SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #737 (3), Friday, January 18, 2002
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TITLE: Staff Ready To Take Control of TV6
AUTHOR: By Natalia Yefimova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - This week's last-ditch effort by TV6 managers to stay on the air was a compromise struck with the authorities - and brokered by the Press Ministry - requiring the station to cut its ties with majority shareholder Boris Berezovsky, according to several interviews published Tuesday.
 
"There is a chance to create our own media outlet and to get the right to broadcast ... or to get nothing at all," Pavel Korchagin, executive director of Mos cow Independent Broadcasting Corp., which holds the license to TV6, told the Kommersant daily. 
 "When they hit you on the head with a crowbar, you have to protect yourself," he said.
 On Wednesday, Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov said that he expects TV6 journalists to win a new broadcasting license and stay on the air.
 "The entire journalistic collective of the channel must receive an opportunity to continue to work in the same way and format," Kasyanov said. "We believe that it would be right."
 Kasyanov's statement echoed similar comments by President Vladimir Putin, who said on a trip to Paris Tuesday that the government would support TV6 journalists who have moved to re-establish a new company under the old name and asked the government for a broadcasting license.
 On Monday, Korchagin sent a letter to Press Minister Mikhail Lesin waiving the station's right to its broadcasting license in the hopes of forming a new company in time to bid for the license when it comes up for grabs in April. Until then, he requested that TV6's journalists be allowed to continue broadcasting.
 Berezovsky, who holds a 75-percent stake in TV6, would not be part of the new company, Korchagin said. "If Berezovsky turns up among the shareholders of the new company," he said, "then the following day it will receive a warning about liquidation proceedings from another arbitration court or some other court."
 Asked whether the formation of a new company was a potential solution that had been discussed ahead of time with the press minister, Korchagin replied, "Essentially, yes."
 Berezovsky, who became a harsh critic of the Kremlin after President Vladimir Putin began consolidating power in 2000, said the decision by the station's journalists was "a sign of weakness" but it was hard to condemn them.
 "I have a clear sense that a shudder went through the staff. I have no grievances against them," he told Kommersant, which he owns. "These are people who have been through a great deal." The core of the TV6 team had worked at NTV until a Kremlin-backed takeover of the station last spring.
 However, in a telephone interview Tuesday from London, Berezovsky said he was stunned by and categorically opposed to the station's renunciation of its license. "Such a decision is outside the jurisdiction of management. ... It is illegal," he said.
 He warned that a temporary license would make the TV6 journalists dependent on the government.
 Putin, in an interview published Tuesday, repeated that there was no government interference in the TV6 case.
 Berezovsky, who has been living in self-imposed exile, said he had been told that Korchagin's letter was drawn up at Lesin's request and accused the minister of setting a trap for the station's journalists.
 After the letter was submitted late Monday, Lesin told reporters that a tender would be held for a temporary broadcasting license and hinted that the TV6 team would have a good chance of winning.
 "As far as the journalists' talks with Lesin, I absolutely do not believe the promises Lesin can make," Berezov sky said.
 During the NTV scandal, Lesin received a scolding from the president for signing the infamous Protocol No. 6 - a legally dubious document stipulating that NTV's jailed owner, media magnate Vladimir Gusinsky, would receive his freedom in return for selling his shares.
 Lesin's spokesperson, Yury Akinshin, said Tuesday that the minister had no official response to Berezovsky's comments, as "such allegations can only be ignored."
 Meanwhile, TV6 staff took the first steps toward creating their new company. At a meeting Tuesday, they agreed to create a corporation made up of 50 journalists, department heads and other staff, spokesperson Tatiana Blinova said in a telephone interview earlier this week. Yevgeny Kiselyov, the former general director of NTV who took over the same post at TV6 last year, was unanimously elected general director.
 Notwithstanding the move to form a new company, Blinova said the Moscow Independent Broadcasting Corp., known by its Russian acronym MNVK, would contest the Supreme Arbitration Court's decision last Friday to shut it down through the Constitutional Court and other legal institutions. 
 A spokesperson for oil major Lukoil, whose subsidiary Lukoil-Garant owns 15 percent of MNVK and brought the suit to liquidate the company, said Tuesday that his company would continue pushing for the closing of MNVK for fear that otherwise assets could be stripped from the company.
 Blinova and Kiselyov said the documents necessary to register the new legal entity - formally called OOO TV6 - would hopefully be submitted to registration authorities by Wednesday. Both said it was too early to say how the new station would be funded.
 While registration should not pose a problem, Press Ministry officials and media experts said that the idea of a temporary broadcasting license was unprecedented and bound to give rise to scores of legal hurdles.
 Two officials at the ministry's licensing department said there was no existing practice of issuing temporary licenses.
 Media analyst Anna Kachkayeva said the TV6 equation had too many variables to make predictions about the company's future, but added that she regarded Lesin's assurances that the station's journalists would continue working with "cautious optimism." 
 "Everything that concerns the license tenders for TV6 and NTV will serve as a lithmus test showing whether the government truly wants to take control of all the national television channels," Kachkayeva said, adding that whatever happens to the stations will have powerful reverberations for their hundreds of regional partners.
 Gazprom said last fall that an announcement about the structure of the sale of NTV and related companies would be made on Jan. 15, but later indefinitely postponed that announcement.
 Analysts have mentioned a number of serious contenders for TV6, several of whom may be angling for NTV as well.
 Izvestia wrote Tuesday that there were four groups to watch: the Kiselyov-led TV6 team, which would require a new financial backer; the little-watched Moskovia station, reportedly controlled by oligarch-turned-senator Sergei Pugachyov; television veteran Anatoly Malkin, who heads the ATV production company; and Alexander Lyubimov's VID production company, which lost out in its 2000 bid to take over the broadcasting license of Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov's TV Tsentr in a politically charged tender where Lesin cast the deciding vote.
 Less likely contenders include Ren-TV and TV6 founder Eduard Sagalayev.
 While Berezovsky has said repeatedly that his goal is to foster an independent press, Putin challenged that assertion in an interview that appeared Tuesday in the Polish press ahead of Putin's visit to Warsaw.
 In a thinly veiled reference to Berezovsky and Gusinsky, Putin said that oligarchs who rose to power under former President Boris Yeltsin "have nothing to do with democracy" and, by taking control of media outlets, "they defend not freedom of speech but their own commercial interests."
 Putin stressed that the key to developing an independent press was creating a flourishing economy that would allow media to survive through advertising sales rather than handouts from powerful businesspeople.
 The president reiterated his position that the conflicts around TV6 and NTV were both purely economic and had nothing to do with politics or the government.
 "I don't quite understand what people want from us," he said. "Do they want us ... to pick up the phone and interfere in the affairs of the court. If so, then where is democracy?"

TITLE: Notorious Case Comes to an End
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: After almost two years in jail - as well as a heart attack and the onset of diabetes - Dmitry Rozhdestvensky, chairperson of the board of directors of the Russkoye Video film-production and advertising company was set free Wednesday by the Petrogradsky District Court.
 
The court found the 47-year-old Rozhdestvensky guilty on one of the three charges he was facing, but he was immediately released under the terms of a 2000 amnesty. Justifying the release, judge Natalya Beganskaya said that Rozhdestvensky "presents no danger to society and has made significant input in the development of contemporary Russian cinema."
 A second charge, that Rozhdestvensky and then-Russkoye Video Executive Director Alexander Sekretaryov stole a state-owned Lada automobile, was dismissed by the judge. Earlier, a third charge that Rozh destvensky had embezzled 142,000 Finnish marks ($21,320) was dropped for lack of evidence.
 In the end, Rozhdestvensky was convicted of using revenues from his television channel to fund the construction of a luxurious summer residence for himself and family in Siversky, a suburb of St. Petersburg. If not for the amnesty, Rozhdestvensky would have faced a three-year prison term and conviscation of his property.
 Beganskaya said that Rozh dest ven sky "had arranged barter deals with companies which provided him with construction materials of use to him personally, but of no value to the company, in exchange for advertisements."
 "The investigators made a mountain of a mole hill," said Sergei Fedotov, one of Rozhdestvensky's lawyers. "It is perfectly obvious that the case collapsed, and the court just didn't dare to acquit Rozhdestvensky."
 Rozhdestvensky's saga began with his arrest on Sept. 10, 1998 on charges of fraud and embezzlement. A federal Audit Chamber report alleged at the time that Rozhdestvensky had engaged in massive tax evasion, but that case was later dropped due to a lack of evidence. He was released from jail and placed under house arrest on Aug. 3, 2000 because of his extremely poor health.
 From the beginning, Rozhdestvensky's case has had political overtones. He has consistently maintained that the charges were filed as a vendetta against him for his support of former St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sob chak in the 1996 election campaign. At that time, the Russkoye Video television channel was highly critical of Vladimir Yakov lev, who won the election.
 In 1997, another political connection emerged when Media-MOST, the company once owned by oligarch Vladimir Gu sinsky, purchased a stake in Rus skoye Video. That stake is now at the center of criminal charges filed against Gusinsky, who is currently living abroad. 
 Last year, Media-MOST lost control of most of its properties, including the national television channel NTV, the radio station Ekho Moskvy, the daily newspaper Segodnya and the weekly newsmagazine Itogi. Gusinsky's media outlets, especially NTV, had been harshly critical of President Vladimir Putin.
 Rozhdestvensky and his relatives say that the investigators threatened them in order to get them to testify that Gusinsky had given him a $1-million bribe in exchange for the stake in his company. He says that investigators also promised to dismiss the charges against him once he testified against Gusinsky.
 "'Even if we testify against Gusinsky, where will we get $1 million,' I asked them," Rozhdestvensky's mother, Natalya, said. "'We'll get it for you,' they promised."
 Although he is now free, Rozh dest vensky is unsatisfied. 
 "I am not entirely happy because the court did not fully acquit me," Rozh destvensky said. "I also don't want to think about the horrors that they threatened me with."
 Natalya Rozhdestvenskaya had a similar reaction.
 "As I stood in the courtroom listening to the judge reading the verdict, I was thinking that at any minute a representative from the General Prosecutor's Office would come in with more absurd charges," she said. "I'm so uncertain of everything that I even had the medical-emergency number dialled on my telephone."
 "What I have learned is that given the legal conditions in which Russian businesspeople work, almost any manager could be brought to court to face similar charges," Rozhdestvensky added.
 Analysts agreed with this assessment.
 "The new regime is trying to limit all liberties and freedoms as much as possible," said Yakov Gilinsky, a crime analyst at the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. "The pressure from the state on the country's democratic institutes is enormous. And the cases of [environmental activist] Alexander Nikitin and [military journalist] Grigory Pasko, as well as the situation with NTV and TV6, illustrate just how important it is to the state to have control over information."
 Ruslan Linkov, head of the local branch of Democratic Russia, recalled a quip made by Yury Andropov when he was head of the Soviet KGB that the country had no political prisoners or political opposition, but rather mentally unstable people and criminals.
 "This attitude, although it has changed slightly, still exists. The state is battling against political opponents by trying to discredit them by presenting them as embezzlers, thieves, bad managers," Linkov said.
 Although Rozhdestvensky is now free, he must still cope with the consequences of his ordeal. His health was seriously affected and, during one of the searches at his dacha in Siversky, his wife, also named Natalya, had a stroke and is now paralyzed.
 Nonetheless, his lawyers are urging him to appeal the verdict.
 "Clearing Rozhdestvensky's name is worth the battle," Fedotov said.
 Rozhdestvensky himself is cautious, however.
 "I don't want to be involved in another trial without being prepared for it," he said.
 "Rozhdestvensky's case is a vivid illustration of the enormous pressure coming from prosecutors, which forces defendants and witnesses to perjure themselves and leads people to strokes and heart attacks," Linkov said. "What should be of particular concern to the state now is how to prevent such things and ensure that the real criminals are punished."

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Break Up the Capital
 

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Governors from the northwest region support the idea of transferring some of the functions of the capital away from Moscow, Interfax reported Thursday.
 Murmansk Region Governor Yury Yevdokimov was quoted as saying that "some functions could be painlessly transferred from the center to the regions, and not only to St. Petersburg, but to the Murmansk Region as well." 
 Yevdokimov said that Moscow must give the regions the chance to solve the problems that "the center has no time or desire to solve."
 Novgorod Region Governor Mikhail Prusak also said that part of the functions of the capital "could be transferred to St. Petersburg, and part could be transferred to another region such as Khabarovsk or the Far East," Interfax reported.
 Prusak said that "economic functions ... should have long ago been transferred to the subjects of the Federation."
 "I think that some functions should definitely be transferred to Kaliningrad. In particular, there should be a presidential representative there in charge of customs, external economic relations and foreign relations," Prusak said, according to Interfax.
 
 
Deaths in Chechnya
 

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The bodies of two local police officers serving in Chechnya were found on Tuesday, Interfax reported Wednesday.
 Corporal Sergei Prokopenko and Senior Sergeant Sergei Ivanov, both 28, died of gunshot wounds near the village of Mesker-Yurt, where their unit is serving, Interfax reported.
 
 
Hostages Freed
 

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Police on Wednesday freed a local couple that had been held hostage since Jan. 3, Interfax reported Thursday.
 The couple, identified only by the surname Petrov, was rescued after a passerby found a note that they had thrown from the window of the house where they were being held, Interfax reported citing police sources.
 On Jan. 3, three unknown men entered the couple's apartment on Ulitsa Kostyusko claiming to be police intending to set up a stake-out. They then took the couple to another apartment where they were forced to sign over the right to privatize their apartment.
 Police continue to search for the kidnappers, the news agency reported.
 
 
Vaccinate the Kids
 

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - A charity fund organized by cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, singer Galina Vyshnevskaya, has donated more than $3 million to St. Petersburg to vaccinate children against hepatitis B, Interfax reported Wednesday.
 The program began three weeks ago, according to City Hall, and nearly 40,000 local school children have already been vaccinated. 
 In all, the program will last three years, during which all St. Petersburg students between the ages of 13 and 17 will be vaccinated, Interfax reported.
 
 
Officials Arrested
 

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Two customs inspectors at Pulkovo International Airport were arrested Tuesday, Interfax reported.
 As a result of a sting operation, the two men - identified only as Captain Volkov and Senior Lieutenant Zelensky - were arrested after accepting 2,000 rubles from a passenger, according to Interfax.
 According to the police, the two accepted the money in exchange for agreeing to pass the passenger's baggage through the Pulkovo 2 terminal customs zone, Interfax reported. 



TITLE: Harsh Smoking Rules Adopted
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Think twice before lighting up.
 
Smoking anywhere but in designated areas at work and in government offices, hospitals, universities and theaters was outlawed across the country as this week. 
 Tobacco companies are now required to start placing health warnings on the fronts and sides of cigarette packs and meet new standards for tar and nicotine levels.
 Furthermore, starting in July, actors will be banned from puffing on cigarettes in movies or on the stage unless the act is essential to the plot. The same rule will apply to anybody who goes on television.
 The new rules, which were adopted Monday and replace a myriad of regional smoking laws, are part of federal legislation signed into law by President Vladimir Putin in July. They may not change conditions much for smokers living in cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg, which for years have had their own laws regulating smoking. But the move, part of a Kremlin drive to bring regional laws into conformity, does mean that areas that go above and beyond the federal law - parts of Dagestan, for example, forbid the sale of cigarettes during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan - could find their regulations successfully challenged in court.
 Smokers, however, need not panic about the new rules. The law remains largely toothless, with no penalties spelled out for many violations and none expected any time soon. The only existing federal penalties have been in place since 1992 and are outlined in the Administrative Code. They consist of a fine of 10 percent of the minimum wage, or 45 rubles ($1.50), for smoking on city transportation and a fine of $5 to $30 for the illegal trade of tobacco, a vague term that has been applied to regional laws banning the sale of cigarettes to underage smokers.
 The federal law outlaws sales to smokers younger than 18.
 "This is the first time in Russia that the state has shown its position on the issue," said Vladimir Usanov, a spokesperson of the State Duma's health committee, which authored the legislation. "Until today, we were far behind the other countries that regularly show state-sponsored anti-tobacco ads on TV."
 Usanov said the law aimed to protect nonsmokers, prevent children from starting to smoke and improve the quality of tobacco products. 
 Usanov, citing World Health Organization statistics, said 300,000 people die in Russia each year from smoking-related causes. Smoking, he said, has led to a 63-percent rise in lung cancer deaths over the past 10 years.
 The challenge will come in enforcing the law, he said. Those penalties will have to be introduced as amendments to a new Administrative Code that goes into effect in July, but Usanov said he did not expect them to be passed in the near future.
 "Our government is quick to push budgets through the Duma," he said in a telephone interview. "But when it turns to health-related laws, the government considers them second-tier and less urgent."
 Penalties that smokers have seen in Russia are small compared to those abroad. Italy from the start of the year started fining smokers 20 euros to 250 euros ($18 to $235) for lighting up in the wrong place, Vremya Novostei reported recently. The fine is doubled if a pregnant woman or child under 12 is nearby.
 At the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fine for smoking in the metro was 5 rubles (then $8). The current fine of 45 rubles is small compared to some regional laws introduced since 1992. For example, the Moscow City Duma has passed a law fining smokers in elementary schools 10 minimum wages, or 4,500 rubles ($150). The federal law also bans smoking in schools but, since it fails to define a penalty for doing so, Moscow will not be able to collect any fines.
 The reason is that under the Constitution, federal laws cannot be superceded by local laws, Leonid Olshansky, a lawyer and co-author of the new Administrative Code, said in a telephone interview.
 Practically, that means all regional smoking laws are no longer valid. 
 In some Russian regions, mainly those with large Muslim populations, smokers have fallen victim to initiatives by local authorities. The Dagestani parliament has forbidden smoking in public places, and local administrations in some rural settlements have banned cigarette sales during Ramadan. In 2000, then-Ingush President Ruslan Aushev imposed similar restrictions on smoking and sales in his republic during Ramadan.
 Tobacco producers Philip Morris, Liggett-Ducat and Arbat would not immediately comment on the new law Monday.
 Muscovites interviewed on the street appeared unconcerned about the law. Indeed, none of the people approached had yet heard about it.
 Tatyana, a salesperson at a tobacco stand near the Vodny Stadion metro station, was in fact violating the law - she was selling cigarettes individually, an act that is now banned. 
 The law also forbids the sale of cigarettes through vending machines, a measure aimed at keeping packs out of the hands of underaged smokers. 
 Asked how she defined the age of her buyers, Tatyana looked puzzled.
 "I have no right to ask for their passports, so I usually decide their age on their appearance," she said.
 As for the portion of the law concerning smoking in theatrical performances, Elena Kazakova, an administrative director of Moscow Satirikon Theater, said the authorities would have a hard time challenging directors that their artistic vision was wrong.
 "A real director will not be stopped by such a law because he is led by the plot of the play and not by bureaucratic regulations," Kazakova said. "If Bertolt Brecht wrote about prostitutes in his 'Three-Penny Opera,' they must smoke, drink and even pull off their stockings on stage."

TITLE: Stricter U.S. Visa Rules for Russian Men Now in Effect
AUTHOR: By Megan Twohey
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Beginning this week, Russian males aged 16 to 45 applying for non-immigrant visas to the United States must answer almost twice as many questions as before in a new effort by the United States to sniff out terrorists. 
 
As of Wednesday, the U.S. Embassy will not accept non-immigrant visa applications unless they are accompanied by a supplemental form, DS-157, that is being required of applicants worldwide, U.S. Consul General Jim Warlick said in a telephone interview Thursday.
 Non-immigrant visas are issued for temporary tourism, study or employment.
 In the new form, applicants must list all the countries they have visited in the previous ten years; all the professional, social and charitable organizations to which they belong or have belonged; whether they have any specialized skills or training in firearms or explosives; the names of the countries in whose militaries they have served; and whether they've ever served in an armed conflict. 
 Those who have already submitted their application and are awaiting approval will not be required to fill out the new form, Warlick said. The new rule also does not apply to women. 
 The U.S. State Department instituted the new form with the "ultimate goal of keeping potential terrorists out of the United States," Warlick said.
 However, it remains unclear how the forms will be evaluated.
 A State Department memo sent to all consular posts Jan. 2 said the form is an interim measure that will allow consular posts to elicit information "which, in some cases, will lead to a security advisory opinion." 
 The U.S. Embassy sends security advisory opinions to the State Department on applicants whom consular officers believe may pose a threat to the United States, Warlick said. Most are for applicants who have been convicted of a felony or imprisoned, connected to a terrorist organization or to organized crime, he said. 
 "The supplemental form will provide that much more information for consular officers [to make this determination]," Warlick said. 
 The form is now available at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and at all consular offices that process visa applications, including the U.S. Consulate in St. Petersburg.
 For security reasons, applicants have been prohibited from applying at the embassy in person since Oct. 11. 
 Warlick says the embassy is working now to disseminate the form to other pick-up spots, including travel agencies and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
 
 <i>
Kevin O'Flynn contributed to this article. </i>

TITLE: Court Bans Candidate in North Ossetia Poll
AUTHOR: By Natalia Yefimova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - After two days of street protests and more than 30 hours of court hearings, the Supreme Court of North Ossetia on Thursday annulled the candidacy of the main challenger to long-time President Alexander Dzasokhov in upcoming elections.
 
The court upheld a complaint by prosecutors saying that Sergei Khe ta gu rov, a former federal official who now heads a coalition of enterprises dealing in scrap-metal, violated the law by giving false information about his assets and possessing two internal passports.
 Khetagurov's representatives said they would appeal the decision in the country's Supreme Court.
 &quot;Not a single one of the prosecution's allegations was backed up by documentary proof,&quot; spokesperson Oleg Yegorov told NTV television. 
 Investigators familiar with the case were unavailable for comment Thursday.
 Khetagurov - who skipped this week's marathon hearings claiming an acute case of pneumonia - headed the Federal Migration Service from February 2000 until it was disbanded by President Vladimir Putin last year. Before then, he served for six years as deputy emergency situations minister under Sergei Shoigu and, from 1991 to 1994, served as North Ossetia's prime minister.
 Media reports said the prosecution also accused Khetagurov of misleading the local election commission by listing his permanent place of residence as North Ossetia's capital, Vla di kavkaz, although he has been spending most of his time in recent years in Moscow. However, an official with the commission's legal department said by telephone Thursday that North Ossetia's electoral law establishes no residency restrictions for presidential candidates.
 On Wednesday, television showed crowds of 1,000 to 2,000 protesters shouting their support for Khetagurov at the regional Supreme Court building in Vladikavkaz. Local authorities beefed up security and by Thursday the crowds had shrunk to several hundred demonstrators.
 Khetagurov's reputation is a mixed bag in North Ossetia. While some consider him an effective organizer and a tough official capable of bringing order to the crime-infested republic, he also has been rumored to have ties to criminal groups.
 While Khetagurov had been considered Dzasokhov's most serious challenger, pollsters say his popularity does not rival that of the incumbent. ORT television reported Thursday that Khetagurov's popularity rating in the republic was about 20 percent - only about one-third of Dzasokhov's.
 Members of Putin's administration have backed Dzasokhov. The Vremya Novostei newspaper reported in July that, during a visit to North Ossetia, one of Putin's deputy chiefs of staff, Alexander Abramov, publicly praised the president and called on local residents to vote for him in the Jan. 27 elections.
 If Khetagurov challenges the court decision and his appeal is upheld, this could have serious reverberations for North Ossetia, thanks to a sensational ruling made Tuesday by the Constitutional Court. According to news reports, the court ruled that a candidate illegally scratched from the ballot can fight in court to invalidate the results of the election.

TITLE: Canada-Crash Diplomat To Face Trial
PUBLISHER: The Moscow Times
TEXT: A Russian diplomat accused of killing a Canadian woman and seriously injuring her friend in a car accident almost a year ago will go on trial Feb. 12, according to a report in the Ottawa Sun newspaper.
 
Andrei Knyazev, 45, has been charged with careless driving resulting in death under the Russian Criminal Code and will be tried in a Russian court, the Sun said Tuesday. 
 If convicted, Knyazev faces up to five years in prison and a three-year suspension of his driver's license.
 It remains unclear which court would hear the case.
 The accident occured Jan. 27 when Knyazev, then a mid-level diplomat at the Russian Embassy in Ottawa, was driving home after apparently spending the day fishing and drinking.
 His car ran onto a sidewalk, striking prominent Ottawa labor lawyer Catherine MacLean and her friend, Catherine Dore. MacLean, 50, was killed and Dore, 56, seriously injured.
 When police arrived on the scene, Knyazev claimed diplomatic immunity and refused an alcohol breath test. 
 He was sent back to Moscow two days after the incident and was fired from his position in February.
 The Foreign Ministry in Moscow refused to comment Wednesday on Knya zev's case. An Ottawa police spokes person told the Sun that the police were satisfied with the way the investigation had progressed so far and that Russian investigators have asked a representative of the Ottawa police to be available for the trial.
 &quot;After dealing with [Russian] police on two occasions, we fully expected that it would go to court,&quot; he was quoted by the Sun as saying.
 Dore's husband, Phillipe Dore, said that he and his wife were pleased to learn Knyazev would be tried soon.
 Reynald Doiron, a spokesperson for the Canadian Foreign Affairs Department, said the Canadian Embassy in Moscow might send an observer to the trial, the Sun reported.

TITLE: UN Official Tours Ingush Camps
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: NAZRAN, Ingushetia - The top UN refugee official on Wednesday visited people who fled warring Chechnya and are spending their third winter in bleak camps, while international aid groups called for more attention to the conflict. 
 
UN High Commissioner for Refugees Ruud Lubbers toured tent camps in the southern republic of Ingushetia and visited refugees living with Ingush families. 
 Lubbers' trip is the latest of several recent high-level visits to the region. Attention to the 28-month-old war in Chechnya is rising again after slipping from the international agenda following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. 
 The aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres issued an appeal Wednesday urging Lubbers to use his influence to improve conditions for refugees. 
 &quot;The plight of the displaced population lost the attention of the international community. Thousands of displaced Chechens live under unacceptable conditions in Ingushetia and many more Chechens arrive on a daily basis,'' the appeal said. 
 About 180,000 refugees remain in Ingushetia, the group said, many living in abandoned cowsheds, schoolhouses and factories. In some cases there is only one toilet - usually a rickety, leaky outhouse - for 100 people. 
 The deputy presidential envoy to southern Russia, Viktor Korabeinikov, insisted while visiting the camps with Lubbers that returning refugees to their homes is the government's top priority in Chechnya. 
 Aid groups and Western governments have criticized Russia for sweep operations of Chechen villages that residents say involve rampant abuses by federal troops and make refugees too terrified to return home. Such sweep operations have mounted in recent weeks, prompting renewed international concern. 
 Leading human-rights group Memorial has written to the Chechen prosecutor that it has documented the apparent killing of three men and the disappearance of six others during a sweep in the village of Tsotsin-Yurt over the New Year's holiday. 
 Memorial said federal forces also detained a large number of local residents, most of whom complained that they were insulted and humiliated by the soldiers. About 80 residents said they were &quot;cruelly beaten'' during their detentions, which took place between Dec. 30 and Jan. 3. 
 &quot;As interviews with local residents make clear, the special operation was carried out with the crudest violations of human rights and the law,'' Memorial head Oleg Orlov wrote in a letter to prosecutor Vsevolod Chernov, which was released Tuesday.
 Soldiers continued firing at suspected rebels even after being informed that civilians were in the line of fire, according to information collected by Memorial, and used two detainees as &quot;human shields'' during the battle. Witnesses said that the two men were still alive when the battle ended but that their bodies turned up shortly afterward near the local military headquarters. 
 &quot;Both bodies were mutilated,&quot; Orlov wrote. &quot;Ears, noses and genitals had been cut off.&quot;
 About 100 residents of Tsotsin-Yurt picketed the Kremlin-backed regional government's headquarters in Grozny on Tuesday to protest the operations. 
 Meanwhile, Washington-based Human Rights Watch on Wednesday listed Russia foremost among governments it accuses of exploiting the U.S.-led campaign against terrorism to silence dissent. International criticism of the Chechen war has toned down significantly following Russia's enthusiastic support of the war on terror. 
 Lubbers of the UN expressed hope that efforts to find a political solution would pick up speed. The first tentative talks on negotiations were held last fall but both sides announced there were no breakthroughs. 
 <i>(AP, LAT) </i>

TITLE: Weldon Defends U.S. on Storing Excess Warheads
AUTHOR: By Megan Twohey
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - As U.S. and Russian military officials held a second-day of closed-door talks in Washington, a visiting member of the U.S. Congress said Wednesday that the United States had good reason for wanting to store some of the strategic nuclear warheads it has promised to cut from its arsenal. 
 
&quot;Russia continues to build nuclear weapons,&quot; Representative Curt Weldon said in a telephone interview. &quot;We don't. For those reasons, we may want to keep some of our warheads.&quot;
 Russia is unhappy with a Pentagon plan to trim the U.S. nuclear arsenal by putting some warheads in storage rather than destroying them and is worried that the United States will store the delivery vehicles too. 
 &quot;My own feeling is that we should destroy the missiles,&quot; Weldon said.
 Weldon has been in Moscow since Sunday discussing, among other things, the questions raised after Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin pledged in November to cut their country's nuclear arsenals by two-thirds. 
 The Russian government also is unhappy about Bush's unwillingness to sign a formal treaty on the nuclear warhead reductions. Weldon explained the U.S. position by saying that Bush is trying to avoid locking the United States into a treaty that becomes a &quot;sacred cow,&quot; like the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
 Bush fought Russian opposition for months before deciding unilaterally to withdraw from the 1972 U.S.-Soviet treaty, which sought to prevent nuclear attack by limiting both countries' defenses.
 With ABM, &quot;the piece of paper became the issue,&quot; Weldon said. &quot;The focus should be the substance of what we actually do.&quot; 
 Although it won't sign a treaty, the United States will sign some kind of agreement, &quot;sooner rather than later,&quot; he said.
 The Republican representative said he was briefed on the Pentagon's recently concluded Nuclear Posture Review, which includes the plan to house the warheads, and that Congress will play a key role in its implementation. 
 &quot;I've asked for more material and will make sure that I'm involved,&quot; said Weldon, chairperson of the Military Procurement Subcommittee, which oversees the annual authorization for procurement of military weapon systems
 Weldon, who travels frequently to Russia, said improving relations with Russia is one of his priorities. He is the founder of the Duma-Congress Study Group, which coordinates legislative efforts.
 Since arriving Sunday, he has met with people in the Duma, addressed students at Moscow University Touro, given an interview on Ekho Moskvy radio and toured the International Science and Technology Center. 
 At the Pentagon, delegations led by Colonel General Yury Baluyevsky, first deputy of the General Staff, and U.S. Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith met Tuesday and planned another meeting Wednesday. No details on the talks were expected until late Wednesday Washington time.

TITLE: Pasko: I Will Not Take Up Putin on Offer of Pardon
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: VLADIVOSTOK, Far East - Journalist Grigory Pasko, whose treason conviction has prompted international protest, will not ask for a pardon despite President Vladimir Putin's offer to consider such a request, his lawyer said Wednesday. 
 
&quot;To ask for a pardon would mean to admit guilt and agree with the verdict,&quot; lawyer Anatoly Pysh kin told reporters. 
 Pasko, in a statement from prison released through his lawyer, said: &quot;I am not guilty and I will continue the struggle for my honest name and a full acquittal.&quot; 
 But he also thanked Putin for saying in Paris on Tuesday that he would consider an appeal for a presidential pardon. 
 &quot;I thank everyone who believes in my innocence, including Putin and [Federation Council Speaker] Sergei Mironov, for their support and encouraging words,&quot; Pasko said. 
 Mironov was the highest-level Russian official to criticize the conviction, calling it unfair. 
 A military court in the Pacific port of Vladivostok sentenced Pasko last month to four years in prison for illegally attending a secret meeting of Pacific Fleet commanders and possessing the notes he made there. 
 The court ruled that Pasko could have passed the sensitive notes containing an analysis of naval maneuvers to Japanese media, with whom he had worked. 
 Pasko maintains that his prosecution is politically-motivated retaliation for his reports uncovering alleged environmental abuses by the navy.
 Human rights organizations and influential media watchdogs have warned the conviction could threa ten free speech. 
 The case has strained relations with Russia and the West. Putin, responding to French President Jacques Chirac, insisted he had no authority over the court's Dec. 25 decision. 
 The Foreign Ministry has protested to the U.S. Embassy about two American diplomats who attended a public rally last week in support of Pasko.

TITLE: Putin Hopes for Papal Russia Trip
AUTHOR: By Andrzej Stylinski
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WARSAW, Poland - President Vla di mir Putin said he is eager to invite Polish-born Pope John Paul II to Moscow soon, but added that a papal visit hinges on whether the Vatican and the Russian Orthodox Church can settle their differences. 
 
Putin's warm remarks about Poland's favorite son, published Tuesday in a Polish newspaper, seemed intended to win him favor among Poles on the eve of his landmark official visit to their country. 
 John Paul, 81, repeatedly has said he is eager to visit Moscow, but the idea is opposed by Orthodox leaders wary of increasing Roman Catholic influence in the post-communist East. 
 They strongly criticized the pope's visit last June to the former Soviet republic of Ukraine. 
 In the interview with the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, Putin expressed great respect for the pope.
 &quot;We also have a feeling of pride that a representative of the Slavic nationis became the pope of Rome, that he is a Pole,&quot; Putin said.

TITLE: Economy Focus of Poland Trip
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: POZNAN, Poland - President Vla di mir Putin and his Polish hosts shifted from gestures of reconciliation to pressing trade matters Thursday in their bid to rebuild relations left in tatters after the end of communist rule.
 
Officials said a long-standing controversy over gas supplies was approaching a resolution but Putin wrapped up his trip without securing a compromise on the issue.
 Putin pledged Thursday to &quot;do everything&quot; he could to narrow Poland's huge trade deficit with Russia as part of an effort to mend frayed relations between the two former Cold War allies. 
 The deficit of more than $3 billion a year, largely the result of Polish dependence on Russian natural gas, was a key topic during the second day of Putin's two-day visit to Poland. 
 &quot;Russia's leadership will do everything to restore a trade balance,&quot; he told 600 Russian and Polish businessmen at a forum in the western Polish city of Poznan. 
 Warsaw and Moscow have cast Pu tin's visit, the first by a Russian president to Poland since 1993, as a key step in reviving political and economic ties that crumbled after the fall of the Iron Curtain. 
 Moscow was angered by Warsaw's decision to join NATO in 1999 and also has been cool to Poland's bid to join the European Union by 2004. 
 Russia's tone has softened since Putin came to power in 2000, however, and Putin now says Moscow sees advantages in Poland's westward tilt. 
 Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski said trade with Russia will be even more important to Poland's economy as it prepares for EU competition. 
 The trade deficit dominated talks earlier Thursday between Putin and Poland's new left-wing prime minister, Leszek Miller. 
 Miller called the deficit &quot;very disquieting&quot; and said it &quot;could threaten the whole of our economic relations&quot; if it continued to grow. 
 Among key issues was a review of energy-supply contracts, which Poland wants revised to reflect a predicted drop in demand for Russian gas. In return, Russia wants Poland to consider a natural-gas transit-route alternative to the existing Yamal-Europe pipeline that would cross Poland to the West. 
 Kwasniewski told reporters on the sidelines of the Poznan forum that a compromise on lowering Polish gas imports and Poland-based gas transit routes should be reached by the end of February.
 Warsaw also hopes Polish firms can win more construction and export contracts with enterprises in Russia and its isolated enclave of Kaliningrad on Poland's northern border. 
 Miller said the two sides agreed to set up a joint committee to prepare meetings of Polish and Russian premiers at least twice a year. 
 Officials also signed accords on tourism, arbitration of legal disputes and a venture to assemble Polish buses in Kaliningrad. 
 <i>(AP, Reuters) </i>

TITLE: City Sells Nevskij Palace, Sheds $130M Debt Bill
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Putting an end to a 12-year, $130 million saga, Malta's International Hotel Investments (IHI) announced Wednesday that it had purchased the Nevskij Palace hotel and that it is also planning to develop the buildings on either side of the hotel.
 
While both IHI and the city administration refused to dosclose the terms of the agreement, which was announced at a ceremony at the hotel attended by Governor Vladimir Yakovlev and IHI officials, the business daily Vedomosti quoted the figure of $40 million. That figure was confirmed by an IHI official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
 Fifty-one percent of the shares in the hotel belonged to the city government, with 39 percent in the hands of Hermitage, a company owned by the Presidential Management Office, and 10 percent by ABV Hotel-Invest of Austria, which was responsible for the construction of Nevskij Palace.
 But the $40 million represents only a part of what IHI will have to pay out for the hotel and to develop the neighboring buildings, which are located at 55 and 59 Nevsky Prospect. IHI inherits not only the controlling stake from the city, but also $130-million in debt owed to Kreditanstalt Bank of Austria. The figure represents the $100-million loan from Kreditanstalt that the city guaranteed for the hotel's construction in 1989, plus interest and penalties.
 According to Natalia Belik, head of the public-relations department at the hotel, the company has already reached an agreement with the Kreditanstalt Bank on paying off the debt.
 &quot;IHI is ensuring that all debt obligations from the hotel toward its Austrian creditors are settled in full,&quot; she wrote in a press release.
 As for the two neighboring buildings, IHI plans to integrate them into the structure of the hotel, creating a five-star complex that will increase the number of rooms in the hotel from the present 282 and will include a conference center and retail space.
 According to Alexei Chichkanov, deputy chairperson of the City Property Committee for legal questions, the two buildings will be handed over to IHI through a standard procedure by the city Investment Tender Commission.
 Yakovlev signed an order in November 2000 saying that the buildings must be handed over to an investor and renovated in time for St. Petersburg's 300th anniversary in 2003. While the renovation project won't be finished on time - IHI says that they have yet to submit a building plan - Chichkanov said that they would at least be able to complete work on the facades of the buildings.
 And he denies that the inclusion of the two neighboring buildings in the deal was to compensate IHI for assuming the city's debt.
 &quot;This is not the price for paying the city debts,&quot; Chichkanov said in telephone interview Thursday. &quot;The city's debt has nothing to do with IHI plans for these buildings, and the company will be held to the same procedures as any other firm.&quot;
 According to Alexei Shaskolsky, a real estate analyst at Colliers International, to build a five-star hotel with about 200 rooms in St. Petersburg would cost about $50 million.
 &quot;And that is only the cost of the construction and furnishing, without the price of land on Nevsky. It will likely cost them a few million more to acquire the lease rights,&quot; he said. &quot;Nevsky Palace is in a perfect location, and if the plans for further development are realized, this will be a very positive development for St. Petersburg as well.&quot;
 But Shaskolsky also says that the hotel and the buildings around it have some serious problems and that the city is probably glad to have the property off its hands. Not only did the city get rid of its debt responsibility, but it also found an investor to renovate two buildings with serious structural problems.
 &quot;During the construction of Nevskij Palace, the two neighboring buildings were damaged by the weight of the hotel. Their foundations and walls cracked and they've been deserted since that time,&quot; he said. &quot;It was and still is a shame for the elegant image of Nevskij Palace, and Nevsky Prospekt as well.&quot;
 Shaskolsky says that the problem stems from the fact that developers were not permitted to do an extensive investigation of the area below the hotel site before construction because of security concerns due to KGB communications lines buried there. The seven floors of the hotel and two levels of underground parking are too heavy for the site.
 According to Alexei Shashkin, the director of Georekonstruktsiya research-and-development firm, which specializes in researching locations for construction, Nevskij Palace has sunk 20 to 30 centimeters since its construction.
 &quot;Even with the naked eye you can see that the neighboring buildings have been pulled in toward the hotel,&quot; Shashkin said Thursday. &quot;The fact that the people who live in these buildings were settled in new apartments tells you that these buildings are in a dangerous condition.&quot;
 Shashkin refused to estimate what the cost of renovating the buildings would be, but said that city should be happy to have found an investor willing to undertake the project. 
 Nevskij Palace is one of St. Petesburg's four five-star hotels. Construction of the hotel was begun in 1989 and it opened in 1993. Since 1997, it has been managed by Sheraton Hotels, a subsidiary of Starwood, an American firm. Sheraton will likely have to pull out of managing the site as Libyan interests own some of IHI, which is a public company traded on the Malta Stock Exchange. U.S. State Department guidelines prohibit U.S. firms and their subsidiaries from having economic dealings with a number of states, including Libya.
 Corinthia Hotels International, one of the major shareholders in IHI, will likely take over management of the property.

TITLE: Kasyanov Pulls Plug On Rail Tariff Hike
AUTHOR: By Alla Startseva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Escalating the battle for tariff-setting powers and policy, Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov on Wednesday quashed a Federal Energy Commission order to raise rail cargo tariffs Jan. 20, while his boss's top adviser attacked tariff hikes altogether.
 
Kasyanov said he wanted hikes in railway tariffs to be carried out in line with the tariff increases for the other natural monopolies, but his spokesperson was quoted as saying the decision was made in order not to boost inflation this month.
 Whatever the reason, Kasyanov said general tariff increases affecting all monopolies will be approved in February after a cabinet meeting Jan. 24. Tariff rates for the country's railways, power grid and gas supplies directly affect inflation and are a key factor to economic growth.
 The railway tariff was expected to be raised 14 percent Jan. 20 in line with an FEC decision earlier this month.
 Backing down, FEC head Georgy Kutovoi said later Wednesday that tariffs on railway cargo will be increased by approximately 25 percent from March 1, combining the 14 percent increase with a later planned hike.
 Earlier, he said rail rates would be boosted 26 percent, while natural-gas rates would go up 35 percent, and electricity rates 32 percent. The rates are likely to be boosted twice this year - once within the first three months and again in the summer, Kutovoi said.
 Kasyanov on Wednesday did not specify tariff increases for the natural monopolies. He did say, however, that tariffs will not be boosted more than 35 percent and that the first increase will be in the first quarter of this year. Any further increases will be made as necessary, he said.
 Meanwhile, President Vladimir Putin's top economic adviser, Andrei Illarionov, attacked increases in general. 
 &quot;Calculations show that our prices for electricity and railways are too high by about 40 percent for our level of living and economic development,&quot; he told the Argumenti i Fakti newspaper in an interview published Wednesday.
 Kasyanov said that this year the cabinet decided to consider the natural monopolies' investment programs before the federal budget was drawn up in order to define real need in tariff hike. 
 This way there will be a managed plan for the macroeconomic situation and the federal budget for 2003, said Kasyanov.
 The federal budget 2002 forecasts 12 percent inflation.
 Some analysts have said that according to tariffs proposed by the FEC, inflation will be at least 16 percent. Inflation for 2001 was 18.6 percent. 
 The FEC is slated to change its name and status and substantially increase its staff next month. The revamped commission will be a key policy-maker, with the ability to control tariffs for the products and services of the major natural monopolies: Unified Energy Systems, Gazprom and the Railways Ministry.
 Kasyanov has hinted, however, that the FEC may not have the final say in setting tariffs.
 Analysts said the flurry of tariff activity is a sign that a turf war is still raging for the right control tariffs.
 &quot;The fight for making the final decision in setting tariffs is continuing,&quot; said Natalia Orlova, an economist with Alfa Bank.
 Also on Wednesday, the FEC approved UES's 16.7 billion ruble ($550 million) investment program for 2002. The FEC also gave the nod to the 16.786 billion ruble investment plan of nuclear- energy monopoly Rosenergoatom.
 The FEC has set a 13.5 percent rise in UES's grid fees - what regional energy companies and power plants pay UES for use of its grids and other services. From Feb. 1, the fee will be 61.23 rubles per 1,000 kilowatt hours. 
 Kutovoi said the investment component within the grid fee will be increased to 45 percent to 50 percent from 35 percent to 37 percent. However, UES said that with such a hike would only be able to finance an investment program of at most 12 billion rubles.
 &quot;It is an enigma to us how the FEC approves an investment program of 16.7 billion rubles, and then sets a grid fee that is not enough to finance it,&quot; said UES spokesperson Yury Melekhov.

TITLE: Defense Spending Gets Big 2002 Boost
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The cabinet on Thursday approved a plan to dramatically boost spending on arms, upgrades and research in 2002, Russia's top defense-industry official said Thursday.
 
Deputy Prime Minister and Industry, Science and Technology Minister Ilya Klebanov said the procurement plan tops last year's expenditures by nearly 40 percent, Interfax reported.
 The 40-percent figure corresponds to remarks made last year by Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, who said the 2002 procurement budget would likely increase by 27 billion to 79 billion rubles ($8.5 million to 2.5 billion). This year's entire national-defense budget is 284.18 billion rubles.
 Klebanov said the priorities are developing a next-generation fighter and new nuclear submarine, as well as new technologies in communications and conventional weapons, media reported. Klebanov has said that research and development will account for 42 percent of the total and that new technologies would be introduced into the armed forces in 2005 to 2007.
 He also said there will be a &quot;serious increase&quot; in the amount earmarked for modernizing hardware currently used by the military.
 Under Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, Russia is shifting its procurement strategy away from strategic nuclear forces and toward conventional arms.
 Previously, the nuclear forces consumed as much as 90 percent of the procurement budget, according to analysts.
 Konstantin Makiyenko, the deputy head of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, an independent think tank that monitors the defense industry, said modernization and research should be priorities and that Russia should concentrate on developing a new fighter, unmanned craft and radars.
 Makiyenko said the navy should take a backseat to the air force and elite units like paratroopers and special forces because it does not meet the &quot;existing threats,&quot; referring to Chechnya. He criticized Klebanov's idea of creating a new nuclear submarine, which would be an improvement on the Gepard submarine the navy received late last year with much pomp, as expensive and untimely.
 Marat Kenzhetayev from the Center for Arms Control at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology said the focus of spending, given that Russia is not currently engaged in any large-scale conflicts, should be on small arms, communication systems, attack helicopters and jets.
 The defense industry's biggest event of the year is the multi-billion-dollar tender to develop the next-generation fighter, which is being hotly contested by Sukhoi and MiG. The winner is expected to be announced by the end of March, and Sukhoi is favored to win the deal.
 In the meantime, experts say the current fleet of Sukhois and MiGs needs to be upgraded. The air force is working together with IAPO, an Irkutsk plant in the Sukhoi group, to turn its fleet of Su-27s and Su-30s into multi-purpose jets. The air force is also in the process of upgrading its fleet of helicopters by installing systems that allow them to operate at night and in all kinds of weather.
 Despite the state's increased procurement budget, Russia's defense budget is just a shadow of its former Soviet self, leaving the industry to rely on exports for most of its revenues. 
 Last year the defense industry posted a decade-high $4.4 billion in export revenues.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Pipe Welcomes Majors
 

WASHINGTON (SPT) - A meeting of Western companies and shareholders in the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline project welcomed the participation of Russian oil majors LUKoil and Yukos, Itar-Tass reported the project's director as saying Thursday. 
 The director, Michael Townsend, said LUKoil and Yukos were provided with all technical data on the pipeline's construction. The pipeline is planned to link the Azeri capital Baku with Turkey's port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean Sea. 
 International oil company BP Amoco is a major shareholder in the 1,600-kilometer, $2.75 billion pipeline. 
 LUKoil president Vagit Alekperov said earlier this month that the company was reviewing the construction's profitability, as well as Azerbaijan's oil reserves. 
 

 Lawsuit Lives
 

MOSCOW (SPT) - A U.S. appeals court revived a lawsuit accusing executives at the Bank of New York of looting assets from Russia's now-defunct Inkombank, Bloomberg news agency reported Thursday.
 The suit by Inkombank depositors claims that bank executives, Russian mobsters and Bank of New York employees systematically transferred money through the New York-based bank and caused the Russian bank to fail.
 The lawsuit stemmed from revelations in 1999 that a former Bank of New York executive, Lucy Edwards, and her husband, Peter Berlin, used an illegal wire-transfer operation to move billions of dollars through three accounts at the bank. Both have pleaded guilty.
 
 
$400Bln in Flight
 

MOSCOW (SPT) - Monthly capital flight from Russia amounts to about $4 billion, Itar-Tass reported Central Bank Chairperson Viktor Gerashchenko as saying Thursday.
 "The main problem of the Russian banking sector is not money laundering, as is wrongly believed in some countries, but rather legal and illegal capital flight, which reaches $4 billion per month," Gerashchenko said. 
 He was speaking in Panama, where he held talks with the country's officials on developing bilateral cooperation in the banking sphere. 



TITLE: IMF Ready To Give Argentina More Time
AUTHOR: By Harry Dunphy
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - The International Monetary Fund said Thursday it recognizes that Argentina needs time to develop a new economic program to deal with the country's worst economic crisis in decades.
 
Thomas Dawson, director of external affairs at the IMF, told reporters the international financial community is ready to support President Eduardo Duhalde's government once it has outlined a plan to keep the devalued currency on an even keel and halt a slide back to the hyperinflation of the 1980s.
 &quot;Clearly we have a good dialogue going on with the authorities at this point, and they've expressed a strong interest in talking with us [and] talking with other institutions,&quot; Dawson said.
 He added that &quot;obviously it's going to take a while for the authorities to develop the comprehensive program that they have indicated they want, and we will provide whatever kind of technical assistance we can and then we will see where we go from there.&quot;
 Dawson said the IMF was aware Argentina needed &quot;some breathing space at this point.&quot;
 On Wednesday, the IMF granted debt-strapped Argentina a one-year reprieve on repaying a $933 million IMF loan that was coming due on Jan. 17.
 IMF Managing Director Horst Koehler announced the decision of the agency's 24-member executive board in a brief statement, saying the action represented the IMF's &quot;desire to help Argentina overcome its difficult economic and social situation.&quot;
 Dawson said one positive sign for Argentina was that it still has considerable foreign exchange reserves to meet its needs in the short-term. He said demands on reserves should ease if Argentina adopts a freely floating exchange rate.
 &quot;The gross level of reserves in Argentina is still quite substantial but, of course, reserves have potentially a number of different uses, and so therefore how the reserves will be used depends on what the exchange-rate strategy is,&quot; he said.
 The peso had been pegged at one-to-one to the U.S. dollar for a decade. But Duhalde earlier this month devalued the peso to 1.4 per dollar for most business trade. The peso floats freely on the open market for ordinary transactions.
 When asked what lessons the IMF has drawn from the Argentina crisis, Dawson replied the most immediate lessons appear to be that countries should choose the right policies to suit their currency exchange rate, and that they should secure strong political backing when undertaking difficult reforms.
 The IMF sent a second fact-finding team to Argentina this week to consult with the economic team assembled by Duhalde.
 Argentine officials have said they hope to receive $15 billion in support from the IMF and other lending agencies for the coming year.
 The country has been rocked by violent street protests. Protesters have been unhappy with the country's deteriorating economic situation, which ultimately forced the government to default on its massive $132 billion foreign debt.
 The IMF last month withheld a $1.23 billion loan for Argentina after officials decided the country did not have a sustainable economic program.

TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Airbus Axe
 

PARIS (Reuters) - European planemaker Airbus SAS announced plans on Thursday to slash the equivalent of 6,000 jobs in reaction to a slump in demand, but said it could weather the market turbulence without cutting "permanent" staff.
 Clearly mindful of political sensitivities to labor layoffs ahead of French elections this year, the Toulouse-based firm said roughly 1,000 workers would leave through voluntary redundancy and another 5,000 "virtual" jobs would be trimmed by ending part-time and temporary work contracts.
 Airbus also put a brave face on what many analysts believe is developing into the worst crisis ever for the global airline industry, saying it could maintain annual deliveries of 300 planes in 2003 - the year deliveries are expected to hit a low. 
 
 
Ford Posts Loss
 

DEARBORN, Michigan (AP) - Ford Motor Co. posted a $5.07 billion loss for the fourth quarter of 2001, mostly because of heavy one-time costs related to its recently announced restructuring plan.
 For the full year, the world's second biggest automaker said Thursday it lost $5.45 billion, its first annual loss since 1992.
 Ford's loss for the October-December quarter amounted to $2.81 a share. During the last three months of 2000, Ford earned $1.08 billion, or 57 cents a share.
 But the quarterly results narrowly beat Wall Street expectations if one-time items are excluded from the comparison.
 Those costs included $4.1 billion in restructuring charges and an additional $102 million in accounting charges.
 
 
Bank Closings
 

BELGRADE Yugoslavia (Reuters) - The World Bank said on Thursday Yugoslavia's decision to close four big debt-laden banks earlier this month proved Belgrade's commitment to reforms and signalled that the state was pulling out from the sector.
 "This is a very courageous decision," Christiaan Poortman, World Bank's regional coordinator for south-east Europe, on a three-day visit to Yugoslavia, said in an interview.
 "Those banks have outlived their usefulness. Conditions for further reforms and restructuring are now much better," he said.
 On Jan. 3, Yugoslav authorities ordered the closure of Investbanka, Jugobanka, Beobanka and Beogradska Banka - four state-held mammoths crippled with billions of dollars of debts.
 
 
U.S. Stocks Lift
 

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks rose at midday on Thursday as upbeat economic data and encouraging news from General Electric Co. and other marquee names helped dispel earnings gloom on Wall Street.
 Blue chips moved to new session highs after fresh economic data showed a key gauge of U.S. mid-Atlantic manufacturing surged in January, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. The blue-chip Dow Jones industrial average piled on gains, rising 133.34 points, or 1.37 percent, to 9,845.61, and the broad Standard & Poor's 500 advanced 9.95 points, or 0.88 percent, at 1,137.52. 
 
 
German Growth Slows
 

BERLIN (AP) - German economic growth slumped to an eight-year low in 2001, officials said Thursday.
 Last year's 0.6 percent growth came in lower than government forecasts, underscoring the challenge faced by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder as he runs for re-election in a Sept. 22 national vote.
 And federal statistics officials, who released the figures, hinted strongly that Europe's biggest economy shrank for a second consecutive quarter in the final months of 2001.
 The government had estimated gross domestic product growth last year at 0.75 percent and has predicted 1.25 percent growth this year-both far below the robust 3 percent expansion in 2000.

TITLE: More of the Follies That Got Us Into This Mess
AUTHOR: By Jared Diamond
TEXT: AS the theme for the last volume of his history of World War II, Winston Churchill wrote: &quot;How the great democracies triumphed, and so were able to resume the follies which had so nearly cost them their life.&quot;
 
A half century later, Churchill's words have regained uncanny relevance. While today's greatest democracy, the United States - along with its loose coalition of allies - routed the Taliban from Afghanistan extraordinarily quickly, we have not won the war on terrorism. Our focus now should be on what we can do to avoid lapsing into victors' follies. And that means combating the forces of poverty and hopelessness on which international terrorism feeds, in Afghanistan and elsewhere. I would single out three strategies - providing basic health care, supporting family planning and addressing such widespread environmental problems as deforestation - that, even in crude economic terms, would cost the United States far less than another Sept. 11.
 I'm not suggesting that we can eliminate terrorism by alleviating such societal problems overseas. The planners and immediate agents of terror were fanatics who will continue to try to harm us as long as we are rich, powerful and supporters of Israel. But those few active terrorists depended on many more people, including desperate populations who have tolerated, harbored and even taken part in terrorist activities. When people can't solve their own problems, they strike out irrationally, seeking foreign scapegoats or collapsing in civil war over limited resources. By bettering conditions overseas, we can reduce chronic future threats to ourselves.
 There's a simple logic to this line of thinking, based on a sweeping change in the way the world has worked over the last half century. In the past, we have often portrayed foreign aid in the grand tradition of noblesse oblige - as noble help to others. And while that's still true, foreign aid more than ever represents self-interested help. That's because the increasing efficiency of worldwide communications and transport (a.k.a. globalization) isn't just a matter of &quot;us&quot; being able to send &quot;them&quot; good things. It has also become easier for &quot;them&quot; to send &quot;us&quot; bad things.
 If a dozen years ago you had asked an ecologist uninterested in politics to name the countries with the most fragile environments, the most urgent public health problems and the most severe overpopulation (measured against available resources), the answer would have included Afghanistan, Burundi, Haiti, Iraq, Nepal, Rwanda, Somalia, Yugoslavia and Zimbabwe. The close match between that list and the list of the world's political hot spots today is no accident. In contrast, countries with well-maintained environments and modest populations, such as Belize, Bhutan and Norway, are no danger to us.
 The first area in which a modest amount of American money can produce a big payoff is in public health. High infant mortality and short adult lifespans resulting from preventable diseases such as malaria, AIDS, cholera and parasitic infections are a major cause of poverty - and paralyze whole economies in multiple ways. First, they sap the productivity of workers, who are often sick and die young; second, they stimulate high birth rates, because parents expect many of their children to die. The result is that much of the population is too young to work and women can't join the workforce because they are busy raising children. All those things make countries unattractive to investors. The biggest economic success stories of recent decades have been Hong Kong, Mauritius, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan, all of which invested heavily in public health and saw their GNPs rocket as child mortality and family size plunged and as worker lifespans lengthened.
 But many other countries with similar public-health problems lack the money and scientific know-how to solve them. Compared with our own economic losses from Sept. 11 (about $100 billion in domestic losses and a further $1 billion per month to wage war in Afghanistan), it would be cheap for us to fund clean water supplies (decreasing the transmission of water-borne diseases); to provide medicines for treatable diseases; to fund more grants for U.S. biomedical research into vaccines for tropical diseases such as malaria and cholera; and to stimulate vaccine and drug development in pharmaceutical companies by guaranteeing to buy effective medicines. At present, companies lack incentives to invest in curing diseases whose victims live mostly in poor countries. Nor does our government invest adequately in research on malaria, the world's leading infectious disease (with 400 million new cases per year), because few of those stricken are Americans. Our annual spending on malaria research is less than the cost of a few days of war in Afghanistan.
 A second area of big payoff for small investment is in family planning. The world population explosion is paradoxically steepest in the poorest countries, which already have more people than the country's resources can support. 
 This is a disaster in the short term, as noted above, because it removes mothers from the workforce and increases the ratio of non-working children to working adults. It also spells disaster in the long run, because more people competing for a fixed or shrinking resource pie is a recipe for civil war, as has already happened in Rwanda and Burundi, Africa's most densely populated countries.
 Among the minority of Americans opposed to funding family planning overseas, there is a widespread misconception that people in overpopulated developing countries really <i>want </i>large families - and that we have no right to tell them to have fewer children. In my experience of working in Third World countries, nothing could be further from the truth. Their citizens experience every day the disastrous consequences of large families. They are frustrated to know that the means to limit family size exist but are unavailable or unaffordable. It would be simple and cheap for the U.S. government to subsidize family-planning methods and education through local government agencies and non-governmental organizations.
 The third area I would target for foreign aid involves worldwide environmental problems, including biodiversity losses, climate change, deforestation, depleted energy sources, overfishing, pollution, salinization, soil erosion and limited fresh-water supplies. To take just one example, deforestation reduces soil fertility and water quality, causes erosion and deprives local people of free timber and other forest products. While these environmental issues are pressing even in the United States, their consequences are more immediately threatening in other countries with more fragile environments.
 Here, too, Americans suffer from a wide spread misconception: that Third World landowners want to log their own forests, and that we have no right to stop them. Actually, local people are well aware of the value of their forests and hate to lose them. They are forced, tricked or seduced by logging companies, their own national governments and their own desperate need for money into signing logging leases. But they see no alternative to selling their only marketable asset. 
 The long list of solutions that the United States could support includes: promoting conservation leases (payment for land that is left unlogged); refusing import licenses and domestic logging permits for timber that is harvested without replanting; restricting importation of products from deforested land, such as tropical palm oil; and pressuring the World Bank, for which the United States provides much of the funding, not to make loans for projects that involve extensive deforestation.
 All three of these areas illustrate a general theme: the need for our government to pursue long-term crisis-prevention policies, instead of simply responding as crises arise. Unfortunately, such an approach is not considered urgent. Neither by politicians, nor the public. 
 Today, and every previous day for years, 100 more acres are being overgrazed in Afghanistan, 100 more acres are deforested in Nepal, and 100 more people are contracting AIDS or malaria in Zimbabwe. Yet these are the slow processes that eventually explode into $100-billion crises.
 In our daily personal lives and business lives, we don't commit that folly of focusing only on crisis management. Of course we fixed the toilet that broke in our house this morning, but we also buy life insurance and draw up wills to solve problems that our children will face many decades from now. Our government needs more of that thinking. In public health as in the health of us as individuals, it is cheaper and more efficacious to practice a lifestyle that prevents disease than to wait to go to the emergency room when we finally get really sick. Unless we do so on a global level, we shall, like so many other victorious nations in the past, be doomed to repeat the victors' follies.
 
 <i>Jared Diamond, a professor of physiology and public health at UCLA, is the author of &quot;Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.&quot; He contributed this comment to The Washington Post. </i>

TITLE: The Best Audit That Money Can Buy
TEXT: WASHINGTON - Time spent in Russia is excellent preparation for understanding New Moscow, the city of corruption and insider deals rising on the Potomac River.
 
Anyone following Russian business would know what a self-parody the international accounting business has become. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and one of its predecessors, Coopers & Lybrand, repeatedly signed off on the books of the Russian Central Bank - even as auditors knew the bank was funneling billions from its hard-currency reserves through FIMACO, a shell company in the British Channel Islands.
 Central Bank Chairperson Viktor Gera shchen ko says all of the money eventually came home, but is silent about any investment profits. The whole arrangement looks like corrupt bureaucrats investing $50 billion of the nation's wealth - including IMF funds - and then keeping the dividends for themselves. Minus, of course, the scraps thrown to the auditors as professional fees.
 Yet when the FIMACO story finally broke - fall-out from the August 1998 ruble crash - Gerashchenko gave his auditor, PwC, some carefully selected documents, PwC wrote a guarded report about what it was handed, and Gerashchenko waved it around as &quot;an audit&quot; and exoneration. Soon &quot;oligarch&quot; Boris Berezovsky was paying PwC for a similar &quot;audit,&quot; and by July 2000 The New York Times could report that Berezovsky &quot;received a measure of vindication ... when the auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers exonerated one of his companies in a long-running investigation into embezzlement.&quot;
 Everyone was so pleased with this stamp of Western approval that in 2000 Ge ra shchenko tried to stop the Duma from replacing PwC with Deloitte & Touche, by lying on the floor of parliament, suggesting Deloitte did not use international accounting standards (whatever that may mean today) and that its work was confined to France and &quot;French-speaking Africa.&quot; But he needn't have worried: the &quot;Big Five&quot; accounting firms - PwC, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Ernst & Young, KPMG and Arthur Andersen - are pretty much peas in a pod.
 Andersen is now &quot;the black sheep&quot;, after its auditors winked while Enron hid multimillion-dollar losses, and then destroyed documents as a criminal investigation closes in.
 But though this is the first week Americans woke to find the Enron story dominating newspaper front pages, the Big Five's moral bankruptcy is an old story. The U.S. government two years ago filed a fraud suit against Lucent Technologies, the enormous AT&T spin-off, for misreporting profits by the millions; PwC is Lucent's auditor. In May, the government sued &quot;Chainsaw Al,&quot; the CEO who embraced a nickname meant as an insult (it referred to his enthusiasm for firing people by the thousands, a passion he celebrated in best-selling books) for misreporting his company's profits by the millions. Andersen also audited those books.
 Many auditors also offer &quot;consulting&quot; services, i.e. advice that costs millions, to the same companies they audit. That's an obvious conflict. But when Clinton-era regulators tried to ban it, lobbying and political contributions from Andersen, KPMG and Deloitte blocked them. Now comes George Bush's new commissioner for securities, Harvey Pitt - a lawyer who has defended every one of the Big Five from government fraud suits, and also, for good measure, the notorious insider trader Ivan Boesky. Pitt says Enron came about because there's too much regulation - the Big Five need more freedom and fewer rules.
 Congress is holding hearings on Enron, but the Democrats are no strangers to campaign contributions either. Expect &quot;exoneration&quot; of the accountants - for the usual professional fees, of course.
 
 <i>Matt Bivens, a former editor of The St. Petersburg Times, is a Washington-based fellow of The Nation Institute [www.thenation.com]. </i>

TITLE: Who Loves This Ded Moroz?
AUTHOR: By Boris Kagarlitsky
TEXT: DED Moroz, or Grandfather Frost, is usually considered to be the Russian counterpart of Santa Claus - a bearded, good-natured fellow who stuffs presents into children's stockings hung by the fireplace and is used to advertise various brands on television. In fact, Ded Moroz (also known as Morozko), according to the fairy tales, is a severe and capricious man who, depending on his mood, will distribute gifts or will make people freeze to death.
 
This winter, the darker side of Ded Moroz's character was strongly in evidence. At the beginning of the New Year's public holidays, Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov ceremonially presented him with the keys to the city. Moscow was then promptly assailed by a terrible cold spell. The mayor, however, didn't ask Ded Moroz to give the keys back, and it would seem that he returned to his hometown of Veliky Ustyug with them.
 This winter in Moscow alone more than 300 people have died from the cold. In December and the first half of January, between 5 and 10 people were freezing to death each day - more than the casualties sustained by the federal army in Chechnya.
 The fact that people are freezing to death on the streets of the most affluent city in the country is not just a result of general level of drunkenness and the poor state of municipal services, but is also indicative of a broader social malaise and the increasing numbers of homeless on the streets of the capital.
 In Helsinki, where the climate is not dissimilar to ours and the people no less prone to hitting the bottle, there is a municipal service that cruises around the city and picks inebriated people up off the streets. On public holidays, volunteers are drafted in as reinforcements.
 In the old days, people were not left to freeze to death on the streets of Moscow - certainly not in the numbers we are witnessing today. To this one must add the people killed and injured by falling icicles, the accidents on slippery, ice-covered roads, etc. Driving a car in Moscow in winter-time has turned into a hazardous adventure that can have unpredictable results.
 I usually get around town on the metro. A recent attempt to take a taxi, however, turned into a fiasco when the car I was in got stuck in a 90-minute traffic jam and I was late getting to the television studio where I was supposed to participate in a live debate.
 Moscow is surprisingly poorly adapted to winter conditions. Ice on the roads turns into a struggle against the elements that is hard to win, in particular for pedestrians, thousands of whom break arms and legs every winter.
 If over the past month you haven't slipped on the ice that covers sidewalks and pedestrian zones at least once, it can mean one of only two things: Either you are extremely lucky or you're a big boss and rarely ever have to take more than a couple of steps from the door of your car to the door of your office.
 Complaints about the city authorities' lack of winter preparation are nothing new. However, things are getting steadily worse. We had cold winters in Soviet times, but never this number of victims. Ice-covered sidewalks as a universal phenomenon only came in with perestroika. Members of the older generation recount how, under Stalin, dvorniks worked irreproachably, sidewalks were swept clean and even in the winter women could go out in high heels. Do we really need a regime of terror in order to keep the streets free of ice? 
 Cold weather has undoubtedly played an important role in eastern-European politics. In temperatures of minus 20 and below, people's desire to get out on the streets and protest falls off remarkably rapidly. In Poland in 1981, General Jaruzelski's regime introduced a state of emergency when the cold weather set in. Activists from the free trade unions responded with the slogan, &quot;The winter is yours, but the spring will be ours!&quot; 
 In Russia, reforms tend to get going in the warm season, while with the onset of cold, the state has a tendency to demonstrate the full extent of its repressive might. It is no accident that Nikita Khruschev's reforms were called the &quot;thaw.&quot; 
 It's also very convenient to conduct elections and referendums during the winter, as the fewer people that make it to the polling booths, the easier it is to add &quot;dead souls&quot; to voting protocols.
 Officials sit in well-heated buildings and their cars get around the city using the few roads that have been properly cleared of ice and snow. I can't thing of a single incident of a city official freezing to death in his or her office or dying from a blow to the head from a falling icicle.
 No wonder the city authorities have such an unambiguous affection for Ded Moroz.
 
 <i>Boris Kagarlitsky is a Moscow-based sociologist. </i>

TITLE: TV6 Case Gives Plenty Of Reasons To Worry
TEXT: THE liquidation of TV6 is not, as much of the Western media insists on describing it, the end of independent national television in Russia. 
 
TV6 is independent of the government, but it is controlled by Boris Berezovsky, who openly acknowledges that it is politics, not business, that drives his interest in the television station. And Berezovsky's politics is to make trouble for the Kremlin.
 Berezovsky's TV6, like Vladimir Gu sinsky's NTV before the Gaz prom takeover last year, may not have been a model of unbiased reporting, but it gave us a point of view different from that espoused by the state channels. We viewers will be the poorer without it.
 What the word independent also does not apply to in this case is the judicial system. The Higher Arbitration Court on Jan. 11 ordered the liquidation of TV6 on the basis of a now-nonexistent law, a law so inane and detrimental to business that the State Duma took the trouble to repeal it last year. 
 As Boris Nemtsov said, after the TV6 decision, &quot;any talk about the independence of Russia's judicial system will not be possible without an ironic smile.&quot; 
 The U.S. White House also lamented the &quot;strong appearance of political pressure on the courts.&quot; 
 The U.S. State Department said the case raises questions about freedom of the press. And there is reason to worry. 
 The message the TV6 case has sent to journalists in Russia, and to those who wish to control them, is strong.
 After the TV6 ruling, journalists have been given more reason than ever to think twice about what they choose to report.
 Grigory Yavlinsky and other liberal politicians hit the nail on the head in warning that regional authorities could interpret the outcome of the case as a green light to crack down on local independent media that dare to challenge them.
 &quot;There is no doubt that the liquidation of TV6 will lead to a chain reaction of prosecution of mass media in the regions,&quot; Yavlinsky said.
 Regional leaders, who traditionally act on what they see as Mos cow's cue, have a reputation for not tolerating dissent in the media. Nemt sov, in a comment he wrote for The Moscow Times in September, said that as much as 90 percent of regional media is already directly or indirectly controlled by local authorities. 
 With the perceived TV6 precedent from Moscow, the remaining independent voices in the regions could also be silenced. And, unfortunately, the odds are that nobody in Moscow would hear about their demise - much less report on it. 
 
 <i>This comment originally appeared as an editorial in The Moscow Times on Jan. 15. </i>

TITLE: terem marks fifteen years
AUTHOR: by Gulyara Sadykh-zade
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Terem Quartet, which has fully recovered from the split that occurred two years ago, has managed to accomplish a lot in the last 18 months. Not only has the group been able to successfully integrate the young newcomer Aleksei Barshchev, but it has also renewed its repertoire and even slightly reoriented it toward the ensemble's new artistic goals.
 
The academic aspect of Terem's concerts is now coming through more clearly, and the quartet's jaunty manner has been replaced by a more restrained and decorous style.
 As the group approaches its fifteenth anniversary, it has become virtually irreplaceable on the local music scene. The quartet's participation in any festival held by the Philharmonic and its regular appearances on the stages of the Shostakovich and Glinka concert halls is now taken for granted.
 The group's two most recent concerts wound up a cycle of anniversary celebrations that began last fall on the stage of the Bolshoi Drama Theater. At that concert last November, the large number of guests transformed the event into something of a local talent show.
 However, Terem's evolution has proceeded naturally. It's own style has accumulated out of elements collected over the years: an exotic folklorism <i>a la russe, </i>with elements of jazz and generously seasoned with fountains of wit and parody, that blends Russian folk songs with European traditions and interweaves popular classics with Soviet songs and Tchaikovsky. It is a truly unique phenomenon on the musical scene. 
 It is important to note that the Terem Quartet does not bow down before the immutable values of academic music. The group boldly experiments with genres and styles, turning the very form of a classical concert into something between the happy play of children and the overblown theatrics of a clown act. And all that is suffused with elements from the collective unconscious of the Russian folk, especially elements of its sense of humor that relish transformations and estrangement.
 To achieve this, Terem uses a plethora of elements: their Russian-flavored Bach is suffused with pathos and at times even seems to turn into an authentic village dance. Their variations on &quot;Happy Birthday&quot; blossom with paraphrasing from Schumann's &quot;Carnival,&quot; Chopin's waltzes and a number of other equally far-ranging references.
 This principle of musical fusion is so seriously cultivated that it is elevated to the level of high art and calls for academic analysis. The notorious label of post-modernism that was inevitably applied to the Terem Quartet during its formative phase is hardly adequate. Proceeding from the mainstream of European classical traditions, the group is constructing its own &quot;post-modernism,&quot; one that is bursting with unrepentant daring and, even, naughtiness.
 The Terem Quartet certainly has no rivals when it comes to toe tapping, clapping, raising eyebrows, winking knowingly at the audience and all the other devices used to draw spectators into the performance. Ironically, a Terem concert at times borders on a mime performance. The group consciously wipes away the traditionally inviolable border between the stage and the hall, skilfully drawing the listener into a process of co-creation and, in the process, rewriting all the old rules governing the relationship between artist and audience.
 In the process of tearing down these barriers, however, the separate roles and functions of each of the group's members remain strictly defined, with the sonorous characteristics of each instrument building upon the personalities of the performers. For instance, the monumental image of Mikhail Dzyudze has fully merged into the voice of his giant bass balalaika, a voice so thick and fatty one can almost feel the cholesterol. At the same time, Andrei Konstantinov's light and gossipy domra, with its flighty pizzicato and precise jingling tones, introduces to the quartet an unpredictable, alogical (dare I say &quot;feminine&quot;?) element. Andrei Smirnov's expansive, resonant bayan integrates all the voices into a harmonic continuum, a flowing unity of contradictions.
 In the final analysis, this quartet seems to me no less than a simplified model of the universe, and I think that this manufactured syncretism - the group's essential innovation - lies at the heart of the public's blind, irrational affection for the Terem Quartet. Time and again, Terem manages to touch some deep, hidden layers of the collective unconscious and to create within the listener resonances in harmony with its music. And as long as this mystical connection between musician and listener remains, Terem's success is ensured.

TITLE: when the revolution was young
AUTHOR: by Tom Gallagher
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Only nine days after the fall of Emperor Nicholas II, the United States became the first nation to recognize the provisional government that replaced him. So when U.S. President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war on April 2, 1917, he could plausibly argue for war against Austria-Hungary and Germany - &quot;the last exponents of absolutism and divine right,&quot; as Norman Saul puts it - on the grounds that &quot;the world must be made safe for democracy.&quot;
 
Wilson proved quite successful in rallying American opinion around this &quot;war to end all wars.&quot; The new Russian government, however, did not fare nearly so well. Continuation of the war proved a hard sell in a country whose casualties were matched only by Germany's, and within eight months the new government was itself ousted by the Bolsheviks, who pledged to take Russia out of the war. To demonstrate the seriousness of their intent, the Bolsheviks quickly carried through on a pledge to publish the secret treaties that Russia was party to - after a nephew of Leon Trotsky secured them at pistol-point from a recalcitrant Foreign Ministry. The treaties revealed, among other things, that Russia had been slated to acquire Istanbul if the war went in favor of the Entente countries.
 <strong>War and Revolution </strong>is Norman Saul's third volume of extremely detailed history of U.S.-Russian relations. The University of Kansas professor documents the immensity of the shock that the second Russian Revolution - nearly all of whose principals were unknown - caused in the United States. A year earlier, every Bolshevik, Menshevik, Social Revolutionary and the like now running around Petrograd had been either living underground or sitting on their suitcases in exile. And it was quite hard for Washington to officially accept &quot;a short-term editor of a small Lower East Side New York Russian-language newspaper now being in charge of the foreign affairs of a major ally.&quot;
 Understanding was in very short supply. In the opinion of a British diplomat, the U.S. ambassador in Petrograd did not &quot;know a Left Social Revolutionary from a potato.&quot; One prominent American sent to Russia to promote the war effort returned with some mostly forged documents that he published to prove that the Bolsheviks were not Russian revolutionaries at all, but actually German agents. Leon Trotsky, the &quot;short-term editor&quot; mentioned above, said Woodrow Wilson was controlled by Wall Street; Wilson said &quot;Lenine (sic) and Trotsky sounded like opera bouffe.&quot; As a result, as this book comes to its end, the United States is still recognizing the provisional government, although it had long since been definitively consigned to &quot;the dustbin of history,&quot; as Trotsky famously put it.
 Much of this story does read like a musical farce, but America was not shut out of the choice roles. When Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, who commanded the seizure of the Winter Palace, left Petrograd three days later to counter an anticipated attack from forces loyal to the provisional government, three Americans - including journalist John Reed, whose story was made famous in the movie &quot;Reds&quot; - hopped into the car with him. Upon their arrival, &quot;Antonov-Ovseyenko discovered immediately that the Red Guards and other units were short of ammunition [and] he decided to write an order for some to be sent but had to borrow paper and pencil from the Americans. Thus the first order of the embryonic Red Army was written on American paper with an American pencil.&quot; U.S. financial assistance would also facilitate the return to Russia of both Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin, perhaps the third most important Bolshevik in the years immediately following the Revolution.
 The Bolsheviks soon stood alone, as the various &quot;white hopes&quot; - the White armies under the leadership of former tsarist officers that fought the Red Army - roamed the land. And there were also the 35,000 Czech and Slovak former prisoners of war from the Austro-Hungarian army who were attempting to get from Siberia to the western front, seizing control of land as they went. Saul writes that the &quot;closest equivalents&quot; to the patchwork of groups then controlling various stretches of the Trans Siberian Railroad &quot;were the highwaymen of early England or the train robbers of the American West.&quot;
 But somehow, despite facing the threat of a new German offensive, Russia's former war allies managed to muster sufficient troops to intervene on the side of the Whites on several fronts. Later they would impose an economic blockade. However, as far as American policy went, one State Department official lamented that it &quot;seemed only to have helped the <i>Bolsheviki, </i>that partial support had been given at various times to each of the anti-Bolshevik elements, but only in sufficient quantity to permit the <i>Bolsheviki </i>to advertise that the allies were opposing them.&quot; 
 This temporizing was, however, not without reason. Although isolated among world governments, Soviet Russia was not without friends in the West. As Wilson's chief political advisor Colonel Edward House put it, &quot;There is not a Western country that could safely send troops into Russia without creating labor troubles at home.&quot; 
 The strength of &quot;War and Revolution&quot; does not lie in its political analysis. When Saul refers to America's &quot;missed opportunities,&quot; he presumably means opportunities to crush Bolshevism early, and in this reflects the conventional view that since the Soviet Union turned out badly, it ought to have been eliminated sooner. In that regard, the book rests comfortably in the current one-dimensional mainstream that holds that capitalism always was, always will be, and always should be. But for documentation of the early years of one side of a relationship that would dominate much of the 20th century, it is superb.
 
 <i>
&quot;War and Revolution: The United States and Russia, 1914-1921,&quot; by Norman E. Saul. Published by University Press of Kansas, 483 pages. $45.00
 
 Tom Gallagher is a freelance writer based in San Francisco. </i>

TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: Many music fans may be heading down to Moscow for the first Russian concert by New York guitarist <strong>Marc Ribot, </strong>who will appear solo at 16 Tons on Jan. 24.
 
Widely regarded as one of today's most inventive and adventurous guitarists, Ribot (pronounced REE-bow) has been a staple of New York's New Music scene for years, although he is best known for his work on recordings and tours by Elvis Costello, Marianne Faithfull and, most notably, Tom Waits. With the latter he appeared again on the 1999 &quot;The Mule Variations&quot; album and tour.
 Over the past three years, Ribot has achieved considerable success with his own &quot;fake-Cuban&quot; band, Los Cubanos Postizos. But his current tour is promoting last year's solo effort &quot;Saints,&quot; on which he treated jazz and pop classics - including The Beatles' &quot;Happiness Is a Warm Gun&quot; - occasionally using his &quot;extended technique&quot; and a toy guitar.
 Ribot will return to Russia on March 12 and 13 to perform with Los Cubanos Postizos and will probably play St. Petersburg then. Local ly, however, we will be treated to <strong>the Rollins Band </strong>next week. They will play at PORT Club on Jan. 25. 
 The band's mainstay, 40-year-old Henry Rollins, has been to Moscow a couple of times - once confusing punks there by performing a &quot;spoken-word&quot; set when they expected an unleashed punk show - but never to St. Petersburg.
 A graduate of the Washington D.C. &quot;straight-edge&quot; hardcore scene, Rollins came to prominence as a member of Black Flag. After that band split, he was quick to form the Rollins Band, which developed its own brand of hard rock with blues and jazz influences and received a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Band in 1994. Tickets cost 400 rubles.
 This weekend's entertainment will include <strong>Markscheider Kunst </strong>at Faculty on Saturday. However, be warned that there is a risk of not getting in, as was the problem when Tequilajazzz played there last Friday. The club only holds about 200 people, leaving many fans standing outside in the snow.
 Kunst, the eight-member &quot;afro-beat&quot; band, signed a three-album recording deal with Moscow's Gala label last year and its first &quot;proper&quot; album, &quot;Krasivo Sleva,&quot; is now available in record shops. However, you will save 30 percent or more if you buy it at the Moloko club, where the CD is available for 200 rubles.
 Moloko, which has the honor of being the band's favorite club, will host a birthday party for Kunst mainstay Sergei Yefremenko on Jan. 26 featuring Kunst's Latin-tinged spin-off project Tres Muchachos and friends. Entrance fee: 100 rubles.
 The week's Web site in the spotlight is that of <strong>Cynic, </strong>the unique local club that is in reality an eatery, but one with attitude. The well-organized site at www.cynic.spb.ru. gives some idea about what the club - whose main principle is &quot;everything but violence is permitted&quot; - is like, and the photo section gives some indication of a Cynic's typical &quot;happening&quot; - involving a couple stripping on a table. According to the management, the photo exhibition by Finnish journalist Sami Hyrskylahti, which the club hosted in November, has been scanned and will be posted on the site next week.
 
 <i>- by Sergey Cherov </i>

TITLE: where chinese tourists go to dine
AUTHOR: by Thomas Rymer
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: There's no sign indicating its name (unless that's what the two Chinese symbols over the entrance denote), there's about a 50-percent chance that main courses ordered will arrive strung out over a period of about twenty minutes, and there's always the danger that the arrival of a busload of Chinese tourists will swamp the kitchen and send your schedule reeling.
 
All of this said, Asia is serving up the best Chinese food I've had in St. Petersburg and, for those with a modicum (or more) of patience, is well worth the visit. 
 Located at 41 Kazanskaya Ulitsa (don't forget the address - as I said, the name's not on the sign), this restaurant has an unassuming, almost cafeteria-like flavor to it. There are two dining rooms, with the one to the right providing a little more of an Oriental flavor, especially when half full of the afforementioned tourists.
 None of this is important, really, because Asia is all about the food. The restaurant excels at serving what I would consider authentic Chinese cuisine at very reasonable prices.
 As my dining companion and I sat down to read the menu while drinking the complimentary green tea that had been brought to the table on our arrival, we opted to start out with soup and then order a few different dishes to share for our mains - the standard strategy that I believe was first developed by McArthur's troops during the Korean War.
 The plan didn't exactly pan out, which, as I said, is one of the dangers. My Crab and Shrimp Soup, for 28 rubles ($0.90), arrived simultaneously with the 30-ruble ($1) Botchkaryovs and our first main. Conspicuously absent was my dining companion's Sweet and Sour Soup, which never did materialize.
 The soup was the weakest link of the meal taste-wise. The crab was of the frozen-finger variety and most of the shrimp seemed to have slipped through the net. The chicken broth with egg white was very tasty though.
 The first main delivered, Fried Pork with Forest and Black Mushrooms for 98 rubles ($3.20), turned the experience around. The pork was tender and the fresh, crunchy red and green peppers added a wonderful contrast to the mushrooms in the sauce.
 Next came my personal favorite, the Fried Beef with Vegetables in a Piquant Sauce, also at 98 rubles. As was the case with all of the dishes we tried, the meat was tender and the vegetables, in this case cabbage, were both fresh and crunchy, giving the food a wonderful texture to go along with the taste. The best part of the dish, though, is the amazingly spicy sauce, which was abundant enough to give the dish a stew-like quality. For those who are disappointed by the dearth of spicy options on offer at most of the city's Chinese restaurants, this dish will definitely cheer you up.
 A few minutes later our Jumbo Shrimp With Sweet and Sour Sauce (380 rubles, or $12.45) arrived. The dish was outstanding, with the shrimp living up to their &quot;jumbo&quot; billing and the taste of the pinapple chunks, red and green peppers, onions and tomatoes coming together perfectly in a sauce that was not too overbearing to upset the balance of the other tastes.
 Our chicken dish, Szechuan Chicken (88 rubles, or $2.90), completed the victory sweep for our main courses by joining each of the others in beating the rice and noodle dishes we had ordered to the table. This is just one of the pitfalls that come with the territory at Asia. Again, the dish was bang-on, with a light garlic sauce accompanying the chicken, cashews, carrots and onions.
 About half way through our meal, a busload of Chinese tourists did come filing into the room where we were eating. I've been to the restaurant a number of times and this is a fairly regular occurence, which I take as a good sign. You can look at it as a potential roadblock for those looking to get in and out in a hurry or, instead, you can view it as a strong vote of confidence from a group of people who are pretty familiar with their subject.
 
 <i>
Asia, 41 Kazanskaya Ul., 314-9629. Open noon to 11 p.m. Dinner for two with beer, 820 rubles ($27). Menu in Russian only. No credit cards accepted. </i>

TITLE: Former Supporter Providing Information on the Taliban
AUTHOR: By Ellen Knickmeyer
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - U.S. investigators on Wednesday questioned a man who described himself as a financial supporter of the Taliban and showed up voluntarily at the biggest U.S. base in Afghanistan offering information.
 
Pentagon officials said the man had given money to the Taliban, but had not been a member of the Islamic regime that ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. It was not known what information he had about the complex web of support of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network, which was sheltered by the Taliban.
 Marine spokesperson Lieutenant James Jarvis said the man showed up Tuesday at the Kandahar airport, where thousands of U.S. troops are based and a detention center holds hundreds of al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
 The man remained on the base Wednesday but was not being detained, Jarvis said. A Pentagon official said, on condition of anonymity, that he was not on the U.S. list of wanted men, but Jarvis said investigators were &quot;jumping with joy.&quot;
 At the Pentagon, General Richard Myers, chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the man was being questioned. Officials did not disclose his identity or nationality or say how he came to the base.
 U.S. officials initially said the man was an al-Qaeda finance official but later Pentagon officials said he was a Taliban backer.
 The nature of the man's purported donations were unclear. However, during the years the Taliban was in power, a major source of income for the Islamic militia purportedly came from kickbacks from big-time smugglers, including drug dealers, who were willing to pay in order to be allowed to continue their operations.
 In contrast, the new government is flat broke. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell arrived in Kabul early Thursday to confer with Afghan leaders ahead of an aid conference in Tokyo next week, where donors will contribute funds to rebuild the shattered country. The first secretary of state to visit Afghanistan since the mid-1970s, Powell traveled in secret from Pakistan under tight security, to protect his party from any remaining Taliban or al-Qaida threat.
 In Washington, U.S. President George W. Bush again ruled out participation by U.S. troops in the U.N.-mandated peacekeeping force in Afghanistan. During a meeting in which he encouraged Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit's offer to take over leadership of the force after Britain's term is finish, the president said:
 &quot;I've made it clear that our troops will be used to fight and win war. And that's exactly what they've done.&quot;
 Also Wednesday, a Marine color guard saluted as a flag-draped coffin holding the remains of the last of seven Marines killed in a crash a week ago was loaded onto a C-17 at Kandahar and flown to Germany en route to Dover Air Force Base. The crash of the refueling plane in Pakistan was the most deadly single incident for U.S. forces in the Afghanistan campaign.
 The runway at Kandahar airport was darkened to prevent the C-17 from becoming a target for attackers.
 The struggle to restore services in the capital took a step forward with the reopening of Kabul's international airport, which closed three months ago because of heavy bombing. The control tower is still a shattered hulk, and bomb craters dot the taxiways, but a Boeing 727 belonging to the national carrier, Ariana Afghan Airlines, took off on a symbolic test flight, circling over the airport before landing again.
 The U.N. refugee agency said Wednesday that authorities in neighboring Pakistan had let hundreds of vulnerable Afghan refugees move from a border area, but that thousands more remain blocked there.

TITLE: India Takes Step Toward Peace
AUTHOR: By Beth Duff-Brown
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW DELHI, India - India was making conciliatory gestures toward Pakistan ahead of a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to the Indian capital on Thursday.
 
On the eve of Powell's visit, India announced it was open to dialogue with its south Asian nuclear rival and called a speech by the Pakistani president &quot;path-breaking.&quot;
 Indian Home Minister Lal K. Advani praised a speech in which President General Pervez Musharraf condemned terrorism and vowed to curb Islamic militants accused of launching attacks in India.
 &quot;The speech which General Musharraf has made is important, is in a way path-breaking,&quot; Advani said Wednesday night. &quot;I have not heard earlier any other Pakistani leader denouncing theocracy in the manner in which General Musharraf did.&quot;
 Advani's comments, a clear change of India's previous lukewarm response to Musharraf's speech on Saturday, came just as he returned from Washington and on the eve of Powell's two-day visit.
 Powell, who arrived in Pakistan on Wednesday for the first leg of his Asian tour aimed at pulling the two countries back from confrontation, praised Musharraf for launching the crackdown on Islamic militants.
 &quot;The important thing now is for both sides to make a political judgment that the way out of this crisis is political and diplomatic, and not through conflict,&quot; Powell told a news conference in Islamabad. &quot;We need a campaign against terrorism, not a campaign with these two countries fighting one another.&quot;
 Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, on a private visit to India to meet with business leaders, met Thursday with K.C. Pant, the government's chief negotiator with Kashmiri separatist groups.
 The secretary of state under Presidents Nixon and Ford, Kissinger denied playing any U.S. government role in de-escalating tensions between India and Pakistan.
 &quot;I have come here to educate myself on a few facts about Kashmir and there was no specific agenda of our talks with Pant,&quot; Kissinger told the Press Trust of India news agency.
 He said he believed Washington should play no role in meditating the Kashmiri conflict, as demanded by Musharraf.
 India and Pakistan have massed hundreds of thousands of troops on their frontier since a Dec. 13 suicide attack on the Indian Parliament, which New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-based Islamic militant groups and Pakistan's spy agency. Pakistan and the two groups denied involvement.
 An Indian Army spokesperson said Thursday that moderate small-arms fire between Indian and Pakistani troops resumed overnight across the Line of Control that divides Kashmir.
 India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars over the Himalayan province, which both countries claim. India accuses Pakistan of fighting a proxy war by funding and arming more than a dozen Islamic militant groups in Indian-controlled Kashmir. The 12-year insurgency has cost more than 32,000 lives.
 On Saturday, Musharraf said he would not allow militants to conduct terrorist acts in the name of Kashmir. However, he said his country would continue to support their claim of independence for the mostly Muslim region or a merger with Pakistan.
 In his speech, Musharraf announced a ban on five groups, including Islamic and Kashmiri militants. He also announced restrictions on religious schools that have become terrorist breeding grounds, and authorities have arrested nearly 2,000 suspected militants in a nationwide crackdown.
 On Thursday, police in Pakistan arrested scores of suspected militants in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and sealed dozens more offices of Islamic extremists elsewhere in the country.
 India still maintains it will not pull its troops back from the border until it sees more concrete action, though New Delhi was open to dialogue.

TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Iraq Prepared
 

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - On the eleventh anniversary of the Gulf War, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said on Thursday his country was prepared for and would foil any fresh U.S. military attack against Iraq as part of a war against terrorism.
 In a televised speech, Saddam said experience Iraq had gained from the Gulf War - in which a U.S.-led coalition drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait and bombed Iraq - would enable it to repulse any new military campaign.
 "After the course of the aggression 11 years ago, backed up by a continuous aggression till this day, our people will not be taken by surprise," Saddam said.
 Iraq had survived the Gulf War and would be able to survive other military action, he said.
 He said Iraqis "now have more confidence in themselves and more conviction in their march than they had in the year 1991.
 "Will the performance of one who has taken an examination and passed it be higher and better, or lower and lesser?" Saddam asked.
 But he prayed that God would spare Iraq military confrontation with America.
 
 
No Chemical Weapons
 

WASHINGTON (AP) - U.S. investigators are testing some suspicious-looking canisters found at former al-Qaeda sites in Afg ha nistan, but officials have tentatively concluded the group could not make chemical, biological or radiological weapons.
 Searches of more than 40 sites used by Osama bin Laden's terrorist network yielded documents, diagrams and material that showed "an appetite for weapons of mass destruction," U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Wednesday.
 Of 50 suspected al-Qaeda sites identified so far, 45 have been thoroughly examined, officials said.
 "In terms of having hard evidence of actual possession of weapons of mass destruction, I do not have that at this stage," Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news conference.
 Rumsfeld added that he had been shown photographs of canisters recently found at a former al-Qaeda site which could contain chemical agents. Their contents have yet to be examined, he said.
 "Externally they appear to be weapons of mass destruction," he said. Asked to explain, he said, "They've got stuff on them that make reasonable people think there's something not good in there, and we're going to check them out."
 Other officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the canisters are no more than 15 centimeters high and bear Cyrillic markings indicating they might be of Russian origin.
 These officials said the canisters were probably harmless. They said al-Qaida is known to have made a number of transactions in the past for useless items dressed up as chemical or other terror weapons. 
 
 
Outrageous Error
 

GEORGETOWN, Texas (AP) - A plaque prepared to honor actor James Earl Jones at a Saturday celebration of civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in Lauderhill, Florida, instead has this inscription: "Thank you James Earl Ray for keeping the dream alive."
 Ray was the man convicted of assassinating King in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968.
 "I apologize to whoever I need to apologize to. This was a mistake, a very unfortunate mistake," Herbert Miller, vice president for sales at Georgetown-based Merit Industries, said on Wednesday. Merit prepared the plaque at the request of Adpro, a Lauderhill-based business.
 "It had an immediate chill. It was eerie," Adpro owner Gerald Wilcox said as he showed the plaque displaying words that, he said, "deeply hurt."
 The plaque features a $0.15 stamp of King and stamps of six other famous African-Americans, including Harriet Tubman, W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Laurence Dunbar. The finished product arrived Monday and, even without seeing it, officials in the city were angry.
 "It's a real outrage," Commissioner Margaret Bates told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. "To confuse James Earl Jones with James Earl Ray. Just think of the significance."
 
 
Student Kills Three
 

GRUNDY, Virginia (AP) - Peter Odi g hi zuwa returned to his law-school campus hoping to get another chance from his dean after flunking out for a second time. But he came armed with a pistol and, moments after being rejected, authorities say he started firing.
 Odighizuwa shot his dean and a professor to death in their offices and then opened fire on a crowd of students, killing one and injuring three others before students tackled the gunman and handcuffed him, officials said.
 "He was angry. He thought he was being treated unfairly, and he wanted to see his transcript,'' said Chris Clifton, the school's financial aid officer.
 "I don't think Peter knew at this time that [his dismissal] was going to be permanent and final,'' Clifton added.
 Odighizuwa, a 42-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen from Nigeria, was scheduled to be arraigned Thursday in Grundy General District Court.
 Odighizuwa went to the campus of the Appalachia School of Law on Wednesday to talk to his dean, L. Anthony Sutin, about his dismissal, officials said. He shot Sutin and professor Thomas Blackwell, who taught contract law to Odighizuwa, with a .38-caliber pistol, authorities and students said.
 Police said the third person slain was student Angela Dales, 33. The injured students were in fair condition at area hospitals.
 
 
Gambian Elections 
 

BANJUL, Gambia (AP) - Legislative elections started peacefully across the tiny West African nation of Gambia on Thursday amid an opposition boycott that has set the stage for a massive ruling party victory.
 Turnout was low at many polling stations in the capital, Banjul. Voter apathy was reflected in short lines at schools and government buildings where residents queued to cast their votes.
 Ousainou Darboe's main opposition United Democratic Party is boycotting the ballot along with two smaller parties, accusing the government and the independent electoral commission of preparing a fraudulent vote - charges both deny. The opposition withdrawal means President Yahya Jammeh's ruling Alliance for Patriotic Reorientation and Construction party will run unopposed in 33 of the 48 constituencies up for grabs.
 With the power to appoint the five remaining seats in the 53-member assembly, Jammeh will easily secure control over two-thirds of parliament - the same majority necessary to pass legislation. 



TITLE: Russians Near Sweep In Lausanne
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LAUSANNE, Switzerland - Alexei Yagudin of Russia regained the men's title Thursday at the European Figure Skating Championship, despite a serious challenge from teammate Alexander Abt.
 
Yagudin won his third European title to go with his championships in 1998 and 1999. Teammate and rival Yevgeny Plushchenko, who unseated him in 2000, is out with an injury and did not defend his title.
 Yagudin, also a three-time world champion, led after the qualifying and short program. He missed his opening quadruple jump - intending a quad-triple-triple combination. He came back to do another immediately at the other end of the rink.
 He also hit six triples, although he doubled two jumps late in the routine to the music from &quot;Man in the Iron Mask&quot;
 His technical marks were mostly 5.7s and 5.8. Presentation marks were 5.8s and 5.9s.
 Abt, who had a bronze medal as a substitute in the 1998 championships and has been fourth the last two years, beat Yagudin in the technical elements. Abt landed a quad-double combination to begin and eight triples in all, although on one he appeared slightly to touch down on a triple axel.
 His technical marks were mostly 5.8s and 5.9s. His presentation scores were lower than Yagudin's, however, getting 5.7s and a few 5.8s with just one 5.9.
 Third place went to 17-year year old Brian Joubert of France. He was third in the national championships this year and 14th in the national championships last year.
 Yagudin's victory continues a Russian streak of men's winners in the last five years.
 It also continued the Russian dominance from the pairs competition on Wednesday when, or the 35th time in 38 years, a Russian or Soviet pair has won the European pairs figure skating title. 
 &quot;I think it is probably the skating tradition in Russia. The tradition and the experience keep on accumulating,&quot; said Maxim Marinin, who teamed with Tatiana Totmianina for the title Wednesday. 
 &quot;It is the coaches that work with the athletes from generation to generation. The coach gives the knowledge to the student, and so on,&quot; added Marinin, who is coached by 1984 Olympic pairs winner Oleg Vasiliev. 
 Stephane Bernadis of France, who came in second with Sarah Abitbol, had another view of why the Russian skaters do so well. 
 Since 1996, Bernadis and Abitbol have won six European silver or bronze pairs medals. The gold medal has gone to five different Russian pairs during that time. 
 &quot;It's in their blood,&quot; Bernadis said. &quot;When you see guys like Alexei Yagudin, it is incredible to see them skate.&quot; 
 Yagudin was in the lead heading into the men's final on Thursday. He looks set to regain his European title in the event that could have a Russian sweep of the medals. 
 On Wednesday, Russians won both groups of women's qualifying headed by Michelle Kwan's rivals for the Olympic gold, Irina Slutskaya and Ma ria Butyrskaya. 
 Totmianina and Marinin continued the Russian pairs tradition with an American tune, skating to a &quot;West Side Story&quot; medley. 
 They finished second last year to Yelena Berezhnaya and Anton Sik ha ru li dze, who did not defend their title because of injury. 
 &quot;It's really hard to beat the Russian pair. Every time, there is another and another and another,&quot; Bernadis said. &quot;The game is not easy with the Russians.&quot; 
 In third place was yet another Russian pair, Maria Petrova and Alexei Tikhonov, who have won the European title twice.

TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Charity Case
 

BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) - The Massachusetts attorney general made sure the state's charities got their share of money for the sale of the Boston Red Sox.
 Attorney General Tom Reilly withdrew his objection to the sale of the team to Florida Marlins owner John Henry after exacting another $30 million for charity. The deal cleared the way for baseball's other owners to approve the sale 29-0 in Phoenix on Wednesday night, with the New York Yankees abstaining.
 "I'm looking forward to just being a fan, quite frankly," Reilly said. "We had run out of patience. It was important to us to get it done."
 Henry offered $660 million for the team, which owns Fenway Park and 80 percent of the New England Sports Network - $90 million less than the highest bid. Reilly was critical of the deal, claiming that baseball commissioner Bud Selig orchestrated the sale to his allies, and in the process shortchanged the charitable trust that owns 53 percent of the team.
 
 
Hornets Want To Fly
 

CHARLOTTE, North Carolina (Reuters) - The Charlotte Hornets have applied to the NBA to relocate the franchise to New Orleans by next season, officials said Wednesday.
 Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory said he learned of the decision from Mike Crum, director of operations at the Charlotte Coliseum, where the team plays its home games.
 "We anticipated this for several weeks," McCrory told a news conference.
 The NBA would not confirm that the Hornets have applied to relocate, and Hornets officials could not be reached for comment.
 Twenty-two of 29 NBA owners would have to vote in favor of the move.
 
 
Help Wanted
 

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Lokomotiv Moscow is aiming to sign unsettled Georgian striker Georgi Demetradze on loan from Real Sociedad.
 "Indeed, we're interested in Demetradze," Lokomotiv coach Yuri Syomin said from France, where the Russian premier-division club is having its first pre-season training camp.
 "But we need to take a look at him at our next training camp before we make a final decision."
 Lokomotiv, which is trying to rebuild its side following the departures of top goalkeeper Ruslan Nigmatullin and captain Igor Chugainov, signed South African international midfielder Bennett Mnguni to a three-year-contract earlier this week.
 Demetradze, the Russian league's top scorer with 21 goals in 27 matches with Alania Vladikavkaz in 1999, joined Dynamo Kiev in a record $4.5 million five-year deal the following year.
 
 
Is Italy Slipping?
 

ROME (Reuters) - AC Milan's Executive Vice-President Adriano Galliani has reacted angrily to speculation linking star striker Andriy Shevchenko with a move to Spain, as he reflected on a shift in power in European club soccer away from Italy.
 Galliani, who effectively runs Milan for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, also revealed that Milan has tried but failed to lure Real Madrid's Luis Figo and Francesco Totti of Italian champions AS Roma to the club in the past.
 "We will never sell Shevchenko to Real [Madrid]. What price does Sheva have? He has no price," Galliani was quoted as saying in Thursday's Corriere Dello Sport.
 "It's incredible. In the past Real never came to Milan to look for [Marco] van Basten or (Ruud) Gullit. The market has changed," Galliani said ruefully.