World Trade Center," bin Laden recalled. "The brothers who heard the news were overjoyed by it."
 U.S. administration officials have said the tape was found in a house in Jalalabad after anti-Taliban forces moved in. They claim that the tape was made in November. On the tape, bin Laden is sitting on the floor of a spare room, talking with several other men, including two aides and an unidentified Saudi sheik.
 Entering the room, bin Laden bends over to greet the sheik, then smilingly takes his place next to him, sitting cross-legged on the floor.
 The sheik promptly thanks bin Laden, saying, "Everybody praises what you did, the great action you did, which was first and foremost by the grace of Allah. This is the guidance of Allah and the blessed fruit of jihad."
 "Thanks to Allah," replied bin Laden.
 The sheik informed bin Laden that another cleric had delivered a sermon in Saudi Arabia Sept. 11. "He said this was jihad and those people were not innocent victims," the sheik said, apparently referring to the victims of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks.
 "(Inaudible) we calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed, based on the position of the tower," bin Laden says.
 "We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all."
 The administration has been working for days with government and private Arabic-speaking experts to translate bin Laden's comments in the amateur videotape.
 "The tape is a smoking gun, in itself incriminating of bin Laden," Senator Bob Graham, chairperson of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said late on Wednesday.
 "But more than that it gives you a sense of the demeanor, the person of bin Laden," Graham said. "He speaks as though he were an engineer describing a structural failure rather than a person who has just planned, orchestrated and directed one of the most horrific acts in history."
 Bin Laden, who inherited millions of dollars from his family's construction fortune in Saudi Arabia, said "(Inaudible) due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only.
 "This is all that we had hoped for," he said according to the translation.
 "It shows without a doubt, I believe, his culpability and his complicity in the whole Sept. 11 deal. This is a damnable piece of evidence against Osama bin Laden," Senator Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the intelligence committee, said on Wednesday.
 U.S. officials say they are convinced the tape is not a fake or staged. However, its amateur quality made some segments difficult to understand.
 
 <i>- Reuters, AP </i>

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Fresh Kompromat
 

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Police confiscated a large quantity of printed material apparently intended as part of a negative campaign against two candidates for the Leningrad Oblast Legislative Assembly, Interfax reported Thursday.
 The leaflets were taken from a car on Thursday and did not bear the required identifying information. Police did not release the materials or identify the two candidates involved.
 Elections to the oblast legislature will be held Dec. 16 and 295 candidates are vying for the 50 seats. Seven candidates have been disqualified for violations of election law, Interfax reported.
 In recent weeks, officials of the Leningrad Oblast administration have accused Governor Vladimir Yakov lev's administration of interfering in the elections in order to secure the election of candidates that it favors. Yakovlev's spokespeople have denied the accusations.
 
 
Budget Signed
 

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Governor Vladimir Yakovlev signed the 2002 municipal budget, Interfax reported Thursday.
 The budget, which was passed by the Legislative Assembly on Nov. 21, forecasts 57.33 billion rubles ($1.91 billion) in revenues, 56,267 billion rubles in expenditures and a surplus of 1.066 billion rubles ($55.3 million).
 
 
Additional Trains
 

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - In response to heightened demand during the holiday season, the Oktyabrskaya Railroad will add additional trains to its most popular routes, including the connection between Moscow and St. Petersburg, Interfax reported Thursday.
 At least three additional trains - two daytime trains and one overnight - between Moscow and St. Petersburg will run from Dec. 29 through Jan. 13.
 Additional trains will also be added for service to Tambov, Voronezh, Izhevsk, Yekaterinburg, Bryansk and Nizh ny Tagil, Interfax reported.
 
 
Just a Coincidence
 

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Governor Vladimir Yakovlev stated that he does not believe that the resignation of former acting Vice Governor Alexander Potekhin is connected to the criminal investigation opened against him, Interfax reported Wednesday.
 Yakovlev stated that Potekhin "had long ago requested" that the governor accept his resignation and that Yakovlev finally considered it possible to grant the request, according to Interfax.
 The Northwest District Prosecutor's Office launched a criminal investigation against Potekhin and his deputy, Dmitry Solonnikov, on Nov. 27, claiming that the officials had been illegally involved in commercial activity. 
 No charges have been filed.
 Another vice governor, Valery Malyshev, is also facing criminal charges.
 
 
Another Hit
 

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The general director of the open joint-stock company Kommunalno-Ekspluatatsionny Tsentr (KETs) was shot and killed near his home on Wednesday evening, Interfax reported.
 Aleksei Zazhidsky was shot in the shoulder and chest by an unidentified man as he drove up to his home on Ulitsa Ryleyeva. The killer then fled in a Volga taxi, the news agency reported.
 Zazhidsky's wife, who heard the shots, called an ambulance, but Zazhidsky died en route to the hospital.
 A criminal investigation has been launched.
 
 
Stockholm Center
 

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The Russian government has approved an agreement to open a Stockholm Culture and Information Center in St. Petersburg, Interfax reported Wednesday.
 The Foreign Ministry and the Swedish government negotiated the agreement, under which the St. Petersburg government will provide a downtown space for the center. 
 
 
Ready To Vote
 

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The government of the Republic of Komi has completed all preparations for the Dec. 16 election of the republic's president, Interfax reported Thursday.
 According to the chairperson of the republic's election commission, Antonina Sozykina, 687 polling districts have been created. On Dec. 14, Sergei Bolshakov, a member of the Central Election Commission, will arrive from Moscow to observe the election.
 Seven candidates, including incumbent President Yury Spiridonov, are running in the election. Other candidates include the chairperson of the republic's State Council, a State Duma deputy, the general director of the company Sever OIL BI and an unemployed resident of Syktyvkar. 



TITLE: Fund To Shelter the Homeless
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Nochlezhka, a local charity that operates programs to assist the homeless, has launched a new effort that, if successful, will put roofs over the heads of at least some of those currently living on city streets.
 
The foundation - which publishes the newspaper Na Dne, which is sold by the homeless - plans to buy rooms in communal apartments and then sell them over time to the homeless.
 &quot;The first people to take part in the program will be chosen from those who work selling Na Dne,&quot; said Nochlezhka President Valery Sokolov. &quot;We have known some of these people for several years now, and we trust them.&quot;
 Selected participants will be allowed to live in the rooms while making $100 monthly payments that will be used to recoup the purchase cost. Tatiana Duel, the director of the program, estimates that, in most cases, the repayment period will be about two years. After that, the room will become the property of the occupant. Sokolov said the foundation will buy the first room in a communal apartment this spring.
 Although some people have expressed skepticism that program participants will be able to make the monthly payments, Duel is confident.
 &quot;There are people who sell 30 or more papers a day. The paper costs 10 rubles and six of them go to the seller. It is easy to show that this financial situation [will work],&quot; Duel said.
 &quot;I sell between 35 and 50 newspapers a day,&quot; said Nikolai Golod, one of the approximately 20 local homeless people selling Na Dne. &quot;In October, the price of the paper rose from four rubles to 10, which reduced my sales, but increased my income.&quot;
 Golod, who has been selling the paper for three years, credits the job with returning his self-respect.
 &quot;Look at me,&quot; he said, pointing to his inexpensive, but impressively clean white shirt and jacket. &quot;This is my everyday wear.&quot;
 &quot;I used to be a typical homeless person - dirty, unshaven, smelly, attracting no sympathy,&quot; Golod recollected. &quot;Now people can see just by looking at me that I am fighting back for a place in life and they respond by buying the paper.&quot;
 Duel explained that participants in the housing project will wear special signs informing the public that they are homeless and are using the proceeds from selling the paper to purchase their own homes. 
 &quot;I think that people will support this idea,&quot; she said. &quot;No one wants to support people who have given up on themselves, but everyone respects strong people who will fight back under any circumstances.&quot;
 According to Sokolov, there are between 7,000 and 12,000 homeless people in St. Petersburg, most of them living in empty basements, attics or garbage bins. He admits that this program, even if successful, will at best help only a few individuals each year.
 &quot;If it helps even one person to get a new home, we will already be happy and satisfied,&quot; Sokolov said.
 Nochlezhka - which receives funding from private donations, Western grants and from organizing charity concerts - currently has100,000 rubles ($3,333) in its bank account, most of which will be allocated to the housing program. Of that, the City Committee for Labor and Social Protection has contributed 45,000 rubles ($1,500).
 Alexander Rzhanenkov, deputy chairperson of the committee, said that the city and Nochlezhka are distributing questionnaires among the homeless in order to get a district-by-district picture of the current situation.
 &quot;We need to find out how these people became homeless, what their plans and hopes for the future are and what they are ready to do to return to a normal life,&quot; Rzhanenkov said.
 &quot;Within the next few years, city-funded homeless shelters will be opening in every district of the city. We are planning to open three of them next year,&quot; he added.
 Natalia Yevdokimova, a deputy in the Legislative Assembly and chairperson of the Social Issues Commission, welcomed Nochlezhka's initiative, but expressed skepticism about the project.
 &quot;The plan lacks substantial financial grounding,&quot; she said. &quot;With an annual budget of 100,000 rubles, this idea is unlikely to ever take shape.&quot;

TITLE: Heavy Fighting Rages in Chechen Town of Argun
AUTHOR: By Yuri Bagrov
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: VLADIKAVKAZ, Russia (AP) - Russian troops sealed off the Chechen town of Argun on Thursday as their first major battle with separatists in months raged for a second day. 
 
A Russian police unit clashed with rebels on the town's outskirts Wednesday, an official of Chechnya's Moscow-appointed administration said. The rebels retreated into Argun after Russian helicopters fired on them, and gunfire within the town could be heard throughout the day and night. 
 Six Russian service personnel were killed in Wednesday's operation, the official said on condition of anonymity. There was no word on casualties Thursday. 
 The rebels in Argun were believed to be from a unit loyal to Khattab, a Jordanian-born warlord who Russian officials say is a close associate of Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. 
 Anatoly Kvashnin, chief of Russia's General Staff, said some 200 to 300 foreigners are fighting in Chechnya, the Interfax news agency reported Thursday. 
 Before the Argun clash, few major battles were fought in Chechnya in the past year. But hit-and-run attacks and land-mine explosions result in daily Russian casualties, despite Moscow's claim to have re-established control over the region. 
 Russian troops retreated after a war from 1994 to 1996, leaving Chechnya de facto independent. Troops returned in 1999 after rebel incursions into neighboring Dagestan and after apartment-house bombings in Russian cities killed more than 300 people. Moscow blamed the blasts on Chechen militants. 
 The battle in Argun resulted in power shortages at the Russian military base at Khankala and in the capital, Grozny. Nurdin Usamov, the head of Chechnya's power company, said the disruption was caused by Russian troops who damaged power-plant equipment in Argun, Interfax reported. 
 Communication between the Chechen administration and the military command in Argun was also cut. Officials who arrived in the town to supervise military actions were turned back by Russian troops, the administration official said. 
 Elsewhere in Chechnya, rebels fired on Russian positions 21 times in the last 24 hours, killing five service personnel, the administration official said on Thursday. A police officer was killed in the town of Shali when a his unit clashed with rebels. 
 Two soldiers were killed when their armored personnel carrier hit a land mine in Grozny, the official said. Two Russian sappers were killed while defusing mines. 
 Despite the flare-up of fighting, a top Kremlin spokesperson claimed Thursday that the conflict in Chechnya was coming to an end. 
 &quot;It looks like this winter will be the last for the rebels,&quot; Sergei Yastrzhembsky said on Ekho Moskvy radio. &quot;An increasing number of rebel leaders have been neutralized.&quot;

TITLE: Duma Deputy Seeks Protection for Anthem
AUTHOR: By Svetlana Korkina
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Those inclined to burst into song after a few drinks should beware: dishonoring the national anthem could soon become criminal offence.
 
A State Duma deputy from the Unity faction, Sergei Apatenko, has proposed extending Article 329 of the Criminal Code, under which it is a criminal offence to desecrate the Russian coat of arms and flag, to cover denigrating the anthem as well.
 The Duma's Legislation Committee has approved the bill, and the first reading in the Duma is scheduled for this week. If the amendment comes into law, anthem abusers may face fines of 100 to 300 minimum wage units - which stands at 100 rubles, or $3.33 - or as much as one year in jail.
 &quot;Since the anthem is one of the state symbols, it has to be protected as well,&quot; said Apatenko's spokesperson, Ivan Yantsukevich.
 &quot;There have been cases in which the lyrics have been changed ruthlessly, including the use of obscene language. Mockery of the national anthem has also taken place on some television programs ... The anthem is a patriotic song and should be treated seriously.&quot;
 According to a Legislation Committee member quoted anonymously by Gazeta.Ru, some committee members only favored banning the use of obscene words, while others proposed prohibiting anthem-playing at casinos and strip shows. Some argued the law should only concern public performance of the anthem. A final decision on what constitutes denigrating the anthem is expected before the bill reaches its second reading.
 Some Duma deputies have opposed the bill. Vremya Novostei cited Sergei Ivanenko of the liberal Yabloko faction as saying there was no need for it. &quot;Criminal laws should not be made just in case. Otherwise they will not be laws but the communist moral code,&quot; he was quoted as saying.
 The newspaper also cited the Union of Right Forces' Viktor Pokhmelkin as saying that singing alternative words, making gestures or refusing to stand does not pose a threat to the state.

TITLE: New Euro Bills, Coins Meet Border Holdup
AUTHOR: By Victoria Lavrentieva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Do not expect to find it simple to swap rubles for freshly minted euros when the new European Union currency hits the streets Jan. 1.
 
Russia-based banks are finding it next to impossible to get hold of the currency in preparation for the launch. Moreover, many currency exchange points don't even know what the euro looks like.
 The problem is that the EU authorities who have spent much of the past year educating their citizens about the euro have all but neglected Russia, bankers lamented at a conference meant to celebrate the upcoming launch of the single European currency.
 Also, the Central Bank has not acted expediently to open the country's doors to the euro, they said.
 &quot;We are facing difficulties bringing euros across the Russian border, as they are all stuck at customs,&quot; Michel Perhirin, board chairperson of Raiffeisenbank Austria (Moscow), said at the conference Tuesday. &quot;If this problem is not resolved, our retail clients in Russia won't be able to get any euros from cash-dispensing machines on Jan. 1.&quot;
 The holdup at customs is due to the lack of a Central Bank regulation clarifying the status of the currency, said Andrei Kazmin, president and CEO of No. 1 savings bank Sberbank.
 &quot;We can't rule out the possibility that Sberbank won't be able to start operations with the actual euro on Jan. 1,&quot; Kazmin said.
 The Central Bank, however, defended its position. 
 &quot;Until Jan. 1, 2002, we don't consider the euro as a legal means of payment. Thus all cash operations with the European currency are illegal in Russia,&quot; said Tatyana Paramonova, deputy head of the Central Bank.
 She said, however, that the Central Bank and State Customs Committee have agreed on an instruction to regulate the import of euros as of January.
 Interfax reported that the Central Bank signed the instruction Dec. 7 and that it was to come into force Thursday.
 A handful of banks contacted Thursday said they had yet to see any euros.
 Some banks, like Germany's Commerzbank, have found ways around customs by importing euros through channels not subject to declaration, such as diplomatic pouches.
 Still, that leaves many Russia-based banks at a clear disadvantage to their European-based counterparts, said Peter Walter, head of the cash department at Deutsche Bundesbank.
 &quot;All commercial banks in Europe, begining Dec. 1, 2001, are allowed by the European Central Bank to ship euros in banknotes and coins to their correspondents and branches abroad,&quot; Walter said. &quot;This is necessary to do in advance because transportation companies have limited capacities and because retail customers should have access to the euro everywhere outside Europe.&quot;
 Starting Jan. 1, the euro will be floated in 12 eurozone countries in seven banknotes and eight coins. The largest banknote will be worth 500 euros, while the smallest coin is worth 1 cent. By the end of this year, the EU will have minted 50 billion coins and 14.5 billion banknotes.
 Despite all of the the criticism, Kazmin saw a humorous side to the inevitable difficulties that the launch of a new currency can create.
 The Europeans have an excuse - this is the first time they have launched a new currency in decades, Kaz min said.
 Russians, on the other hand, have more experience in this field, carrying out at least three monetary reforms with new banknotes in the past 10 years, he said.
 &quot;They should have asked us how to do it,&quot; he said with a grin.

TITLE: ECB Lowers Expectations for 2002
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: FRANKFURT, Germany - The European Central Bank slashed its growth forecast for the 12 countries using the euro common currency, saying Thursday that the region's economy would only grow in a range of 0.7 percent to 1.7 percent next year.
 
The bank lowered the earlier estimate, made in June, of growth ranging from 2.1 percent to 3.1 percent.
 In a twice-yearly economic forecast, bank economists blamed the slowing world economy, which had dampened demand for European exports, for sluggish growth prospects on the continent.
 The ECB said growth rates will improve, however, &quot;once exports start to recover and uncertainty fades away.'&quot;
 The bank said 2003 would see a recovery with growth of 2.0 percent to 3.0 percent.
 For the current year, growth is seen in a range of 1.3 percent to 1.7 percent a substantial drop from 2000's 3.4 percent.

TITLE: Who Knows What Is Lurking in Those Caves
AUTHOR: By Mark Taylor
TEXT: IN recent weeks, we have found ourselves lost in caves. While U.S. President George W. Bush accuses Osama bin Laden and his followers of being cowards for fleeing to caves and promises to &quot;smoke them out of their holes,&quot; Vice President Cheney retreats to a secure bunker many assume is underground. If this deadly game of hide-and-seek were a film or novel, the symbolic significance of caves would be unmistakable. In real life, the mythic power of the underground is no less important.
 
The complex image and long history of the cave are lending psychological depth and mythic proportions to our fascination with the search for bin Laden. In many religious traditions, caves are highly charged, sacred spaces. They are associated with life and death, creation and destruction, light and darkness. In religious traditions from France to Korea, Mexico to India, Canada to Australia, deities are worshiped in caves. Traces of these long-forgotten traditions flow through our collective memory in ways that transform the first war of the 21st century into a ritualistic repetition of ancient conflicts.
 For the religious imagination, caves are a symbol of creation. In Zuni and Hopi as well as Aztec and Mayan myths, the cave is the navel of the universe, the privileged place of birth. The Aztec earth deity was actually called &quot;Long Cave.&quot; In a sacred cave in Chalma, near Mexico City, Oztoteotl, the god of caves, was worshiped. As the locus of creation, the cave is nothing less than the womb of the entire cosmos.
 But caves are also sites of darkness and destruction. Hades, after all, is also &quot;the underground,&quot; a place where evil lurks. For Plato, the darkness shrouding the cave is the mark of ignorance, which we can escape only through the illumination knowledge brings. The demons of the cave embody psychological and cosmic forces that threaten to tear self and world asunder. Ultimately, the cave anticipates the tomb to which we all inevitably return.
 So what does all this have to do with the war we find ourselves fighting?
 Our current cultural landscape, which seems so new, really represents an age-old topography in which good and evil appear as the opposition between above and below ground. Make no mistake about it, we are engaged in a religious war, which both sides understand as an apocalyptic conflict between light and darkness. What the West regards as light, radical Islam regards as darkness, and vice versa. Certainty clashes with certainty, leaving no room for therapeutic doubt.
 All too often throughout history, it seems that political solidarity is created by opposition to others deemed evil. On the one hand, for bin Laden and his precursors, America is the Great Satan, which must be destroyed through a global jihad. On the other hand, when the &quot;Evil Empire&quot; of the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, radical Islam took its place for the United States. The first President Bush gave evil a face in the person of Saddam Hussein and, having identified evil, sought to contain it in the Gulf War. Now the son follows in the father's footsteps by personifying evil in bin Laden and once again we find ourselves engaged in a war declared holy. When evil is the enemy, warfare inevitably becomes a religious mission.
 And how appropriate that the final conflict may ultimately play out in the caves of Tora Bora. As places where good and evil repeatedly collide in the interplay of creation and destruction, caves are fraught with ambiguity. This shadowy realm in which gods and demons mingle is the point of transition between worlds. Those who venture into this netherworld enter a realm that harbors the threat of death, as well as the promise of rebirth.
 The image of the cave plays an especially important role in the history of Islam. In one version of the tradition, the Prophet Mohammed retreated to a cave in Mount Hira, where he received his first revelation. When his life was endangered in Mecca, he fled to a cave that, according to legend, was concealed by a spider's web. When bin Laden hides in the latticed caves of Afghanistan, he ritually repeats the retreat of the Prophet.
 Far from an act of cowardice or retreat, bin Laden's canny underground maneuvers replay a religious drama, which enhances both his spiritual power and his political effectiveness with his followers. The images he manipulates not only are those of modern culture, but also religious symbols, which pulse in the psychic underground of our consciousness. Bin Laden's elusiveness and invisibility are actually sources of his strength. Indeed, his absence has become an overwhelming presence for those who seek him. This is why his death will solve very little. When placed in a ritual context, the sacrificial victim is reborn in the spirit of the community of his followers. Like religious martyrs before him, bin Laden will become even more powerful in death than in life.
 If the caves of Afghanistan have meaning for Muslims, so do they for Christians. Jesus was not only entombed and later resurrected in a cave; some believe he was also born in a cave. In Turkey last summer, I visited caves set in rock formations bleached white by the blazing desert sun. Carved in the walls and crevices of this soft volcanic rock are countless cave-like dwellings, chapels and monasteries, many dating to the time of the Cappadocian Fathers of the fourth century. In the seventh century, Christians, fleeing Arab persecution in Kayseri, sought refuge in these artificial caves. In some chapels, frescoes as stunning as those in any European cathedral are preserved; in others, ancient iconoclasts have left abstract signs in place of the art they, like today's Taliban zealots, destroyed.
 In nearby Derinkuyu, I explored an even more remarkable hidden refuge - a vast underground city dating back to the era of the Hittites in 2000 B.C. If one could strip away the tourist booths and ticket window, this vast city would be absolutely inconspicuous. The subterranean complex has 18 levels and is 330 feet deep. Equipped with ventilation and water systems, latrines, storerooms, kitchens and stables, the structure could accommodate as many as 10,000 people for extended periods. During times of war, the local population would retreat below ground, and later, when persecutions broke out, Christians also sought safety in these caves. This city and others like it provide the prototype for the underground fortresses where bin Laden and his followers are presumed to be hiding.
 While the inflated rhetoric on both sides invites us to see the strife now consuming us as a conflict between right and wrong, or good and evil, in which opposing forces are sharply defined and clearly delineated, this is a dangerous way to view the situation. In the dark light of the cave, life is never so simple because everything is intertwined, interconnected, interrelated. Nor can we understand this conflict, as many are wont to do, in terms of a clash between ancient and modern civilizations. Ancient forces haunt the modern world and continue to circulate through latter-day warriors whose technological prowess masks the mythic powers they embody. While we no longer live in caves, caves still inhabit us. The cave dweller is both the other we oppose and the figure of dark forces lingering within each of us, to which we are inevitably drawn.
 Forever caught between oppositions we can never reconcile, we long for a resolution to the conflicts tearing us apart. Though we might be reluctant to admit it, we will be bitterly disappointed if the fatal showdown with the contemporary embodiment of evil does not take place in a cave.
 
 <i>Mark Taylor is the Cluett Professor of Humanities and Religion at Williams College in Massachusetts and the author of &quot;Hiding&quot; and &quot;The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture.&quot; He contributed this comment to the Los Angeles Times. </i>

TITLE: How Elections Killed Off the Media
TEXT: IN the November issue of my journal, I published a &quot;Declaration of Ethical Norms for Journalists During Elections.&quot; The Declaration, which comprises seven clauses, was signed by a number of leading media outlets in Krasnoyarsk, a region currently in the thick of an election campaign. The signatories confirm their responsibility to the public, condemn the use of smear tactics and swear to be objective and impartial.
 
Several days ago, I met with one of the authors of this document. &quot;How is the declaration's implementation going?&quot; I asked. 
 &quot;The value of 'black PR' has increased sharply,&quot; he joked weakly. &quot;Now clients have to compensate the press for the moral injury of violating its own word.&quot; 
 In the December issue of my journal, I am printing news of a decision by the Siberian branch of Mediasoyuz - one of the public associations uniting media industry employees - to support the Charter of Honest Journalism, one of many codes of journalistic ethics going around these days. This short news item serves as an ironic illustration to an article about the role of the press in the scandalous Sakha-Yakutiya presidential-election campaign. The title is: &quot;It's more profitable to elect a president than to mine diamonds.&quot;
 Here are a few examples. Two local private newspapers have print runs of 20,000, considering this the optimal level. 
 The overall print run of newspapers supporting the republic's incumbent president, Mikhail Nikolayev, is almost half a million copies, while the republic's electorate is 550,000 people. The print run of publications supporting the Nikolayev's opponents varies between 50,000 and 140,000 copies. Add to this the fact that many publications are distributed for free. How can honest journalists compete? All they can do is join the rest in the queue for election money. 
 One of the main and - I'm not afraid to say - tragic paradoxes of Russian life during this period of democratic transition is that elections have become one of the chief impediments to creating a truly free, independent and commercially viable press. 
 A huge amount of money is poured into the press during federal, regional and local elections. There are no legislative restrictions, and the state of the economy has no effect on the &quot;golden rain&quot; that pours down on the press during election campaigns. Provincial journalists tell me that during the federal Duma elections in post-crisis 1999 the money spent was of an order of magnitude greater than in prosperous 1995. Journalists and political consultants think up highly refined gray and black schemes for getting their share of the cash. 
 As a result, a general system of corruption takes hold, with the attendant effect of journalists, politicians and the public becoming very cynical.
 In Yakutiya, for example, the local prosecutor general arrested several political consultants from Moscow at the end of November. Speaking in their defense, the Russian Public Relations Association did not even try to prove that they had done nothing wrong. All they said was that arresting people is an inappropriate response to dirty political tricks. 
 
 <i>Alexei Pankin is editor of Sreda, a magazine for media professionals (www.internews.ru/sreda). </i>

TITLE: Making the Moves on Moscow
AUTHOR: By Boris Kagarlitsky
TEXT: MOSCOW'S newspapers spent at least a fortnight moaning that Muscovites wouldn't be bothered to turn out for City Duma elections last weekend. But did voters do so in the past? The last elections also took place in December during a severe frost and blizzard. Superhuman vision was necessary to spot at the empty polling stations the huge crowds of people that turned out there according to official reports. 
 
But low voter turnouts have never been a problem before, neither in the capital nor the regions. So-called &quot;administrative resources&quot; are mobilized and the requisite number of voters appears in the right place at the right time, providing the necessary number of votes for the &quot;right&quot; candidates. 
 If the City Elections Committee is now fretting about electoral apathy, then this can only mean that the elections won't be resolved simply by adding &quot;dead souls&quot; to the voting protocols and then registering as city deputies equally moribund politicians.
 A triumph of democracy, you might say. Genuine elections? Alas, it may be a little too early to rejoice. 
 Over the past eight years, the majority of regional elections have been rigged, to say nothing of the minor violations of electoral laws that aren't even taken seriously. Everybody knows this is the case, and it is openly discussed in the press.
 The term &quot;administrative resource&quot; has become firmly entrenched in the lexicon of political commentators who prefer not to utter such coarse terms as &quot;lawlessness,&quot; &quot;falsification,&quot; and &quot;forgery.&quot; The electorate, seeing all this, naturally loses interest in going to vote. 
 No matter how brazen the violations, no one has yet been punished. As the saying goes: &quot;until you're caught, you're not a thief.&quot; 
 No one fears the electorate, but everyone fears the Kremlin. It is the Kremlin's favor that guarantees that loyal administrators can act with impunity. Disfavor means immediate retribution for any misdemeanors committed or even contemplated. 
 In the mid-1990s, relations between Moscow city authorities and the Kremlin were good and the city felt at ease. Now the Kremlin has cast its hostile gaze on the city authorities, and the rules of the game are changing.
 The City Duma, per se, is not much use to anyone. However, there are plenty of people in the Kremlin who would love to take a shot at City Hall. They can't forgive Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov his presidential ambitions in 1998 and 1999. Moreover, a team of aggressive administrators has gathered in the Kremlin, and they aren't content with having the whole of Russia for their playground. They want to take direct control of the financial flows in the regions by installing their people in all the most lucrative positions. If others take bribes and pocket state funds, then it's a crime - because the money should go to those with links to the Kremlin.
 I have never supported Luzhkov, but I must confess that the current Kremlin-inspired attack on City Hall frightens me. 
 There is a multitude of problems in Moscow, and the city administration is far less effective than most people think. Corruption in the capital is no less endemic than elsewhere in the country and the style of governance is among the least democratic. Nonetheless, the changes that the Kremlin is bringing to the capital do not augur anything good. We will simply see a repeat of what happens with most other Russian reforms.
 The problems are very real, but the reformers have no intention of trying to resolve them. Their goals are entirely different. As a result, when the reforms come to an end, we will find that all the old problems still remain and that other new ones have been spawned by the reforms themselves.
 If Kremlin stooges take over City Hall, then we will witness the arrival of a new group of administrators, who are not only unfamiliar with the city, but that also have absolutely no interest in it. Furthermore, it would most likely also accelerate housing reforms that, in practice, will mean higher prices for all and sundry. Luzhkov's administration is also going down this path, but unwillingly as it fears losing Muscovites' support.
 If Luzhkov's administration is replaced by a new team that has the Kremlin's support, then it will simply spit in the faces of the public. Who needs citizens' sympathy when you have the president's favor? 
 The Moscow Duma has an important role to play in deciding whether or not Luzhkov will be eligible to run for a third mayoral term. That's why it has suddenly become an object of intense interest both for the mayor and his opponents. Unfortunately, it is of no interest whatsoever to Muscovites.
 
 <i>Boris Kagarlitsky is a Moscow-based sociologist. </i>

TITLE: There Is Not Much Patriotism Involved in the Draft
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
TEXT: THE army came after me for first time in the mid-1980s, when I turned 14. The preliminary medical examination at the local <i>voenkomat, </i>or military registration and enlistment office, revealed that I met all the requirements and qualified to be conscripted into the paratroops. Since the war in Afghanistan was in full swing with no prospects for peace in sight, my clean bill of health plunged my parents in deep despair.
 
Entering university, however, postponed my call-up and prolonged my mother's apparently futile efforts to increase my life span.
 Her worries were later doubled when my younger brother turned 18. Several days before the enlistment he went to a barber's shop to have his hair cropped and managed to catch ringworm while there. It was a heaven-sent gift. 
 Following consultations with various medical specialists, my mother did everything in her powers to aggravate the illness, and pretty soon my brother received a waiver from military service for three years.
 I myself managed to escape two call-ups after finishing my university education. By this time, it was the mid-1990s, and Chechnya had replaced Afgha ni stan as the meat grinder of the country's young men. I opted for the life of a vagrant rather than going for the challenges of military life. 
 My friends and relatives offered me refuge, while their own sons of conscript age were hiding elsewhere. In short, nobody was particularly eager to volunteer to participate in the latest bloody page of Russian history.
 I was caught the first night I spent at home after months of existence as a kind of urban guerrilla. In the wee hours of the morning, I was awakened by police officers who forced me to put my signature on call-up papers. Having done this, if I didn't appear at the voenkomat within the specified period, I would be subject to criminal prosecution.
 Once again, my mum started pulling strings and calling in favors among her medical colleagues. My brother's medical case history resurfaced, some pages of it were replaced and some cases of the finest cognac - the usual currency for expressing one's gratitude where I come from - were shamefacedly passed from one pair of hands to another. 
 The upshot of all this was that I soon found myself suffering from chronic, recurrent herpes that was in a phase of temporary remission.
 Three days later, dizzy with a terrible hangover (my father's expert opinion was that it would enhance the credibility of my diagnosis), I waited for my turn in a noisy line of young men to undergo one more medical examination at the voenkomat. The boy in front of me, wearing thick glasses and thus hardly fit to wield a bayonet, complained that the commission's optician had found him fit for military service.
 &quot;The doctor just asked me whether I could peel potatoes and when I nodded, he told me to stand next in line,&quot; he lamented.
 Another boy standing behind me in the line, whose appearance hinted at his rural origins, came along with his father. The poor peasant was depressed, finding himself in the company of boisterous youths who were cracking cynical jokes at the nurses.
 &quot;Don't admit these hooligans to the army. They will spoil everything there. Take my son, he is a good boy. He will make a good soldier,&quot; the aged peasant addressed one of the officers in despair. The man was quite clearly out of his mind.
 The medical staff - some of them my mother's acquaintances - confirmed my diagnosis, but the military delegates suspected a ruse.
 &quot;We will send you to the military hospital where our doctors will give you a thorough examination,&quot; the colonel, chief of the military delegation, said to me threateningly.
 &quot;Please do,&quot; I replied, knowing that until I was enlisted, the army delegates could do nothing to me.
 The civilians could, however.
 And they did.
 &quot;Write three call-up papers for this guy,&quot; demanded the deputy head of the local administration, who was also a member of the commission. &quot;I'll deal with him personally. Let him come and see me at my office every day.&quot;
 What he wanted was completely illegal, but I couldn't argue with him because he could get nasty with the doctors, and they would inevitably crack under pressure. When I came to his office, he packed me into his Volga along with his guards and we shuttled between different doctors, some of them his friends, in search of an impartial opinion.
 My diagnosis was signed by the top local dermatologist, and none of physicians displayed any desire to spoil their relations with a powerful colleague.
 &quot;Well, I'll sign your waiver,&quot; the bureaucrat said, finally caving in during my last visit to his office. &quot;Just tell me like a man that you are not ill.&quot; 
 However, I remained adamant and insisted that I was ill. I couldn't do otherwise - so many people had entrusted me with their confidence. Three years later my waiver expired. I received new call-up papers. This time, I couldn't be drafted to the army, as my older daughter had not yet turned three years old, and this provided legal grounds for obtaining a new waiver.
 The colonel at the voenkomat knew this. And he knew that I knew this, too.
 But it didn't stop him from torturing me further.
 &quot;We have to do something with your waiver. I am not sending you to the army, but I am sending you to the venereal and dermatological disease clinic for two weeks to have your diagnosis checked,&quot; was his offer.
 He was well within his rights really, but the cheerful prospect of spending a fortnight in a ward chock-a-block with syphilitics at the time didn't exactly excite my research interests. I thought about paying a ransom.
 The officer asked for $200. I told him I had only 1,000 rubles ($35) on me. Twenty minutes later, my diagnosis was confirmed by a dermatologist whom I'd never seen in my life.
 I shared my enlistment experience with one American acquaintance.
 &quot;When I was young,&quot; he wrote back to me, &quot;I signed up for army service voluntarily. The pay was good and I became an officer pretty quickly. Patriotism didn't come into the equation at all.&quot;
 Back in Russia, there are various motivations used to encourage a youth to do compulsory military service: He should repay his sacred debt to the Motherland, no matter what the Motherland has done for him or has to offer in the future.
 However, as civil society gradually and spontaneously develops in Russia, the understanding grows that civil duty stems from a pact between citizens and the state. Citizens refuse to buy into abstract rhetoric and prefer to operate on a quid-pro-quo basis.
 I never felt any guilt for evading military service. No one who participated in my enlistment affair was thinking about anything apart from his or her own interests. Everybody around me was highly businesslike, and there was no room for romantic feelings. And why should I feel guilty? Everything was settled, fair and square.
 
 <i>Nabi Abdullaev is a staff writer for The St. Petersburg Times based in Moscow. </i>

TITLE: Constitution Provides a Stability Framework
TEXT: CONSTITUTION Day provides a good opportunity for reflection on this most fundamental of documents and cornerstone of the Russian political system. Moreover, comments regarding constitutional amendments made by Sergei Mironov just after being elected speaker of the Federation Council provide further food for thought. He proposed extending the presidential term from the current four years to five or even seven years.
 
Russia's first post-Soviet Constitution had a somewhat turbulent birth in 1993, following President Boris Yelt sin's bombardment of the Sup re me Soviet into submission and the document's adoption by a referendum whose legitimacy has been called into question.
 However, for all Russian democracy's manifest failings, the Constitution has provided an element of political stability. The polity that is sometimes referred to as &quot;super-presidential&quot; is indeed weighted heavily in favor of the president, but nonetheless the Constitution does establish the fundamental separation of powers between the executive, legislature and judiciary - the bedrock of any democracy.
 This is in stark contrast to the unworkable Constitution inherited from the Soviet Union, which in essence provided for two centers of executive power (the presidency and the Supreme Soviet) and should take its fair share of the blame for the disorder and conflict that prevailed between 1992 and 1994.
 Moreover, those doomsayers who saw the Constitution as paving the way for full-blown authoritarianism have clearly not been vindicated. 
 One of the strengths of the Constitution is its extremely complicated amendment procedure (evidenced by the total absence of amendments in the eight years of its life). This has ensured stability of the rules of the game and discouraged sitting presidents from trying to tinker with it.
 Mironov's proposal (whether or not motivated by the desire to show gratitude to the president for his support) in this respect deserves to be consigned to the rubbish heap of history. There is no analogy to support the argument advanced by several Kremlin-linked political commentators that a longer presidential term will serve to smooth Russia's difficult transition.
 On the contrary, regular elections are a crucial part of the democratic process and the threat of being turned out of power is one of the few checks on graft and corruption. Furthermore, any attempt to tinker with the Constitution is fraught with the danger of the slippery slope: Once you've gone to the effort of setting the amendment process in motion, why stop at just the presidential term?
 Lurching in this direction will bring Russia closer to Kazakh and Belarussian practice, and take it much further away from the Western democratic norms that Putin apparently strives for.
 
 <i>This comment originally appeared as an editorial in The Moscow Times on Dec.11. </i>

TITLE: new insights into old images
AUTHOR: by Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: &quot;When I was young, I hated socialist realism,&quot; said emigre artist Grisha Brus kin. &quot;I hated those giant buildings in Mos cow that were built in Stalin's time.&quot;
 
&quot;But now,&quot; he added, &quot;when this art and this architecture are no longer part of an existing totalitarian system, I consider them no more and no less than documents of a epoch, deserving of their place in history.&quot;
 Bruskin, who was born in Moscow in 1945, left the Soviet Union in 1988 and now makes his home in New York, is the subject of new exhibition at the Marble Palace annex of the State Russian Museum, which will run through the end of the year.
 A conceptual artist whose works were banned in the early 1980s by the Soviet authorities as part of a wider crackdown on underground culture, Bruskin has since become Russia's most sought-after artist, one of the very few contemporary artists with a dedicated following abroad.
 When Sotheby's held its one and only auction in the Soviet Union back in 1988, Bruskin's &quot;Fundamental Lexicon&quot; fetch ed a handsome $416,000. More recently, the German government invited him to create a decorative panel for the reconstructed Reichstag in Berlin.
 The Marble Palace exhibition, entitled &quot;Life Is Everywhere,&quot; features Bruskin's intriguing porcelain figurines - playing on Soviet icons such as the famous border guard with his German shepherd, a worker holding a portrait of Stalin and others, as well as parodies such as a socialist-realist convict just released from prison - together with several series of illustrated porcelain dishes, also playing boldly on Soviet themes.
 The plates of the &quot;Primer&quot; series echo archetypical scenes from Soviet life, but are accompanied by deeply personal captions that relate directly to Bruskin's own childhood. One plate depicting a detachment of Young Pioneers marching and playing drums bears the caption, &quot;We dreamed of the war soon to come.&quot;
 &quot;My generation grew up after the war,&quot; Bruskin explains. &quot;We felt as if we had missed our chance to prove how strong we were, and we wished that another war would come so that we could prove that we were strong too.&quot;
 Alexander Borovsky, head of the State Russian Museum's Newest Trends Department, which organized the display, compares Bruskin's attitude to life with that of physiologist Ivan Pavlov. 
 &quot;Bruskin's art is more about life in general than about the Soviet era in particular. He is demonstrating how easily people are manipulated,&quot; Borovsky said. &quot;He chose this Soviet material simply because he happened to grow up during that time.&quot;
 Bruskin, though, says he feels as if he is mummifying Egyptian pharaohs. &quot;I am sending a message to future generations, hoping that by comparing my art to genuine Soviet propaganda art, they will be able to get a true picture of the era.&quot;
 While playing off of Soviet-era propaganda art, Bruskin is also placing himself within the tradition of some of Russia's greatest modern artists, including Kazimir Malevich and Vassily Kandinsky, who also worked in the medium of porcelain. These artists, Bruskin argues, compelled porcelain to serve their artistic ends, and he wanted to follow their path.
 The idea of working in porcelain first struck Bruskin in the mid-1980s when he was working on a series of 15 sculptures entitled, &quot;The Birth of a Hero.&quot; He painted the bronze models white in order to make them look like so-called &quot;garden sculptures,&quot; the gypsum statues of workers, farmer, soldiers and young pioneers that were omnipresent in Soviet parks. The result made Bruskin think of working in porcelain figurines, which naturally led him to plates and dishes.
 The genre enabled Bruskin at once to mock the absolute nonsense of Soviet cliches about life while also making his own statements on the topic. 
 Borovsky feels that, far from being dated after the collapse of communism, Bruskin's art and that of other Russian conceptualists who gained prominence in the early 1980s is becoming increasingly relevant.
 &quot;I really feel that Bruskin's art is now obtaining an even greater resonance in the context of the current ideological situation in the country,&quot; Borovsky said, &quot; with such a huge, farcical number of rallies, political parties, elections and so on.&quot;
 

 <i>
See listings for details. </i>

TITLE: vermicelli's 'grosso' experiment
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Vermicelli Orchestra, which has been packing local clubs recently, will expand its horizons and play an ambitious experimental concert this weekend. The instrumental crossover band, which combines rock, classical and folk elements, will be joined by a classical string ensemble for a program called &quot;Concerto Grosso for Vermicelli and Orchestra.&quot;
 
The Vermicelli Orchestra was formed in 1995 and is fronted by accordionists Sergei Shchurakov, who spent about 10 years playing with Boris Grebenshchikov in both Akvarium and the BG Band. Vermicelli's first stable lineup came together during the recording sessions for its debut album, &quot;Anabasis,&quot; which came out in 1997.
 Over the years, however, the band has undergone many permutations with about 30 musicians having passed through the ensemble. The inspiration, however, remains Shchurakov, whose early listening experience included both classic rock like The Beatles and Led Zeppelin and classical music. Beethoven is his favorite composer, &quot;the composer of composers,&quot; as Shchurakov says.
 &quot;There was a period back in my 20s when I was listening to Akvarium a lot,&quot; Shchurakov said. &quot;I was impressed by a lot of things [in Akvarium's music], so impressed that I ended up joining the band and staying with them for quite a while.&quot;
 Shchurakov says he was introduced to Akvarium in 1987 by Seva Gakkel, the band's cellist, during the <i>Ravnodenstviye </i>(Equinox) album sessions.
 &quot;I sense deep within myself that the old Akvarium, despite its lack of professionalism, is an unrepeatable phenomenon for me. Even now it seems to me that nobody has reached &quot;Day of the Silver&quot; and &quot;December's Children&quot; [Akvarium's albums from 1984 and 1985, respectively],&quot; Shchurakov said. &quot;I believe that no group in Russia has achieved the creativity that Akvarium did then.&quot;
 Shchurakov credits Gakkel, who managed the alternative TaMtaM club until it folded in 1996, for pushing him toward alternative approaches.
 &quot;I was always resisting somewhat because I felt we were already doing different things,&quot; Shchurakov said. &quot;But now I see that [Gakkel] turned out to be right. We are an alternative band ... although we had no intention of becoming one. It happened de facto because we didn't want to go with the mainstream.&quot;
 Shchurakov studied composition formally both in school and at the Mussorgsky College of Music, from which he graduated in 1980 with a degree in folk music. He is the Vermicelli Orchestra's composer and principal arranger, although all members are free to pitch in ideas during rehearsals.
 Despite the Vermicelli Orchestra's early failures and false starts, it is now an integrated band, with its members sensing one another effectively and working together tightly. As a result, audiences are anything but bored. Although Shchurakov considers concert halls to be the appropriate venue for the band, audiences don't hesitate to take to the dance floor when the group plays the clubs.
 In addition to Shchurakov, the ensemble now includes his sister, Maria Shchurakova, on mandolin; Mikhail Ivanov on bass; Ilya Rozovsky on acoustic guitar; Timur Bogatyryov and Julia Antipenko, both on flute; Julia Rychagova on cello; Dmitry Veselov on percussion; and Pavel Ivanov on drums. Artyom Tamazov, described as the band's &quot;producer&quot; and serving as manager and sound engineer, also makes a significant contribution to Vermicelli's sound.
 Gakkel, who has played with the band in the past but took a long break, started playing with Vermicelli as a guest cellist last month and will participate in Friday's concert.
 &quot;I consider him an extremely creative person,&quot; Shchurakov said, &quot;and that is why I feel good when he is playing with us.&quot;
 In addition to &quot;Anabasis,&quot; which was re-released earlier this year, Vermicelli's other album is &quot;Byzantium,&quot; released last year on Moscow's Boheme Music label.
 &quot;I don't know what style [we play],&quot; Shchurakov said. &quot;I can't define it. In general, I am against definitions. I like people to indulge in fantasies.&quot;
 &quot;We are an orchestra. We have written scores and defined parts,&quot; says Shchurakov. &quot;With a rock band, it is bass, guitar, drums and vocals, which leaves a lot of room for self-expression because the instruments don't intersect much. But for us, everything must be reduced to a common denominator, so we need coordination.&quot;
 Friday's performance will be something new for the group. It will consist of two sets of Shchurakov's compositions. For the second set, the Vermicelli Orchestra will be joined on stage by a double string quartet, creating an even deeper and more complexly layered sound. Shchurakov says that if he is satisfied with this experiment, he will use this broader lineup for still more ambitious concerts in the future.
 
 <i>
&quot;Concerto Grosso for Vermicelli and Orchestra&quot; will be at the Concert Hall (near the Finland Station), 13/1 Arsenalnaya Nab., M: Ploshchad Lenina, 542-0944, at 7 p.m., Dec. 14. Check out the Vermicelli Orchestra's bi-lingual Web site at www.vo.org.ru. </i>

TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: Pep-See</strong>,<strong> </strong>one of the city's liveliest and most fun club bands will play a single show on Friday to introduce its new album. Called &quot;The Tantsy,&quot; the album has just been released on Moscow's Gala label and has yet to appear in record stores.
 
The album, which was produced by Pep-See guitarist Vitaly Lapin, is seen as something of a breakthrough for the band.
 &quot;We have never achieved what we ourselves wanted to hear before,&quot; said singer Anna Kipyatkova this week. &quot;Honestly, we were not satisfied with earlier results. Unlike our listeners, by the way.&quot;
 &quot;We made a lot of progress in creating a correspondence between our live sound and our recorded sound. And on our third album, we have finally nearly achieved this - about 90 percent. On this album, we sound like we sound live.&quot;
 In addition to some new songs, the band included covers of two of their older songs: Kesha Spechinsky's &quot;Turbo Boy&quot; and &quot;Lyubov Moya&quot; (&quot;My Love&quot;). While Spechinsky wrote some of the finest Pep-See songs, the album's new material was mostly written by Vitaly Kudryavtsev, who penned the band's hit &quot;Disco.&quot;
 Fronted by three female singers - Kipyatkova, Inessa Mikhailova, Maria Volkova - Pep-See now includes guitarist Lapin and new bass guitarist Nikita Popov.
 The band's previous two albums were &quot;Three Stars&quot; in 1997 and &quot;Ustupite Lyzhnyu&quot; in 1999.
 At Friday's concert, the band - which describes its style as &quot;extreme disco&quot; - will play tunes from the album as well as older hits. 
 &quot;It will be just for friends and journalists,&quot; says Kipyatkova. &quot;It won't have a big resonance.&quot;
 She is not sure whether the band will manage to provide the full light show for the event.
 <i>Red Club, 1 a.m., Dec. 14.
 </i>The incredibly talented Kesha Spechinsky's reformed <strong>Vnezapny Sych </strong>will play on the same night at Fish Fabrique. Spechinsky's career has seen a lot of troubles over the past 10 years, with his band's first album from 1990 appearing properly only this year, thanks to the small local label Zvezda Records. Although two of the three original members died during this period, Spechinsky has reformed the band, which now occasionally plays local clubs.
 The other events of note on Friday include Finnish underground bands playing at Moloko as part of the <strong>Sputnik </strong>project and <strong>Vermicelli Orchestra</strong> performing at the Concert Hall (near Finland Station). The latter will play what it calls Concerto Grosso for Vermicelli and Orchestra with a classical string group. See the story on this page.
 <strong>Spitfire </strong>will play an early-evening concert at the underground club Poligon at 6 p.m. Saturday. The ska-punk band returned from its European tour without its trombonist, who remains hospitalized in Switzerland in serious condition after an accident. If you'd like to help out, see the information on the band's Web site at www.spitfire.spb.ru. 
 <strong>HIM</strong> - the Finnish heavy metal band whose abbreviation means, rather banally &quot;His Infernal Majesty&quot; - will finally play its previously postponed show on Dec. 16.
 The week's main attraction for the trendier crowd, however, is <strong>Tricky</strong>, who will perform at Oktyabrsky Concert Hall on Dec. 19.
 
 <i>- by Sergey Chernov </i>

TITLE: not your mom's breakfast, but ...
AUTHOR: by Thomas Rymer
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: No matter how long you live in a foreign country, sometimes you just get a craving for some of the little things that you took for granted back home. And it can often be extremely frustrating trying to reproduce those little joys, always hoping that the thing you are hankering for is lurking just around the next corner. 
 
A coworker and I are currently in the grips of such frustration, having launched what is likely a hopeless quest to find a place - any place - in town where they are serving up what we would consider to be an authentic, North American-style breakfast.
 This week marked the first episode in our little odyssey, and we decided to try our luck somewhere centrally located and, as a result, on the way to work.
 Pit Stop is an interesting, if somewhat schizophrenic venue, serving as a restaurant, bar, pool hall, betting parlor and shrine to Finnish Formula-One race driver Mika Hakkinen all rolled into one. I had been to Pit Stop before but, arriving this time, I realized that the brightness of the establishment, which had annoyed me a little on earlier occasions, contrasted nicely with the city's frankly oppressive December darkness to create something of a cheerful breakfast atmosphere.
 Opening the one-page breakfast menu, my companion and I immediately noted that our naive fantasies of waffles, pancakes with maple syrup, and bacon, eggs and sausages would not be fulfilled on this day. To be fair though, there are a decent number of dishes on offer, with some of the options we skipped including sausages for 30 rubles ($1); a cheese plate, also for 30 rubles; and lightly salted salmon for 45 rubles ($1.50), among others.
 Still, we did our best to cover as much ground as our stomachs would permit. Our search for the lost breakfast experience of our youths prompted us to opt for three egg dishes, one of which - the fried eggs with sausage <i>(servelat) </i>for 40 rubles ($1.33) - is probably the closest thing you'll find on the menu to truck-stop fare. The three eggs are fried sunny-side-up and served on top of the diced, fried sausage. I thought the taste of the sausage was an acceptable stand-in for bacon and, after a few moments of reticence, my coworker agreed.
 In keeping with the egg theme, we also ordered a couple of omelets. Initially, we optimistically misread the first entry on the menu - which listed ham, cheese and mushrooms - to mean that the omelet would contain all three ingredients, only to discover that these were actually three separate choices. Worse, there was no way to pay a little more than the 35 rubles ($1.15) listed to have them toss in an extra tidbit. In short, no cheese-and-ham omelets here. 
 The omelets were an egg-and-milk mixture that appeared to have been baked in the dish in which it was served, rather than the fried-and-then-rolled variety that I'd been dreaming of, but was tasty enough. We also sampled the Spanish omelet for 45 rubles ($1.50), which was prepared in the same manner, but with what were once frozen vegetables, including red, green and yellow peppers and - in an omelet first for me - green beans.
 We also ordered the bliny served with a jam that we have yet to identify and agreed that they were not a proper substitute for pancakes and syrup.
 We washed this all down with a number of beverages and, to sum it up quickly, the cappuccino for 50 rubles ($1.65) was good, although not exceptional; the fresh-squeezed orange juice for 70 rubles ($2.35) was both tasty and very pulpy; and the hot chocolate for 50 rubles was in the European style and good as well. 
 To my disappointment, my glass of milk was a little closer to cream and served at room temperature and in a coffee cup to boot.
 To sum things up, Pit Stop is not the place my colleague and I are looking for, although it made a valiant effort and clearly deserves credit for that. But the search for an ideal diner-style breakfast spot goes on and, if you think it's a bit quixotic, just call me Sancho.
 To be continued ...
 
 <i>
Pit Stop, 13 Sadovaya Ul., 314-9334. Open 24 hours, with breakfast available at all times. A large breakfast for two, 510 rubles ($17). Dinner menu in English and Russian. Breakfast menu in Russian only. Credit cards accepted. </i>

TITLE: Assault on Last Taliban Bases Intensifies
AUTHOR: By Chris Tomlinson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TORA BORA, Afghanistan - U.S. air strikes intensified dramatically Thursday and Afghan tribal fighters launched a new ground assault against trapped al-Qaeda forces following claims that key terrorist leaders have fled Osama bin Laden's besieged mountain base for neighboring Pakistan. The whereabouts of bin Laden remained unknown.
 
Front-line tribal commanders of the U.S.-backed Eastern Alliance said they had abandoned a plan for al-Qaeda fighters to disarm and surrender at midday Thursday. It was the second cease-fire to fail in less than 48 hours.
 One tribal unit advanced and captured a key al-Qaeda position. Tribal officers said their forces were determined to crush the enemy, most of them Arabs and other foreign Muslim fighters, holed up in a mountainside canyon for three days.
 &quot;The al-Qaeda forces are about to be finished,&quot; said one commander, who identified himself only as Hamid. &quot;They don't have any more food or ammunition.&quot;
 Hamid said Thursday's assault was ordered after it became clear that senior al-Qaeda chiefs had left the Tora Bora area and abandoned their rank-and-file troops. He said the fleeing leaders might try to cross the Pakistan border, just a few miles south across the White Mountain range. Pakistan has said that it has reinforced the border to prevent al-Qaeda incursions.
 It was unclear why the Afghans thought major al-Qaeda figures had taken part in the defense of Tora Bora, which has seen some of fiercest fighting of the war.
 Several figures of the eastern alliance had offered vague, secondhand accounts of seeing bin Laden, but U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz questioned their accuracy.
 However, the $25-million U.S. bounty on bin Laden was a powerful incentive for the Afghan militias to lay siege to Tora Bora.
 &quot;We do not know who is escaping and who is not,&quot; said General Peter Pace, vice chairperson of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, when asked by a reporter on Wednesday about al-Qaeda fighters in the Tora Bora cave complex.
 Pace said he didn't know whether senior leaders were among the holdouts at the mountain battleground. &quot;It'd be nice if there were leaders there, and it'd be great if we were able to kill or capture them,&quot; he said in Washington.
 Bombing was relentless Wednesday night and Thursday morning. High-flying B-52s circled above the combat zone in the foothills of Afghanistan's eastern White Mountains. Fighter aircraft roared across the Tora Bora and Milawa valleys.
 After one jet dropped 450-kilogram bombs on an al-Qaeda post, an Afghan soldier on the ground could be heard cheering over the alliance's radio network.
 &quot;Thank you. Thank you very much,&quot; he said in English after the target was reduced to a smoking heap of rubble.
 Pentagon officials said the bombs included satellite-guided weapons that home in on their targets and the biggest conventional bomb in the U.S. arsenal, the 6,750-kilogram &quot;daisy cutter,&quot; which obliterates everything within a few hundred yards when it explodes.
 At least one, and perhaps as many as three, &quot;daisy cutters&quot; were dropped before dawn on a mountainside canyon where many al-Qaeda men have been hemmed in since they were flushed out of their cave shelters on Monday.
 An Associated Press reporter who saw one blast said a huge, bright magenta fireball hung in the air and produced a false dawn effect as it lit up the sky at around 3 a.m.
 Casualty figures from the latest bombardment were not known.
 U.S. special forces deployed by helicopters helped coordinate the air strikes.
 American AC-130 gunships, slow-moving armored aircraft armed with Gatling guns, strafed al-Qaeda positions.
 U.S. officials said it was not clear whether some enemy personnel were still sheltering in the hundreds of caves and tunnels that riddle the area.
 Thursday's fighting came after two surrender deals between the alliance and al-Qaeda troops fell through.
 After an initial deal failed on Wednesday, tribal commanders set a new deadline of midday Thursday for trapped al-Qaeda fighters to give up, but added a demand that their leaders be handed over as well.
 The alliance said that some of those leaders are on a list of 22 &quot;most wanted terrorists&quot; made public by Washington after the Sept. 11 attacks.

TITLE: U.S. Navy Rescues Crew of Ditched B-1
AUTHOR: By Robert Burns
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - A U.S. Air Force B-1B bomber flying a long-range combat mission to Afghanistan crashed in the Indian Ocean on Wednesday. A navy ship pulled all four crew members to safety.
 
&quot;We're all pretty bruised up and have some cuts, but overall we're doing very well,&quot; the bomber's pilot, Captain William Steele, told reporters at the Pentagon in a satellite telephone call from the USS Russell, the guided-missile destroyer that launch ed a small boat to rescue the crew in darkness.
 Steele spoke about five hours after his B-1B Lancer crashed into the warm waters 85 kilometers north of Diego Garcia, a British-controlled island in the central Indian Ocean.
 He said the crew spent two hours in the water before the Russell came to their rescue, aided by an Air Force KC-10 that first located the downed fliers, maintained radio contact and pinpointed their location for the Russell.
 The B-1B was the first U.S. airplane lost in the war in Afghanistan, which entered its 67th day Wednesday. Air Force B-1Bs and B-52s have made almost daily bombing runs over Afghanistan from the start; in recent weeks they have been pounding al-Qaeda mountain hideouts in the Tora Bora region.
 Steele said his bomber suffered multiple malfunctions - which he declined to discuss in detail - which caused it to go &quot;out of control.&quot; He ruled out hostile fire as a cause for the bomber's malfunctions.
 The most recent previous B-1B crash, in 1998, occurred when a fire in the cockpit instrument panel shut down the plane's power over Kentucky. All four crew members ejected safely.
 Steele said he was not allowed to say whether he was heading toward or away from Afghanistan at that point, but Pentagon officials said the B-1B was about 140 kilometers north of Diego Garcia en route to Afghanistan when the crew declared an in-flight emergency.
 The bomber headed back toward Diego Garcia in hope of landing there, but 15 minutes after declaring an emergency the crew decided they had to eject, Steele said. 
 Diego Garcia is about 4,000 kilometers south of Afghanistan.
 The USS Russell was operating off Diego Garcia, although its home port is Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The ship's commanding officer, Commander Hank Miranda, told reporters that &quot;everything worked like clockwork&quot; once he got word of the crew's location.
 Victoria Clarke, spokesperson for U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, expressed gratitude for the crew's efforts.
 &quot;This underscores what we try to remember all the time: the men and women of the U.S. military put their lives at risk every single day, and we are very grateful for that and we're thinking of them,&quot; she said.
 Two of the B-1B's crew members are based at Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota, and two are based at Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho, Steele said.
 The Air Force estimates the cost of a B-1B at $280 million.

TITLE: Arab Taliban Patients Hold Afghan Hospital in Terror
AUTHOR: By Christopher Torchia
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - Fearing retribution, 13 injured Arab fighters have strapped explosives to their waists and threatened to blow themselves up if anyone other than medical staff enters their rooms at Kandahar's main hospital.
 
The desperate patients, suspected of links to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network, were wounded by U.S. bombing or shot in fighting with Afghan tribal forces opposed to the Taliban.
 &quot;They have given an ultimatum. If someone else comes in, they'll blow themselves up,&quot; Ghulam Mohammed Afghan, head nurse at Mirwais Hospital, said Thursday. &quot;Only a few nurses are allowed to go in. Even I don't visit them.&quot;
 The standoff began 10 days ago when Arab fighters pulled trucks up to the hospital gates and left their injured comrades. The city was still in the hands of the Taliban, who later abandoned it under pressure from U.S. bombing and tribal forces closing in on their last stronghold. While Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan's interim leader, offered amnesty to Taliban who handed in their weapons, less mercy has been shown toward Arabs who came to Afghanistan to fight a jihad, or holy war.
 There have been isolated reports of Arab prisoners being executed in the Kandahar area, and many fought ferociously even as the Taliban were giving up and fleeing to their villages or the mountains. 
 The Arabs in the hospital lie in their beds with hand grenades and other explosives strapped to them, Moham med said.
 &quot;They don't allow anybody to see them except those who are treating them, dressing the wounds or cleaning the rooms,&quot; he said. &quot;They are scared, and they don't want to talk about anything. It's extremely difficult for the hospital staff because they or other patients could get injured.&quot;
 But he said he had a duty to treat them and expected that the International Committee of the Red Cross, which funds the hospital, would eventually take charge of his taciturn patients.
 There is a &quot;no weapons&quot; symbol - an automatic rifle in a red circle with a bar through the middle - at the hospital entrance, but it is widely ignored.
 The hostpital is also treating Afghans badly injured by the air strikes, including several children who lost limbs. Eleven-year-old Kasim Qadir moaned in pain, his right leg amputated and much of his body swathed in bandages. His brother, Abdul, said Qadier was walking home when he picked up an unexploded cluster bomblet. Not knowing what it was, he threw it on the ground a couple of times. The third time, it exploded.
 Elsewhere in Kandahar, fighters ransacked the spacious compound of Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's spiritual leader, who is now a fugitive. They quarreled over which room they would stay in and gazed at the murals of rural scenes and tiled bathrooms, luxuries for most Afghans.
 &quot;No one was permitted to see or to visit this place,&quot; said Kaka, a Kandahar resident who came to look. &quot;This isn't just. This place is like a castle, so many rooms. He built this just for himself and his Arab friends.&quot; 
 Up to 50 U.S. special-forces personnel who were in the compound have also left, leaving behind all-American trash: empty Dr. Pepper soda cans and wrappers of Bazooka bubble gum and Reese's Cups chocolates.

TITLE: India Rocked as Gunmen Storm Parliament
AUTHOR: By Monalisa Arthur
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW DELHI, India - A half-dozen gunmen stormed the gates of India's parliament on Thursday in a car with a siren blaring and opened fire, sparking a battle that left 13 dead, including all the attackers, the government said.
 
Authorities deemed it an act of terror, and analysts called it the worst breach of government security in India since the 1984 assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Parliament was evacuated and all lawmakers were reported safe.
 &quot;This was an attack not just on Parliament House, but a warning to the entire country. We accept the challenge. We will foil every attempt of the terrorists,&quot; Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said in a live television address.
 There was no claim of responsibility.
 The car sped through a gate and one militant jumped out, blowing himself up, while the others opened fire on police and security guards. Police Chief Ajai Raj Sharma said six officers and an army commando were killed. After a 90-minute battle, Pramod Mahajan, India's parliamentary affairs minister, said &quot;all six terrorists have been killed.&quot; The standoff was broadcast live on television.
 Officials at nearby Ram Manohar Lohia hospital said 17 people - 12 police officers and five civilians - were being treated for injuries. Six were in critical condition. Police later set off a bomb found at the scene. Several grenades were also defused, Sharma said.
 The young, clean-shaven assailants drove through one of the parliament complex's 12 gates in a white, Indian-made Ambassador car, similar to those used by government officials, said state-run Doordarshan television. A siren on the car was wailing and official stickers from Parliament and the Home Ministry were affixed to the windshield.
 The U.S. Embassy condemned the attack as an &quot;outrageous act of terrorism.&quot; British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the &quot;brutal terrorist attack&quot; was an assault on &quot;the heart of India's democracy.&quot;
 A spokesperson for Pakistan's foreign ministry, Aziz Ahmed Khan, said Islamabad was shocked by Thursday's attack and strongly condemned it. Relations between India and Pakistan are tense, and the nuclear-armed rivals have fought three wars since British colonial rule ended in 1947.
 India's parliament had just adjourned at the time of the attack, and most lawmakers and cabinet officials were inside. The Press Trust of India news agency reported that Vajpayee was just leaving when the attack occurred. Home Minister Lal K. Advani said all lawmakers were safe.
 Hundreds of rounds were fired as police hid behind cars, trees and the corners of the building. Bodies lay on the lawn and sidewalks near the gate. Journalists at the building said there were bullet holes on the doorways inside, and a television camera operator was shot.
 Advani, the home minister, promised that the attack would only strengthen India's resolve in the fight against terrorism. Advani compared Thursday's attack to one on the state assembly in Srinagar, the summer capital of the northern Jammu-Kashmir state, where a suicide bomber rammed a car into the building's gate and militants fought a gun battle against police. Forty people died in the Oct. 1 attack.
 Islamic militants have fought for 12 years for independence or a merger with Pakistan in Kashmir, the only majority Muslim state in predominantly Hindu India. More than 25,000 people have been killed in the conflict since 1989.
 India has also had to grapple with some 30 tribal groups seeking independence or greater autonomy in the seven northeastern states between Bang la desh and Myanmar.

TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: American Anthrax
 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An Army biological- and chemical-warfare facility in Utah has been quietly developing weapons-grade anthrax spores since at least 1992, and has shipped samples of the bacteria to Fort Detrick, Maryland, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.
 According to the report, the Utah spores belong to the Ames strain - the same strain used in the deadly anthrax-laced letters that killed five people in Florida, Connecticut, New York and Washington. No other country is known to have made weapons-grade Ames anthrax, the report said.
 Army officials told the Post all the anthrax they have made has been accounted for and that they are cooperating with the FBI in its investigation of the anthrax attacks in September and October. The FBI would not comment on the program, the newspaper said.
 
 
Silent Helmut
 

BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany's disgraced former Chancellor Helmut Kohl refused again on Thursday to tell a government investigation the names of donors who gave him $1 million in illegal campaign donations.
 Kohl admitted late in 1999 to having broken party funding rules by accepting the payments from donors, but said he would not reveal their names as a point of honor.
 "Let me make myself clear, I will not answer this question," Kohl told a parliamentary committee established by the government to investigate the donations.
 The resulting scandal tarnished his image as an international statesman and plunged his opposition Christian Democrats into crisis. Kohl rejects allegations his government was open to bribery and that he defrauded his party, and he says he gave his word to the donors not to reveal their names.
 
 
More Elderly
 

WASHINGTON (AP) - The number of people age 65 and older more than tripled over the past half-century to a record 420 million worldwide. In general, seniors are better educated, retiring earlier and living longer.
 The U.S. government study released Thursday also shows the predicted increase will test governments' ability to address health care, retirement benefits and other issues that affect seniors, experts say.
 The 65-and-older population increased from 131 million in 1950 to 420 million in 2000, said the report from the Census Bureau and the National Institute on Aging.
 Over the 1990s, the increase was about 2 percent each year. The one-year increase of 9.5 million between 1999 and 2000 was unprecedented, the report said.
 In the United States, the 2000 census showed about 12 percent, or 35 million of the country's 281.4 million people, were at least 65. That compares with 13 percent of the country's 248.7 million people a decade ago.
 
 
Rugova Rebuffed
 

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (Reuters) - Veteran pacifist Ibrahim Rugova failed to win enough support in Kosovo's new legislature on Thursday to be elected president of the Yugoslav province in a first round of voting.
 Instead of the two-thirds majority needed, only 49 deputies in the 120-seat assembly backed Rugova, who led passive resistance by Kosovo's ethnic-Albanian majority to harsh Serb rule for a decade before war engulfed the province in 1999.
 The assembly session, which follows Monday's inauguration of the vaunted multi-ethnic legislative body set up after a general election last month, ended after the vote and it was not clear when it would meet again. 



TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Great Expectations
 

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Coach Oleg Romantsev will quit if Russia fails to progress beyond the first round of next year's World Cup finals in Japan and South Korea, his assistant said on Thursday.
 "Russia must qualify for the round of 16 from such [an easy] group, otherwise Romantsev and myself will resign," assistant coach Mikhail Gershkovich told soccer weekly Sovietsky Sport.
 "If we don't qualify, we just don't belong at the helm of the national team."
 Russia was drawn with World Cup co-hosts Japan, Belgium and Tunisia in group H.
 "Probably, for the first time in a long time, we have had a favorable draw," Gershkovich said immediately following the Dec. 1 draw in Pusan, South Korea.
 Romantsev threatened to resign in October after he guided Russia into the World Cup finals for the first time since 1994.
 "It's just a struggle being with the national team and I want to work, not struggle," the coach said after an internal row with federation officials.
 Romantsev also coached Russia at the Euro '96 finals in England and resigned after they finished bottom of their first-round group.
 
 
Putting on Pinstripes
 

NEW YORK (AP) - After days of press speculation, the New York Yankees planned a news conference Thursday at Yankee Stadium to announce a seven-year contract with Jason Giambi worth about $120 million, a baseball official and a lawyer familiar with the talks said on the condition they not be identified.
 Giambi's agent, Arn Tellem, traveled to New York on Wednesday to be in town for the news conference, the sources said.
 One of the most feared hitters in the game, Giambi will fit perfectly for the Yankees as they try to add more power and patience to their lineup.
 Giambi, 30, is the perfect combination of the two, leading the American League in on-base percentage (.477) and slugging (.660) last season. He replaces first baseman Tino Martinez, who hit 34 homers, but only had a .329 on-base percentage.
 Giambi hit .342 with 38 homers and 120 RBI last season for the Oakland A's, finishing second in voting for the AL MVP award after winning in 2000. His left-handed power stroke is ideal for Yankee Stadium with its short right-field porch.
 "He's just an outstanding hitter," said Seattle manager Lou Piniella, whose team lost the Yankees in the ALCS. "He had some monster years in Oakland. He would help any ballclub. Giambi is one of the dominating hitters in the game today."
 Money and the chance to win a World Series played a factor in Giambi's decision. The Yankees knocked Giambi's Oakland Athletics out of the postseason the past two years. 
 
 
Czech Team Grows
 

PRAGUE, Czech Republic (Reuters) - Twelve players from the 1998 Olympic gold medal winning squad will form the core of the Czech Republic ice hockey team at the Salt Lake City Games next February.
 Team general manager Ivan Hlinka added nine players - all from the NHL - on Thursday to his initial roster of eight, leaving six spots to fill before the Dec. 22 deadline to name players for the Games which start Feb. 7.
 The Czechs will be led by Washington Capitals star Jaromir Jagr and Nagano hero Dominik Hasek, a goalie for the Detroit Red Wings.
 Hlinka's team so far includes Tampa Bay Lightning veteran defenseman Petr Svoboda, who scored the gold medal-winning goal in a 1-0 final win over Russia in 1998, and Pittsburgh Penguins forward Martin Straka even though both are injured.
 Hlinka said he expects they will eventually be scratched from the squad, but will remain there in the meantime.
 
 
Racy Relations
 

DENVER, Colorado (Reuters) - The National Basketball Association Denver Nuggets on Wednesday suspended coach Dan Issel for four games without pay for using an ethnic slur on a fan who heckled him after the team lost a game in the final seconds.
 On Tuesday night, just after the Nuggets lost to the Charlotte Hornets 99-96, Issel was harassed by a fan in the sparse crowd and yelled back: "Hey, go drink another beer you (expletive) Mexican piece of (expletive)."
 Issel, who has spent his entire professional career either playing for or coaching the Nuggets, broke down in tears as he apologized to the fan he insulted, the fans in general, the team and the city of Denver for what he called "unChristian-like conduct."
 
 
Got His Number
 

LONDON, (Reuters) - Former Australia center Tim Horan has refused to wear the Saracens' number 13 jersey after sustaining his fourth injury for the English premiership club.
 "I will be wearing the number 12 jersey or the number 26 when I get back from this injury but not the dreaded number 13 after the run of bad luck I have suffered," Horan told the Evening Standard.
 Horan suffered his latest setback when he injured a knee against Sale last month. He said he hoped to be back in action before the end of the year even though an X-ray revealed he had cracked the top of his knee cap.
 Another Australian, winger/center Graeme Bond, refused to play in the number 13 shirt on the Wallabies tour of Europe earlier this year for similar reasons.
 After a career plagued by knee injuries and hamstring strains, the 27-year-old was picked to start at outside centre for the tests against Wales and France but swapped shirts with inside centre Nathan Grey.
 
 
Olympic Honor
 

LAUSANNE, Switzerland (Reu ters) - The International Olympic Committee (IOC) plans to give a posthumous award of its Olympic Order to New Zea land yacht ing legend Peter Blake who was murdered by pirates on the Amazon river last week.
 IOC President Jacques Rogge, a former Olympic yachtsman, made the announcement after a meeting of the organisation's ruling executive board on Wednesday.
 The Order is given to competitors or officials who have played a major role in sport.
 Blake's funeral is on Friday in Emsworth, a small village in southern England where he and his family made their home.
 Blake, 53, had one of the most successful yachting careers in history, twice leading New Zealand to victory in the sport's highest profile competition, the America's Cup.