SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #753 (19), Friday, March 15, 2002
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TITLE: Kremlin Moves Against Kokh
AUTHOR: By Andrei Zolotov Jr. and Vladimir Kovalyev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Two weeks ago, Alfred Kokh unexpectedly won a seat in the upper house of parliament. But his appointment, now facing a challenge in a regional court, has yet to be confirmed - and there are indications that the force opposed to Kokh's posting is the Kremlin. 
 
Kokh, the former head of Gazprom-Media and one of the most colorful and controversial figures in Russian business and politics, was elected Feb. 26 by the Leningrad Oblast Legislative Assembly as its representative to the Federation Council. The vote came as a shock to many local politicians - chief among them, Leningrad Oblast Governor Valery Serdyukov, who had nominated his security adviser Oleg Safonov for the job. 
 Addressing the Legislative Assembly after winning 29 of the body's 48 votes, Kokh said his top priority would be developing the region's transportation infrastructure, including the faltering Ust-Luga port project, in which Kokh has significant financial interests. 
 "I want domestic ports to profit Russia. The Baltic states shouldn't be getting these profits," Kokh said. 
 A week later, however, two regional officials, lawmaker Oleg Petrov and top prosecutor Yury Prokofyev, filed legal suits to annul the election, claiming it had involved procedural violations such as invalid voting and improper paperwork on Kokh's income. The hearings in the case opened Wednesday at the Vyborg city court, but were quickly postponed after witnesses for the plaintiffs told the court that one of the lawmakers, Alexander Vernikovsky, had mistakenly cast his vote for Kokh instead of a different candidate, Interfax reported. Hearings are to resume Monday. 
 A source close to the presidential administration said Wednesday that Kokh was fighting a losing battle, since he decided to run for the Federation Council seat and lobbied the vote on his own, without consulting the Kremlin. 
 Speaking on condition of anonymity, the source said that when officials from the presidential administration found out about the election, they "got very angry." 
 "He is going to be kicked out of the Federation Council," the source said. 
 Vyacheslav Nikonov, head of the Politika think tank, described this scenario as feasible. 
 "The Kremlin watches the formation of the Federation Council very closely," Nikonov said. "Not even a fly can pass by unnoticed, much less a big bird like Kokh." 
 Kokh confirmed in a telephone interview that the decision to run for the seat was his own. 
 "This region is not alien to me, I thought I could represent its interests," Kokh said, speaking cautiously, without his trademark bravado. 
 He acknowledged it was possible that the Kremlin might want revenge for his surprise move. 
 "There is such an opinion," he said, declining to elaborate. "If [the Federation Council] is formed by the Kremlin, the Kremlin should go ahead and do it. What's the point then of all these staged shows with deputies voting?" 
 Kokh said he was interested in boosting the region's status as a Baltic gateway. Reiterating remarks made last month, Kokh said that he and investors he brought in have pumped $10 million over the past two years into Ust-Luga Co., the general contractor responsible for developing the Ust-Luga port, some 150 kilometers west of St. Petersburg on the Gulf of Finland. He said he would give up his seat on the company's board of directors when approved as a senate member. 
 However a spokesperson for the port called Kokh's figures part of "his public-relations campaign." 
 "Kokh is one member of the board, which includes many other people," spokesperson Olga Bedikova said in a telephone interview. "There are other members who take care of financing, especially Vladimir Yakunin," the board chairman and a deputy railways minister. 
 The Ust-Luga port project has been plagued by funding problems and ownership conflicts almost since its inception in 1996 when the Transportation Ministry and the Leningrad Oblast administration thought up the project as a way to divert the flow of Russian exports from ports in the Baltic states. 
 The port is to include a terminal with zones for loading and unloading coal, iron ore, oil, mineral fertilizers, cargo containers and lumber, as well as ferry services for cars, trucks and trains. The first section of the complex, where coal will be loaded for export, opened in December, but no shipments have gone through it - in part, because of a battle for control at the company responsible for building the section, Rosterminalugol, which is state-controlled. 
 Earlier this month, a special government commission headed by Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Khristenko replaced Rosterminalugol General Director Andrei Simonov - considered a supporter of the government's opponent in the battle, the Sokolovskaya holding company, which holds a 45 percent stake. 
 "Who would ship their cargo if the ownership issues have not been resolved yet?" said Bedikova. 
 The Ust-Luga Co. has eight shareholders. The major stakes are held by the Leningrad Oblast (24.95 percent), the Obyedinyonnaya Finansovaya Kompania and Interalonzo Holding Ltd. (20 percent each). Bedikova said most of the shareholders are offshore companies, but could not say who controlled them. 
 The company previously announced plans to complete the port in late 2004 or early 2005 and estimated it would have a loading capacity of 35 million tons per year. 
 However, experts have been skeptical. Yelena Beloglazova, a St. Petersburg-based sea shipping analyst, said the Ust-Luga project doesn't look that promising. 
 "It's hard to talk about Ust-Luga, since this is not an ordinary port," she said.
 "Not much works there as of now, and a lot of spending will be required just to make it possible to deliver cargo to the port. 
 "Besides," she added, "coal is such a low-budget cargo that even the St. Petersburg seaport is trying to get rid of it. It brings little profit and is bad from an ecological point of view." 
 Kokh made it clear Wednesday that the port project was very important to him. 
 "I think the port infrastructure in the Russian Baltics is underdeveloped and we are losing a lot of money when we export our goods through the ports of the Baltic states and Finland. We could have saved a lot of money, increased our profits and created jobs," he said. 
 The Federation Council was supposed to confirm Kokh's appointment Wednesday, but has postponed the hearing until March 27. 
 Fatima Tazartukova, an official with the chamber's procedural commission, said that Kokh's confirmation hearing was initially postponed because the necessary paperwork from St. Petersburg arrived only one hour prior to the commission's meeting on March 7, and another required document - proving that Kokh had resigned from his previous job - had not arrived at all. 
 "One cannot say that [the suit in Vyborg] had a direct effect on the decision," Tazartukova said.
 "But it is our practice that in cases when courts begin looking into the election procedure, the commission postpones its decision-making. After all, why hurt a person over and over again?" 
 She also said that if the court rules against Kokh, then he can appeal the decision.
 If his election is struck down and he is nominated again by either the chairman or one-third of deputies of the Leningrad Oblast Legislative Assembly, he has the right to stand for election again.

TITLE: Ford Ready for 2nd Russian Role
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Fresh from starring in a movie about a Soviet submarine disaster, Harrison Ford is teaming up with the screenwriter of the Oscar-winning "Gladiator" to film the story of U.S. aid worker Fred Cuny, who vanished in Chechnya in 1995.
 
Ford, who is co-producing the film, will play the lead role of Cuny, whose career as a disaster relief worker spanned 25 years and some 30 projects in war and disaster-ridden areas across the world, German film company Internationalmedia said in a statement. 
 Cuny went missing during a trip to Chechnya in 1995 at the height of the 1994 to 1996 military campaign. He is believed to have been executed along with an interpreter and two Russian doctors while attempting to negotiate a Russian-Chechen cease-fire. 
 Production of the film is to start in early 2003 for an as-yet-unscheduled release date, Internationalmedia said. The film will be based on "The Lost American," a 1997 documentary by David Fanning.
 Fanning will also serve as a co-producer. The screenplay will come from "Gladiator" screenwriter William Nicholson.
 The feature-film project is the brainchild of Ford, who narrated Fanning's documentary shown on Public Broadcasting Service in the United States. After being pitched the idea of the Cuny biopic, Ford brought the project to producer Doug Wick, with whom he had previously collaborated on the 1988 best-picture Oscar nominee "Working Girl," Daily Variety newspaper reported.
 "Ford has been the driving force behind the Cuny project," Wick told Daily Variety. "He felt the story must be told."
 Renowned Mexican director Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu is in negotiations to direct the project, Daily Variety said.
 Ford, 59, portrays a Soviet navy captain in his most recent movie "K-19: The Widowmaker."
 The story, based on the 1961 nuclear submarine disaster that claimed 22 lives, is scheduled for released in U.S. theaters July 19.
 His new film promises to be a lively account of Cuny's life and career, which started in the late 1960s and took him to war and disaster zones in countries such as Iraq, Somalia and Yugoslavia.
 Cuny's relief efforts have changed the way workers respond to war- and disaster-ravaged countries, according to the book "The Man Who Tried to Save the World: The Dangerous Life & Disappearance of Fred Cuny." For example, refugee camps that Cuny drew up after a powerful earthquake demolished Nicaragua in 1972 became models for other camps.
 Until then, refugee camps had been built in a square grid pattern of large high occupancy huts. Cuny's camps outside Managua used single-family tents clustered around a communal area and had much healthier conditions than other camps. Residents kept order themselves and there were no epidemics.
 Cuny's military relief effort Operation Provide Comfort to Iraqi Kurds is credited with helping save hundreds of thousands of lives. 
 In Somalia, the U.S. government ignored his advice on arranging a humanitarian operation and events deteriorated exactly as he predicted they would, according to "The Man Who Tried to Save the World." In Sarajevo, Cuny had to trick, bribe and cajole Serbs to look the other way as his engineering team diverted water from a nearby river to a thirsty city whose water supply system had been destroyed in fighting.
 But he had little time to do much in Chechnya. 
 Cuny, 50, traveled to the republic for an initial visit in February 1995 as a consultant for the Soros Foundation. He returned on March 31 to reassess plans to open a hospital in Dagestan and deliver humanitarian supplies to people left homeless by the Chechnya war. But he was never been seen again.
 Cuny's son and brother flew to Russia after he vanished, complaining that Russian officials had failed to conduct a competent search due to a complete lack of coordination between Russian, Chechen and Ingush officials.
 Five months after Cuny's disappearance, his family called a news conference in Moscow to announce that they had called off their search. They accused Chechen rebels of murdering Cuny and suggested the Federal Security Services had indirectly led to his death by fomenting a disinformation campaign in Chechnya against him. They said the FSB had falsely stated Cuny had string feelings against Islam and that his companions were employees of the FSB.

TITLE: Ryazan Bomb Film Finally Gets Shown
AUTHOR: By Andrei Zolotov Jr.
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The Liberal Russia movement presented the much talked-about documentary film alleging FSB involvement in the 1999 apartment blasts to a packed audience of journalists, human-rights activists and curious truth-seekers at the Sakharov Museum on Tuesday.
 
Members of the Boris Berezovsky-backed movement said their aim was to persuade the government to open a public investigation into the explosions, which killed more than 300.
 "The main merit of the film is that it raises again the questions that have already been raised but are still unanswered," State Duma Deputy Sergei Yushenkov, one of the co-chairmen of Liberal Russia, said at the presentation.
 "We still don't know who blew up the houses," he said. "We are not passing a verdict. We are demanding one thing - an investigation."
 The film, produced by little-known French company Transparence Production, was partly funded by Berezovsky after NTV and then TV6 bailed out. A nine-minute version of the film was presented by Berezovsky in London on March 5.
 The 42-minute film, shown in its entirety Tuesday on a dim video screen, is based largely on footage from NTV's "Independent Investigation" show, which explores the Sept. 22, 1999, incident in Ryazan in which police said they found three sacks containing explosives and a detonator in the basement of an apartment building. Two days later, Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, declared that the sacks had contained sugar and were part of a counter-terrorism drill.
 The film, which is titled "Assassination of Russia" and tries to make its case with at best circumstantial evidence, pieces together interviews with Ryazan police and residents, contradictory official statements about the incident, and commentary from emigre historian Yury Felshtinsky, who together with former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko, co-authored an unpublished book about the FSB's cooperation with criminal gangs. 
 Footage flashes from a bombed-out apartment building to Ryazan, then to a Moscow studio and President Vladimir Putin's inauguration. A narrator - speaking in the deep-voiced, trustworthy-sounding tones of a Soviet propagandistic documentary - solemnly states that the apartment blasts triggered the second Chechnya campaign which, in turn, propelled Putin to the presidency.
 The film makes a point of stressing that Patrushev called the incident a drill just when Ryazan police said they were on the verge of arresting the culprits.
 "Since Patrushev himself declared the failed terrorist act to be a drill, this, unquestionably points to the fact that the terrorist act had been prepared with Patrushev's knowledge," Felshtinsky says.
 Former Novaya Gazeta reporter Pavel Voloshin said in the film that the documentary's crew had been threatened in Ryazan last year by unidentified people in plain clothes, and that one man who had promised to assist the reporters had changed his mind after the FSB planted heroin in his pocket and threatened to open an investigation if he met with the reporters again.
 Liberal Russia, which owns the rights for the Russian version of the film, distributed videotape copies at the presentation and reiterated an offer to provide a copy to any television channel willing to show it.

TITLE: More Baby Bodies Found in Moscow, Police Still Stumped
AUTHOR: By Robin Munro
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The bodies of two newborn babies were found this week in Moscow, the latest of 10 babies who apparently have been killed by their mothers in the city since the beginning of the year, Interfax reported Thursday, citing the police.
 
The body of one baby, believed to be five or six days old, was found Wednesday in the Moskva River near Letnaya Ulitsa in the northwest of the city. Around its neck was an object that appeared to have been used to strangle the baby, the report said. The baby had been dead for four to six days.
 The second dead baby was discovered by the landlord of an apartment on Yuzhnobutovskaya Ulitsa in the south of the city, also on Wednesday. It showed no external signs of violence and had apparently been abandoned by the tenants, the report said.
 The babies were among five newborns who were found dead in the first two weeks of March, Interfax said.
 Moscow police were investigating the deaths, according to the report, but when reached by telephone, police said they could provide no information Thursday. 
 Although it was not clear how many newborn babies are killed each year in Moscow on average, the deaths of 10 babies in 2 1/2 months can only be alarming.
 In all of Russia, police investigate the murders of up to 200 newborns each year, according to a paper written by Farit Safuanov, a senior researcher at the Serbsky Institute of forensic psychiatry. 
 Boris Altshuler, head of the children's rights organization the Right of the Child, said those most likely to give birth to unwanted babies are teenage mothers and the thousands of women who travel to Moscow from throughout the former Soviet Union to earn a living. Many women come from Moldova and Ukraine to work in the city's markets. 
 "They are very dependent on their chief who runs the market, and they also often have sexual relations with him and in many cases they become pregnant," Altshuler said by telephone. "For whatever reasons, giving birth to a baby creates an enormous problem - they really cannot cope with it."
 For many women in Russia, the solution to an unwanted pregnancy is abortion. The Academy of Sciences estimates only one pregnancy in three is carried to full term. 
 But impoverished women from other former Soviet republics, who are not registered in Moscow, are unlikely to get an abortion, Altshuler said.
 "Even if it costs only 1,000 rubles they won't do it. They don't have the money," he said. "It's a crime that there is no place in Moscow where you can go anonymously and get a free abortion.
 "If they can't do this, then no one should be surprised that babies are found in the water" he said. 
 The punishment for a mother convicted of infanticide is a sentence of up to five years in jail.

TITLE: Deputies Vote Down City Hall
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Legislative Assembly on Wednesday voted down City Hall's spending report on the 2000 city budget, arguing that more than 1.5 billion rubles ($54 million) had been spent in violation of the budget authorization.
 
Eighteen deputies voted to reject the report and 16 voted in support of it.
 City Hall immediately dismissed the rejection as "just another game that lawmakers decided to play," according to Governor Vladimir Yakovlev's spokesperson Alexander Afanasiev.
 "They have to do something, and that's what they are doing. We have already filed our 2001 budget report, so deputies will have something else to reject soon," Afanasiev said.
 The 2000 budget report was rejected on the basis of the results of a September 2001 Audit Chamber report that alleged City Hall had spent 1.2 billion rubles ($43 million) from the territorial road fund to redeem municipal euro bonds issued in 1997 and had transferred another 362 million rubles ($12.9 million) to renovate the Yubileiny sports complex, which is not municipal property, for the World Hockey Championships in 2000.
 "The issue here is how the money was spent," said Irina Sycheva, the spokesperson for the Legislative Assembly's Budget Committee on Thursday. "The money has not been stolen, but it was transferred from the territorial road fund to finance salaries and other [budget lines]."
 Additionally, the Audit Chamber found that the City Hall report did not account for 162 million rubles ($5.8 million) in income collected by the municipal Health Committee in 2000.
 "Some very big sums appeared there, and the Audit Chamber's rating among lawmakers after recent inspections it has provided is very high. The Audit Chamber has proven its capability," said Viktor Yevtukhov, a Legislative Assembly deputy from the Unity faction.
 "But it is not right that the Legislative Assembly should be acting in the place of the Prosecutor's Office. It is the business of law enforcement to deal with things of this kind," he added.
 On Thursday, the Audit Chamber passed its report to the City Prosecutor's Office and the St. Petersburg Police Department's Economic Crimes Section
 "If [City Hall] resubmits its budget report without changes, this would mean that the administration takes responsibility for the violations found by the Audit Chamber," said Dmitry Buryenin, head of the Audit Chamber, on Thursday, according to the Interfax news agency.
 Afanasiev declined to say when City Hall would resubmit the report or whether any amendments would be made. A spokesperson for the Legislative Assembly also declined to say when the body would reconsider the report.
 German Shalyapin, deputy head of the Audit Chamber, said that the rejection is a "meaningful event."
 "This is the first time that the legislative branch has not accepted a [budget] report presented by City Hall," Shalyapin told Interfax on Thursday.

TITLE: Courts Limits Prosecutors' Right To Detain Suspects
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The Constitutional Court on Thursday stripped prosecutors of one of their most important rights by striking down legislation that allows suspects to be detained for more than 48 hours without a court ruling.
 
Under the existing criminal procedural code, arrest warrants necessary to hold people behind bars for more than two days could be issued by prosecutors. While this norm clearly contradicts the 1993 Constitution, which says that only a court can give such a warrant, it has been permitted for the past nine years as an interim measure because there has been no legislation detailing a procedure for court-issued warrants. 
 Last November, the State Duma passed a new criminal procedural code, which finally spelled out that arrest warrants could be issued only by the courts. The new code called for the provision to come into effect Jan. 1, 2004, while Thursday's ruling moves the date up to July 1 of this year, according to Constitutional Court spokesperson Anna Malysheva. "Interim measures cannot remain in effect forever," Malysheva said.
 Government officials said the court's ruling would necessitate immediate changes to existing legislation and could put a big strain on the country's overburdened court system.
 Justice Minister Yury Chaika said the decision would urgently require extra funds to hire new judges. "The court system is not completely ready to carry out this function," Chaika told Interfax.
 Pavel Krasheninnikov, head of the Duma's legislation committee, said Thursday's ruling created a "critical situation" in the court system and meant that lawmakers would have to revamp legislation as quickly as possible.
 The Kremlin's pointman on judicial reform, Deputy Chief of Staff Dmitry Kozak, welcomed the ruling, saying it would "give citizens more protection, as there will be outside control over criminal prosecution," Interfax reported. 
 Last year, when the Kremlin's reform package was being hammered out, prosecutors fought against the provision giving courts control over arrest warrants.
 Some media reported at the time that Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov had threatened to resign if his agency lost the right to issue the warrants. His aide, Vladimir Kolesnikov, warned that if judges start sanctioning arrests, many investigations would be paralyzed.
 But Leonid Troshin, a spokesperson for Ustinov's office, said Thursday that, although the ruling would complicate the job of law-enforcement officials, his agency could do little to reverse it, as the Constitutional Court's decision is not subject to appeal.

TITLE: Pardon Offers Hope for Prison Mothers
AUTHOR: By Sarah Karush
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SAMARA, Central Russia - Among the barbed wire and gray barracks of Women's Prison No. 15 stands a square building painted a cheerful pink where the laughter of toddlers mingles with the gentle voices of doting mothers. 
 
An island of innocence in an otherwise gloomy landscape, the nursery is home to 37 children whose mothers are serving sentences. But, thanks to an act of Kremlin clemency, the rows of cribs could soon be empty. 
 The network of prison nurseries, which house the children of minor offenders and murderers alike, reflects the privileged place of motherhood in Russian culture. Prison officials say the system allows mothers and children to form a crucial bond - even if it is often followed by a painful separation when the child is sent to an orphanage at age 3. 
 But in January, President Vladimir Putin went a step further for incarcerated mothers, recommending that all female inmates with children in prison nurseries be pardoned. Regardless of their crimes or how much of their sentences they have left to serve, inmate mothers are expected to be released with their babies in a few months. 
 Much remains unclear about how the pardons will be implemented, and the announcement has stirred fears among prison wardens that even women who are not dedicated to their children will be freed. But Kremlin officials say pardons will be granted only to mothers whose children would be best served by their early release. 
 Of the 45,000 women in the country's prisons, nearly 500 have small children who live in prison nurseries. 
 At the prison in the Volga River city of Samara, mothers get two one-hour visits with their children a day. Nursing mothers also get four shorter visits for feedings. Once children reach age 3, if their mothers still have more than a year left to serve, they are transferred to orphanages. 
 "Everything is good here, but raising a child in a home setting would be better," says Yaroslava Kachurka, 24, as she cradles Yuliana, a 3-month-old girl with a soft tuft of dark hair. "Now there's been talk of pardoning us, so we're hoping." 
 Black lines from smudged mascara run down the cheeks of Inna Kartseva, 23, when she talks about her life behind bars with Viktor, also 3 months. Born in the prison hospital, Viktor has never seen his father, who is also in prison. Kartseva and her husband were convicted on drug charges, and she maintains they are innocent. 
 "When they put us in jail, it seemed as if life was over. Thank God for this child," she says. 
 With more than six years of a seven-year sentence ahead of her, she too is putting all her hopes on the pardon initiative. "They're waiting for me at home." 
 Nursery director Tatyana Skvortsova says she would welcome pardons - though not for all mothers. 
 "Most of them are great moms, but there are some who have to be dragged in to play with their children," she says - citing the example last year of a woman who left her 10-month-old on a park bench a month after her release on parole from Prison No. 15. 
 In other cases, mothers may love their children but be unable to care for them due to a lack of housing or strong family ties, Skvortsova says. 
 In such situations, social welfare agencies have little to offer children beyond putting them in orphanages. Help for families plagued by poverty, abuse or alcoholism is virtually nonexistent. Children's advocates say this is a major reason for the country's large number of street children - a problem Putin recently vowed to tackle. 
 In this context, prison may be the best place for some mothers and children, many prison officials contend. 
 If the mothers are pardoned, "I can't guarantee that these children won't fill up the cellars and train stations," says Valery Yakovlev, acting chief of the Samara region's prison system. 
 According to the Kremlin plan, mothers' cases will be reviewed by regional pardon commissions that are still being formed. 
 Robert Tsivilyov, head of the Kremlin's pardons department, says each case will be reviewed individually with the child's best interests in mind and on the basis of the prison staff's recommendations. 
 Unlike the amnesties that the State Duma periodically passes for minor criminals to relieve overcrowding in prisons, motherhood pardons could be applied to those convicted of murder and other serious crimes. 
 Neither the new pardons nor the prison nursery offer much comfort to most mothers held at Prison No. 15 - the majority of whom have children on the outside. 
 These women fill their days sewing military and hospital uniforms at the prison factory, rehearsing their acts for the prison talent show and watching TV soap operas. The pink building stands as a reminder of what they're missing. 
 Last fall, Svetlana Mardagaliyeva's son turned 3 and was transferred to an orphanage. There is no guarantee they will be reunited even after she has served her remaining 4 1/2 years. To get him back, she will have to prove she has housing and a steady income. 
 "Something still draws me to the nursery, but what?" she says. "I guess it's just habit."

TITLE: U.S. Optimistic on Deal Over Nuclear Weapons
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: WASHINGTON - U.S. President George W. Bush on Wednesday expressed optimism that a deal on nuclear-arms reduction would be ready for his summit meeting with President Vladimir Putin in May, and clearly moved from reluctance to enthusiasm about signing a formal agreement with his Russian counterpart. 
 
At a White House news conference, Bush also defended a Pentagon review of the nation's nuclear posture that included consideration of how these weapons might be used to destroy biological or chemical arms of an adversary like Iraq, Iran, Libya or Syria, even if those states are not nuclear powers. 
 "We've got all options on the table, because we want to make it very clear to nations that you will not threaten the United States or use weapons of mass destruction against us or our allies or friends," the president said. 
 He expanded on comments earlier in the day by Russia's Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, who said "some specific results have been achieved" in two days of talks on nuclear-arms reductions with U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. 
 "I share the minister's optimism that we can get something done by May," Bush said. "I'd like to sign a document in Russia when I'm there. And it could be a good thing." 
 Although the president has said repeatedly that he is open to how a deal could be sealed with Russia, he has said just as often that a formal agreement was unnecessary. 
 Wednesday, however, he seemed to wholeheartedly embrace Russia's view. 
 Bush said he agrees "with President Putin that there needs to be a document that outlives both of us. And what form that comes in we will discuss." 
 American officials have said that even after the United States cuts its nuclear arsenal it might store hundreds of warheads to respond to future threats.
 Asked to describe the Russian reaction, Ivanov seemed to indicate that Russia might also store some warheads.
 "It is true that for some period of time, those warheads could be stored or shelved, but anyway, the time will inevitably come when those will have to be destroyed," Ivanov said.
 Rumsfeld also said Wednesday that the U.S. and Russia are likely to come up with a legally binding document. 
 President Bush and President Putin "have agreed that they would like to have something that would go beyond their two presidencies," Rumsfeld said at a news conference after two days of meetings with Ivanov. 
 Referring to Ivanov's call for a legally binding document outlining that pledge, the American defense secretary said: "Some sort of a document of that type is certainly a likelihood." 
 The disclosure last weekend of an internal U.S. nuclear review naming Russia and six other countries as potential threats alarmed the Kremlin and leaders of other countries. 
 "Without getting into the classified details, I can say that the review says nothing about targeting any country with nuclear weapons," Rumsfeld said. "The United States targets no country on a day-to-day basis."
 <i>
 - AP, NYT
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TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Ex-Officer Sentenced
 

MINSK, Belarus (AP) - A Belarusian court on Thursday sentenced a former police officer to life in prison for several crimes, including kidnapping a camera operator for Russian television, one of several well-known people to disappear in Belarus in recent years. 
 Dmitry Zavadsky went missing on July 7, 2000, after he left for the Minsk airport to meet a Russian colleague. He is feared dead, though his body has never been found, and the trial that wrapped up in the Minsk regional court Thursday shed no light on what happened to him after the abduction. 
 Goverment prosecutors said Zavadsky was kidnapped by a group led by a former officer of the elite Almaz police force, Valery Ignatovich, who was angered by his television reports. 
 Ignatovich and three other members of his group went on trial last fall on charges of various crimes, including murder, theft and Zavadsky's abduction. 
 
 
Terrorists in Georgia
 

WASHINGTON (AP) - Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said Wednesday that Russia will not ignore "international terrorists" who have infiltrated neighboring Georgia. 
 He said they are linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network and are "full of new plans for terrorist operations." 
 Speaking at a news conference with U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Ivanov said these terrorists had trained in Afghanistan, "committed terrible crimes" in Chechnya, and are now in Georgia's remote Pankisi Gorge, only a dozen or so kilometers from Russia's border. 
 "We cannot just sit and watch those activities indifferently," he said, adding that Moscow had provided the U.S. government a list of hundreds of names of such people with links to al-Qaida. 
 
 
Ukraine Arms Trade 
 

KIEV (AP) - Ukraine's President Leonid Kuchma strongly denied Thursday accusations that his country had illegally supplied arms to Iraq. 
 "Ukraine didn't supply Iraq with any weapons," Kuchma told journalists in Kiev. 
 Kuchma's comments came a day after lawmaker Oleksandr Zhyr told the Ukrainska Pravda Internet newsletter that he had evidence of Kuchma's alleged involvement in a $100 million arms trade deal with Iraqi representatives. 
 Zhyr said he had a recorded conversation between Kuchma and Valeriy Malev, head of the Ukrspetsexport state arms-export company, backing up his accusations, according to the newsletter. 
 Malev was killed in a car accident last week, four days after the presidential administration received a report about the recording, Zhyr said. 
 Kuchma called Zhyr's statement "gibberish." 
 He denied that Iraq uses components of Ukrainian-made air defense systems, and denied news reports that Ukrainian officials sold arms to the Taliban. 
 
 
Armed Deserter 
 

VLADIVOSTOK, Far East (AP) - A soldier armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle deserted his unit in the Far East on Thursday, prompting a region-wide manhunt, police said. 
 The 18-year-old conscript, Arkady Muratov, fled his unit in the town of Partizansk with the rifle, ammunition and a bayonet, said regional police spokesperson Gennady Vasilchenko. 
 More than 200 police and soldiers are combing the area around Partizansk in the Primorye region, Vasilchenko said. Residents were advised to be on the lookout and warned drivers to be on alert in case Muratov tries to commandeer a vehicle. 



TITLE: Government Submits Draft Farmland Law
AUTHOR: By Yevgenia Borisova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Calling it a &quot;burning issue for the nation,&quot; Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov on Thursday signed off on a government plan to legalize agricultural-land sales for the first time since the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917.
 
&quot;There is now no law on the sale and purchase of land, yet such sales and purchases exist in large quantities,&quot; Kasyanov told a cabinet meeting. &quot;This lowers the real value of Russia's farmland and encourages corruption and the ineffective use of land,&quot; The Associated Press quoted him as saying.
 &quot;The time has come to remove the irregularities and establish a clear, transparent law,&quot; Kasyanov said.
 Of Russia's 1.7 billion hectares, roughly a quarter, or 406 million hectares - nearly five times the size of Brazil - is officially classified as agricultural, and about half of that, or 190.7 million hectares, is arable.
 Liberals have long argued that legalizing the sale of agricultural land is an integral component of overall market reforms, but conservatives fear foreign ownership of national soil and argue the bill could hurt poor farmers.
 The government's draft law, officially called the Law on Agricultural Land Turnover, would allow foreigners to lease, but not own, land near national borders. It would also preserve so-called land parcels, which are technically owned by some 12 million farmers, but used and run by former collective farms.
 Under the government's proposal, such parcels must be dedicated to agricultural purposes if they are sold on the secondary market, and regions will have some authority on some issues.
 &quot;[This bill] is of fundamental importance,&quot; Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev said after the cabinet meeting. &quot;And it attracts the attention of all the political parties, movements, the population and economic organizations,&quot; said Gordeyev, who is also one of four deputy prime ministers.
 &quot;The main target of the law is to preserve property rights,&quot; he said.
 The State Duma - amid chants of &quot;shame, shame&quot; in parliament and protest demonstrations organized by Communists and Agrarians outside - passed a new Land Code last year that, among other things, legalized the sale of urban and commercial land.
 Five other versions of the same bill have already been prepared and submitted to the Duma.
 They are sponsored by: Boris Nemtsov's Union of Right Forces; Adrian Puzanovsky's People's Deputy parliamentary faction; Duma Deputy Gennady Kulik, a former deputy prime minister in charge of agriculture; Nikolai Kharitonov, the head of the Duma's agro-industrial group; and Alexander Chetverikov, head of the Duma's agriculture committee.
 At just a single page, the Union of Right Forces' draft is the shortest. It says simply that agricultural land must be sold without limitations.
 The other drafts include a variety of proposals, including one requiring landowners to have a higher education in agriculture. Four call for a blanket ban on foreign ownership.
 Experts, however, say it is doubtful that any of the alternative bills will be accepted.
 The government's bill is expected to be submitted to the Duma on Tuesday.
 The government's bill on agricultural land was expected to elicit even more aggressive opposition in the Duma than the Land Code.
 But Nikolai Plotnikov, head of the Duma's Agrarian faction, appointed by the Duma to steer the draft through the required three readings, said such virulent reaction is less likely now that the government has opted for a compromise version.
 &quot;[The government] has found the right approach to the law already - it has prepared a compromise version,&quot; Plotnikov said by telephone Thursday.

TITLE: Local Airline Bracing for European Ban
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: On April 1, new sound-emission standards will bar a number of Russian aircraft currently in use from the skies over Europe, and St. Petersburg-based Pulkovo Airlines, while saying this won't reduce the number of passengers the it flies, is saying that it will adversely affect its bottom line.
 
Of the 40 aircraft Pulkovo flies, all but the company's 14 Tu-154Ms - modified versions of the standard Tu-134 aircraft produced by domestic aircraft-manufacturer Tupolev - will be ineligible to fly to European destinations. Pulkovo's other Tu-154s, as well as its Tu-154 and Il-86 models, exceed the organization's guidelines. 
 Nikolai Kolesov, Pulkovo Airlines deputy general director, said that the planes not permitted to fly to Europe will be switched over to domestic routes, and that the new situation will cause some &quot;financial difficulties.&quot;
 &quot;Pulkovo has been flying to Europe and will continue to do so in future,&quot; Kolesov said last week. &quot;But now we will have to use the Tu-154M modification.&quot;
 Presently, the company uses the Il-86, which is made by Ilyushin and seats 350 passengers. The Tu-154M carries from 160 to 180 passengers, depending on its configuration, so the company will have to double the number of flights to European destinations, Kolesov says.
 &quot;This will probably cause some difficulties with traffic, but our international partners and airports understand our difficulties, and we have yet to run into any disagreements on the number of flights we can land there,&quot; Kolesov said.
 According to Paul Duffy, a Moscow-based airlines analyst, about 20 percent of Pulkovo's business comes from flights to Europe.
 Duffy said that one way Russian airlines are looking to maintain their European business is to lease aircraft from foreign firms, but the taxes they are charged by the Russian government for doing so make the option much less attractive.
 &quot;Since Sept. 11, the Western market is not as strong as it was before,&quot; Duffy said. &quot;Presently there are a lot of aircraft available, so this might be the easiest time for an airline with a good reputation like Pulkovo to lease Western aircraft.&quot;
 But Duffy says that an aircraft such as the Boeing 737, which has about the same economy-class passenger capacity as the Tu- 154M, would cost about $130,000 per month to lease - a price-tag that would be bumped up by a 45-percent tax.
 The cost for Russian airlines isn't the only issue that has boiled to the surface as the Transport Ministry has been involved in negotiations with European Union officials this year over easing the ban.
 European carriers have complained in the past that Russian airports charge excessive fees for them to land their planes here, and some analysts believe that the EU's hard line on the noise-level enforcement stems in part from this.
 &quot;The ICAO measure is probably in response to the high tariffs their airlines are charged to fly into Russia,&quot; Yulia Zhdanova, an analyst with United Financial Group (UFG), said on Monday. &quot;European air companies are very unhappy with those tariffs.&quot;
 Echoing Duffy's concern over the expense involved with leasing abroad, Zhdanova says that Russian carriers may have to shift their attention toward their domestic routes.
 &quot;Those Russian companies which won't be able to modernize their aircraft, or purchase or lease others, will have to direct their business at this market.&quot;
 She also added that, for some companies, this might actually turn into a positive, as the domestic-flights sector appears to be more dynamic at present.
 &quot;The market for international flights was dynamic, but this was stifled by the Sept. 11 attacks,&quot; she said. &quot;The restoration of volumes on the international market to the levels where they were before the attacks isn't expected to come any time before the second half of 2002.&quot;
 Last year Russian air companies transported about 25 million passengers, 14.6 percent higher than in the previous year, according to UFG statistics. The air-cargo industry, which will also be hurt by the ban, experienced a growth in revenues of 8.6 percent, and in tons carried of 12.5 percent.
 Pulkovo is Russia's No. 3 airline, carrying 1.7 million passengers last year, behind Aeroflot with 5.8 million and Sibir with 1.9 million passengers.

TITLE: Kasyanov Detractor Joins PM as Advisor
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - For months, he has railed against the way Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov's government has handled the economy, calling 2001 a &quot;lost year&quot; in terms of reforms.
 
He blames the government for doing little to curtail the &quot;burgeoning corruption&quot; he says is sweeping the country and calls its stated intention of joining the World Trade Organization by the end of 2003 a &quot;huge mistake.&quot;
 So when Kasyanov last week asked the young and outspoken economist Mikhail Delyagin to be his adviser, most observers were mildly shocked.
 Delyagin, who has earned a reputation as a doomsayer and protectionist, re-enters public life as a member of the country's economic leadership, but with views quite different than the influential ultra-liberal set dominated by top presidential economic adviser Andrei Illarionov, Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref, a staunch free-trade proponent, and the powerful industrial lobby.
 Delyagin, 33, was tight-lipped Tuesday about the specifics of his appointment and the tasks he is expected to fulfill, except to make one thing clear.
 &quot;This is not a political appointment,&quot; he said by telephone. &quot;I have simply returned to government work, which I've done for a fair amount of time in the past.&quot;
 Indeed, the wunderkind economist has wandered among the ruling elite since the fall of the Soviet Union, first advising former President Boris Yeltsin, and then later doing the same for former deputy prime ministers Anatoly Kulikov and Boris Nemtsov. His last prominent public post came in the wake of the financial crisis of August 1998, when he was named an adviser to then First Deputy Prime Minister Yury Maslyukov, a Communist.
 Now, after 2 1/2 years running his own think tank, the Institute for Problems of Globalization, Delyagin is back at the White House, although in an uncertain capacity.
 There has been some speculation that Delyagin was hired to give Kasyanov more ammunition against Illarionov, who has often criticized the prime minister, most recently for his debt program.
 &quot;Delyagin is a person that can create a debate. Although the question is how much debate and on which issues,&quot; said Peter Westin, senior economist at Aton brokerage.
 Delyagin's appointment coincides with a quietly boiling debate over Russia's bid to join the WTO. While the cabinet's official line is voiced mostly by quick-entry advocate Gref, Delyagin has called for a more cautious approach.
 Major energy-consuming producers, already lobbying Kasyanov to keep energy prices down, will likely be pleased to have a fellow traveler with the prime minister's ear.
 &quot;Possibly Kasyanov needs someone who can deliver an argumentative concept to advocate this theory,&quot; said Alexei Moiseyev, economist with Renaissance Capital investment bank.
 There were also reports that the government planned to hire a special consultant on WTO issues. Wondering if Delyagin was the one, Westin questioned his expertise on the issue.
 &quot;Delyagin being an adviser to Kasyanov is like Dr. Ruth being the advisor to the Pope,&quot; said Westin, referring to the diminutive and elderly American sex therapist Ruth Westheimer.
 Westin called the appointment of Delyagin &quot;puzzling.&quot;
 &quot;He doesn't stand for the policies we think the government is pursuing,&quot; he said.
 Independent economists note that Delyagin has consistently called for a bigger state role in managing industries and higher government spending to boost economic growth - a position diametrically opposed to Illarionov's.
 In addition to Illarionov, however, Delyagin is likely to face criticism from others in his profession.
 Moiseyev said that state spending can only be increased two ways: either by borrowing more money or by printing more money. Neither option is suitable given the current conditions of the economy, he said.
 Advocating protectionist measures and an increased role for the state in regulating industry, however, might result in Delyagin finding a key political ally - industrialists themselves.
 The nation's most powerful trade lobby, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, or RSPP, said Tuesday that it had begun working on a comprehensive national industrial policy that it hopes the governmnt will eventually adopt. 
 But some observers doubt that Delyagin will have much of a say in that, or in anything much at all. 
 &quot;It looks like a formal revival of Yeltsin's tradition of covering up the tanks with branches, or having advisers to voice someone else's opinion,&quot; said Yury Korgunyuk, a political analyst with Indem, a think tank. &quot;But the times have changed, covering something no longer means that the original thing is not obvious,&quot; he said.
 Moiseyev added that the whole notion of Kasyanov having an economic advisor contradicts the structure of the Cabinet.
 &quot;It is unclear why Kasyanov would need an economic advisor, since he has ministers that are his direct subbordinates,&quot; he added.

TITLE: Kremlin Approves Gazprom's Revised Plan
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The cabinet on Thursday approved Gazprom's 140.8-billion-ruble ($4.5-billion) investment program for 2002, a month after the gas monopoly agreed to a reduction in spending. 
 
Although the 140.8 billion rubles was just 5.2 billion rubles ($168 billion) less than what the firm had asked for in its revised plan, it was significantly less than the 161 billion rubles ($5.19 billion) that Gazprom initially outlined in an investment plan rejected as unrealistic by the government in December.
 Analysts said that the 5.2-billion-ruble shortfall was marginal, while the main factor that would make the investment program a reality would be a further hike in the domestic tariffs for natural gas.
 Energy Minister Igor Yusufov indicated Thursday that the cabinet was ready to discuss further tariff increases, but only if the increases were in line with prevailing macroeconomic conditions.
 Although gas tariffs were raised by 20 percent on Feb. 15, a further hike would help close the 15-billion-ruble ($483-million) hole remaining in Gazprom's freshly approved investment program.
 Yusufov also defended Gazprom against accusations by the Tax Police, which earlier this week said the monopoly had failed to pay 30 billion rubles in taxes between 1999 and 2001. The announcement sent Gazprom stock plunging 7.6 percent Tuesday, although the drop was nearly regained Wednesday, with shares growing by 6.5 percent.
 Apart from a tariff hike, extra funding could also come from Gazprom shedding some of its non-core assets. The sale of businesses such as Gazprom-Media, the monopoly's media arm, is to be discussed at a board meeting Friday. The board will also discuss a proposed $500-million issue of Eurobonds. 
 Analysts agreed that the approval of the investment program was positive news. 
 &quot;It certainly is good that Gazprom has a proper investment plan that will finally tackle long-neglected problems such as investment into exploration and development,&quot; said Valery Nesterov, oil-and-gas analyst with Troika Dialog brokerage.
 The approved plan, although 21 billion rubles less than Gazprom's original, still represents a 50-percent increase on the company's 2001 investment plan.
 However, Nesterov said, the firm is still plagued by problems such as cost-ineffective investment, which will take years to resolve.
 Gazprom will have to borrow up to $2 billion this year to service its $12-billion foreign-debt burden
 Vladislav Metnev, oil-and-gas analyst with Renaissance Capital investment bank, noted that the return to the tariff-hike issue indicated a positive change in the government's approach to Gazprom. 
 The government should not wait any longer to begin tackling tariffs, especially when it comes to a debt-ridden company that is currently forced to sell two-thirds of its output at loss-making domestic prices, he said.
 &quot;The longer the government waits to resolve the tariffs issue and restructure the domestic gas market, the harder and more painful it is going to be,&quot; he said.

TITLE: Space-Tourism Firm Exhibits Space-Plane Plan
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Isachenkov
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ZHUKOVSKY, Central Russia - Eager to grasp a share in the fledgling space-tourist market, a leading Russian aerospace company presented a mockup Thursday of a &quot;space plane&quot; that would give an adventurer willing to pay $100,000 the chance to experience three minutes in zero gravity on the edge of space.
 
The three-seat Cosmopolis-XXI (C-21) ship accommodates a pilot and two passengers and relies on technologies developed for the Soviet Buran space shuttle, which made a flawless unmanned maiden flight in 1988, before being scrapped for lack of funds.
 &quot;Our firm has developed the Buran and put its technology into this project,&quot; said Valery Novikov, head designer at the Myasishchev Design Bureau, which is developing the suborbital ship on order from Russia's private Suborbital Corporation, working together with Space Adventures, a company specializing in space tourism.
 Arlington, Virginia-based Space Adventures helped the first space tourist, Dennis Tito, broker his flight to the International Space Station atop a Russian Soyuz rocket. Tito reportedly paid the Russian space agency $20 million for an eight-day trip to space last year, and the next space tourist, South African Internet tycoon Mark Shuttleworth, is scheduled to fly to the station in April.
 Space Adventures President and CEO Eric Anderson said Thursday that about 100 people have booked seats on a future suborbital ship that is expected to become operational in three years.
 Space Adventures said in a statement that a recent study found the suborbital space-tourist market could generate annual revenues of over $1 billion. The company is accepting bookings for suborbital flights departing by 2005 at $98,000 per seat.
 The C-21 will be mounted on top of the M-55 carrier aircraft that will take it to an altitude of 17,000 meters. After the ship is released from the carrier, its own solid-fuel rocket engine will propel it to an altitude of just over 100 kilometers for three minutes in weightlessness, after which the C-21 will slide back into the atmosphere and land like a conventional plane. The entire mission from takeoff to landing will take about one hour.
 The ship's mockup was presented at an air base in Zhukovsky, near Moscow.
 The tiny ship is the size of a small sports plane, but looks less cramped inside than the claustrophobic Russian Soyuz space capsule. 
 &quot;It's quite comfortable for the crew,&quot; Russian cosmonaut Valery Polyakov said after posing for cameras inside the C-21 mockup.
 Polyakov holds the world's record for the longest space mission - 438 days in 1994 and 1995.
 Suborbital Corporation chief Sergei Kostenko said it would cost $10 million to build and test the C-21, while the entire program for acquiring two carrier aircraft and seven suborbital ships will cost approximately $60 million. Kostenko said the project is financed by Western investors, whom he refused to name.

TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: EU Growth Uneven
 

LONDON (Reuters) - Industrial output figures from around Europe on Thursday showed that, while the euro zone as a whole may be recovering, the performance is uneven.
 Industrial production in France, the euro zone's second-largest economy, rose surprisingly strongly in January but output in Italy, the region's third largest, made little progress and Dutch and Belgian production contracted.
 The figures chimed with the European Central Bank's latest monthly bulletin, published on Thursday, which spoke of a gradual economic pickup in the 12-nation single-currency bloc.
 "The precise strength of this upturn remains uncertain for the time being, but it can be expected that towards the end of the year it will be strong enough to see growth back at levels in line with potential growth," the ECB said.
 
 
U.S. Auto Reprieve
 

WASHINGTON (AP) - The U.S. Senate gave automakers a reprieve Wednesday by rejecting a plan to require that they produce cars, trucks and sport utility vehicles that run 50 percent farther on a liter of gas.
 The industry and its unions lobbied against requiring a 6.5333-liter-per-100-kilometers (36-miles-per-gallon) average by 2015. Supporters of the higher standard said it would save millions of barrels of oil and could be reached through current and emerging technologies.
 Instead, the Senate by a 62-38 vote told the Transportation Department to develop new fuel-economy rules over the next two years, but did not require specific mileage increases.
 
 
OPEC Standing Pat
 

VIENNA, Austria (Reuters) - OPEC prepared on Thursday to extend a freeze on crude output and said prices were inflated by the threat of a U.S. attack on Iraq rather than any supply shortage.
 The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries wants to hoist oil back to its central $25-a-barrel target after a six-month price slump caused by a recession that slowed demand.
 "Around an average $25 is fair," said UAE Oil Minister Obaid al-Nasseri of OPEC's reference basket of crudes, valued this week at just over $22.
 Algerian Oil Minister Chakib Khelil said ministers wanted to re-establish prices in their $22-to-$28 target range and estimated that prices now included about a $3 "war premium."
 
 
Samsung and Symbian
 

HANOVER, Germany (Reuters) - Samsung Electronics, the world's fastest-growing cell-phone maker, on Thursday said it will add Symbian to its software partners and plans to expand into low-cost cellphones.
 The South-Korean electronics manufacturer is the last of the world's top- five handset makers to adopt the software of Symbian, a British company that has been set up as counterweight against Microsoft and is financially supported by three of the top five phone producers.
 Microsoft is trying to expand from the stagnant personal computer market, where its software can be found on 90 percent of all PCs, into the rapidly growing mobile-phone market. Cellphones increasingly offer services which can also be found on computers, such as email and messaging. Although Samsung was warmly welcomed into the fold by Symbian, the South Korean company said it regards Symbian as only one of three main software platforms for advanced mobile phones that can handle email, calendars and play audio and video. 



TITLE: Can Nuclear Weapons Make the World Safe?
AUTHOR: By Marie Cocco
TEXT: AND in the sixth month, we went nuclear. On paper, anyway. Word from the Pentagon leaked to the Los Angeles Times that the United States government has changed the way it looks at The Bomb. 
 
It has, for more than two generations now, been seen as the ultimate horror. The mere thought of its use has been considered so terrifying that all discussion about nuclear weapons was required to have as its purpose the aim that they never be used again. 
 Now Pentagon planners think it would be dandy to have some new nuclear bombs that would be very useful, indeed, in taking out a dangerous bunker or cave or two. Or if it were time to go to war over Taiwan. 
 They thought they could keep this a secret. But it leaked, and so now we are told by the top spinners in U.S. President George W. Bush's administration that it's just a thought, a possible contingency plan for a contingency not immediately foreseen. 
 After all, we are supposed to feel safe again now. We just didn't know we were to stop worrying by learning to love The Bomb. 
 The thing about historic dates is that they are time for remembrance and time for taking stock. Last Monday marked six months since the day terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. 
 The remembrance part went beautifully. New York gathered in person and in spirit near Ground Zero for a solemn, sunlit ceremony. It had the peculiar balance of emotion and grit the city brings to everything it does. 
 The White House ceremony was lovely. Flags of the assembled countries - 100 or so diplomats from around the globe attended - sprang to life in the March breeze. In a speech that sought to thank allies and keep them eager for our cause, Bush did not mention using The Bomb in the war on terror. It is not the type of thing you say in polite company. 
 The war in Afghanistan is going as well as could be expected. We are, at the moment, bogged down in the mountains fighting al-Qaida, but there is no way this crew ultimately can escape the overwhelmingly superior American military. 
 The trouble is not so much abroad - though there is, as yet, not one nation that has come forward to say it is square behind the administration's apparent intent of using military force, around the globe if necessary, to uproot terrorists. This was before the &quot;axis of evil&quot; morphed into the generals' axis for annihilation. 
 At home, things just do not seem right. 
 We pull toddlers out of airport security lines if their names turn up in the computer for a random frisk. There is no reason to believe a 3-year-old returning home from Disney is a terrorist. Still, we are told, precautions must be taken. 
 There is very good reason to believe a terrorist might check a suitcase with explosives into the belly of an airliner. Still, we are told, we cannot X-ray all checked bags. It costs too much. The machines are too unwieldy to install quickly. 
 There was, from the start, an official dismissiveness toward a congressional mandate to at least match all checked bags to a passenger. It's not done, even now, on connecting flights. Change in Chicago for a riskier ride. 
 This is our national decision: We will pay whatever it takes to dispatch the military around the world, and leave soldiers in a temporal hell for as long as it takes. We will, though, leave in place airline security gaps so wide you could pilot a B-52 through them. 
 The Pentagon's nuclear strategy &quot;re-assessment&quot; now contemplates using nuclear weapons to deter - or respond to - a chemical or biological attack. So far the only deadly biological agent used against U.S. citizens was anthrax. It was sent through the mail not by a hostile outsider but, authorities believe, by some homegrown loner with access to our army labs. If the culprit is found we will, presumably, not nuke New Jersey. 
 The war on terror is permanent, and it has given rise to a permanent war mentality. That has its benefits. It is good that we are not, as a rule, mouthing off to harried airport security workers who, no doubt, think it's silly to force a pre-schooler to remove Pooh sneakers before proceeding to the gate. 
 The permanent war mentality lends legitimacy, too, to a belief that all will be well if we undertake just one more military campaign, in one more terrorist haven, with one or two more sophisticated weapons and maybe even the ultimate one. 
 This may make some feel safer. Personally, I'd like to see them X-ray checked bags. 
 
 <i>Marie Cocco is an editorial writer and columnist for Newsday, to which she contributed this comment. </i>

By James Pinkerton
 
OF course the Pentagon has scenarios for nuking other countries. That's what generals are supposed to do: When they aren't fighting, they're supposed to be planning the next fight. But if, as the 19th-century Prussian military strategist Karl von Clausewitz observed, &quot;war is the continuation of politics by other means,&quot; then come the real questions: What is the political end that U.S. President George W. Bush's administration is seeking? Will continuing on to war achieve that end? 
 
So far, the Bush team is hanging tough, even though such military speculation is frightening to the world, and maybe destabilizing to some allies. The Nuclear Posture Review, first revealed in the Los Angeles Times, lays out hypothetical circumstances for nuclear strikes against China, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Russia and Syria. But no doubt if those countries had a freer press, their war plans against America would be fully exposed, too. 
 Of course, there's nothing new about such war planning. The late Herman Kahn was one of many military think-tankers who made a career out of armchair-strategizing about deterrence and overkill. He published two books, &quot;On Thermonuclear War&quot; (1961) and &quot;Thinking About the Unthinkable&quot; (1962). In one exercise, he outlined 44 levels of military escalation, from &quot;Ostensible Crisis&quot; to &quot;Barely Nuclear War&quot; to &quot;Justifiable Counterforce Attack.&quot; Indeed, so eager was Kahn for precision that he even half-seriously suggested the creation of a computer-controlled &quot;doomsday machine&quot; that would eliminate the &quot;unreliable&quot; human factor in nuclear-warfare. 
 Happily, the politicians never surrendered to such Strangelovian suggestions, preferring to keep a human finger hovering just above the nuclear button all through the Cold War. Perhaps the political class remembered that World War I started in part because politicians surrendered their authority to a simpler technology - the technology of railroad-based mobilization. The issue in 1914 was getting one's troops to the frontier before the enemy. And, in those days, that meant relying on intricate but inflexible railway schedules to move men and material to the battle zone. 
 As the Oxford historian Niall Ferguson argues in his 1999 book, &quot;The Pity of War: Explaining World War I,&quot; the ponderous imperative of war mobilization created its own war momentum. The Russian army, for example, knew that it would be the slowest to mobilize, so its generals wanted to be the first to mobilize. Indeed, once the order to gear up for war was made, the Russian chief of staff said that he would destroy his telephone, so that he could not receive a countermanding order. 
 And so, Ferguson wrote, &quot;war by timetable&quot; commenced, and 10 million men died. 
 Today, Bush is unchallenged as commander-in-chief, but he still faces the challenge of sticking to his reported plan of removing Saddam Hussein from Iraq - possibly as soon as this autumn. 
 But assuming for the moment that Bush succeeds in all three of these missions, longer-term questions will remain. Specifically, how will the rest of the world react to these latest usages and considered usages of American strength, both conventional and nuclear? 
 Put simply, countries facing an American threat, real or imagined, face a choice: They can plan to accommodate, or they can plan to retaliate. And as the same Nuclear Posture Review reveals, the potential threat to the United States goes beyond the countries on the nuclear hit list. In all, 12 other countries have nuclear-weapons programs, 18 have ballistic missiles, 13 have biological weapons, and 16 have chemical weapons. 
 In response, America's military planners will no doubt develop still more scenarios, planning tit for tat, tat for tit. That's necessary, but it's not sufficient. In the words of Georges Clemenceau, who led France to a Pyrrhic victory in World War I, &quot;War is too important to be left to generals.&quot;
 Thus, the task for the American president: He must demonstrate to a skeptical world that plans for winning wars today are in fact a plan for keeping the peace tomorrow. If he fails, then, with apologies to Clausewitz, politics will continue on into war, and then on to still more war.
 
 <i>James Pinkerton is a columnist for Newsday, to which he contributed this comment. </i>

TITLE: Can Dialogue Produce Media Reform?
TEXT: IN the March issue of Sreda magazine, Manana Aslamazyan, director of Internews, reports on the progress of the ongoing Russian-American Media Enterpreneurship Dialogue, or RAMED. The dialogue was initiated by presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush at last year's summit, and Internews coordinates the dialogue on the Russian side.
 
Everyone knows that the American involvement in the dialogue serves solely as PR cover for delivering domestic ideas on reform of the media to the highest organ of the Russian state - the ear of the president. And, therefore, by far the most interesting part of the dialogue is on the Russian side.
 Aslamazyan relates how difficult it has been for the players in Russia's media industry to find a common language, and, as an example, she cites the disagreement over how to go about creating a public television network.
 &quot;Representatives of the commercial networks usually promote the idea of turning the state-owned VGTRK into a public television network,&quot; Aslamazyan writes. &quot;Let the state fully finance its own network, and let the network be responsible for implementing government policy, they say, but that network should not go anywhere near the advertising market. It's no surprise that the heads of the state television companies are against such a proposal. They're happy to receive money from the state budget, but why, they ask, should they have to give up advertising?&quot;
 Aslamazyan nevertheless holds out hope that the dialogue between media organizations will produce a unified policy for the industry.
 &quot;If these proposals win industry support, we will submit them to the Press Ministry with the goal of reaching the president and providing him with practical guidelines for further action. And we will do our best to control implementation of this program,&quot; Aslamazyan writes.
 This approach demonstrates one of the main flaws of reform efforts in this country in general: Transformation of the most important areas of public life has, fallen not to society itself, but to those responsible for creating the problems in the first place.
 Generals are reforming the army, collective-farm chairpeople are reforming agriculture, and so on. The downside of such an approach is so blatantly obvious that it doesn't take much effort to predict that the media dialogue in its current form will yield no sensible result.
 Take the army, for example. The &quot;generals' reform&quot; has given us a hybrid army made up of conscripts and quasi-professional troops. Surely, one would think, this is an improvement. The generals' feelings haven't been hurt and the public is happy.
 Snotty-nosed draftees see less fighting, and that part of the adult male population that has been trained to fight - the <i>kontraktniki</i>, or hired soldiers - has the opportunity to earn a legal living. Unfortunately, this sort of army seems to have been specially created for looting.
 The mass media are no less important to the interests of society than defense. It cannot therefore be left to interested parties - the heads of state and private networks - to decide among themselves the fate of public television and to hand down their own compromise as the only possible model for this crucial institution.
 Industry opinion must not be allowed to guide the president's hand. And it would be nothing short of mockery if the press were to control the state's implementation of a media-reform program created by media companies for the selfsame media companies.
 Far be it from me to criticize the organizers of RAMED. They're doing the best they can. I blame the government, which has failed once more to play a constructive role in the reform process. What the government should be doing is fostering a public debate in society on the crucial question of reforming the mass media. The media lobby has an important role to play in this debate but not the leading role, let alone monopolizing the whole thing.
 
 <i>Alexei Pankin is the editor of Sreda, a magazine for media professionals (www.internews.ru/sreda). </i>

TITLE: U.S. Steel Tariffs Take Gold Medal for Stupid
TEXT: LOOKING deeply into the eyes of Vladimir Putin, George W. Bush famously concluded that Russia's president is &quot;a man America can do business with.&quot;
 
That observation proved to be truer than most people predicted, especially on issues dear to Bush's heart, such as oil and war. Putin, however, said no such thing about Bush, preferring to take a more, shall we say, sober approach to dealing with the leader of the world's sole remaining superpower.
 Putin was right to refrain from such a snap assessment. Bush, by deciding this week to impose punitive tariffs and quotas on steel imports from a host of countries, including Russia, not only acted on the fringes of legality, but also single-handedly pushed the world toward a potentially disastrous trade war.
 Bush also exposed himself as a political panderer who will compromise his &quot;free-trade&quot; doctrine to protect ailing and inefficient companies just because they helped pay for his election campaign and happen to employ thousands of swing-state voters without whose support he would still be in Texas.
 This is hypocrisy, pure and simple, especially coming from a man whose minions scour the Earth urging nations to open their markets to U.S. goods. Under these circumstances Russia has every right to retaliate.
 But without the legal mechanisms available to members of the WTO, which Russia hopes to join by the end of 2003, there is little it can do. And even if Russia were a member, it could take two years or more to resolve the dispute, by which time Bush would be well into his re-election campaign, and the damage done to Russia's steel industry - and its 750,000 employees - could be catastrophic.
 In this light, Russia's decision to ban all U.S. poultry beginning Sunday seems equitable. After all, some 70 percent of all chicken consumed in this country is imported from America. Why should a major American industry have a free ride here when a major Russian industry is discriminated against there? It's not as if the standard of living in both countries is equal.
 Both sides deny the linkage of the two issues, which might have been true a few months ago. But not now.
 Even so, the Agriculture Ministry may have a point in questioning the safety of U.S. chicken - no one has ever produced a study that establishes exactly what a lifetime of eating chemically altered steroid-pumped super birds does to a person.
 To use an Olympic analogy, Russia's steel team may be out of medal contention, but its poultry team now looks like a contender, as the favorite has just been disqualified for doping. 
 Maybe it will get one of those golds left behind in Salt Lake City.
 
 <i>This comment originally appeared as an editorial in The Moscow Times on March 7. </i>

TITLE: ... But Not a Kopeck to Spend
AUTHOR: By Boris Kagarlitsky
TEXT: THE New York-based economist Doug Henwood likes to judge the health of the U.S. economy not so much by looking at the numbers as by checking how often the words &quot;recession&quot; and &quot;crisis&quot; appear in the press. 
 
But there is an even simpler method: Ask people if they have any spare cash lying around.
 Recently, my wife had to do just this. With the March 8 holiday approaching, we set about collecting money to buy gifts for the women who work in our child's kindergarten. This ritual dates back to the Soviet era. 
 Ours is a private kindergarten, and the parents who send their children there are outstanding members of Moscow's middle class. They're all well dressed, and half of them drive their children to school in the morning. Previously we had had no problem collecting for the gift fund, but this year for some reason everyone was a little short and we raised half as much as we had last year.
 A few days later I spoke with a high-ranking official at one of the &quot;alternative&quot; labor unions. Most of the &quot;alternative&quot; organizations have managed to acquire offices and to develop their own sources of revenue in the 10 to 12 years of their existence, which is to say, they aren't hurting for money. But this official unexpectedly began to complain. 
 &quot;It's strange,&quot; he said. &quot;Most of the time we do fine financially. But recently we've had nothing but problems.&quot;
 Next I talked with an executive at a major textile company. Not long before he had told me that his company had recovered all of the losses it incurred during the 1998 financial crisis. The executive, an old acquaintance of mine, gave me a glass of expensive whiskey and said: &quot;Something's not right. On paper everything adds up. But in the past the company always had uncommitted resources available. Now we don't.&quot;
 The government seems to be sensing the same thing. The money hasn't dried up, but there never seems to be enough to go around. Despite rising share prices and encouraging economic indicators, officials at all levels are complaining about the lack of ready money.
 We're revisiting old questions that were seemingly answered long ago. Government sources have leaked information about an impending review of the country's Tax Code. If the press is to be believed, the government is planning to raise the much-ballyhooed &quot;lowest income-tax rate in Europe.&quot; Some form of progressive tax will be restored, and the procedures for collecting the unified social tax will be reviewed. Mikhail Delyagin, a long-time foe of liberal economic policy, has been appointed to advise the government.
 Correcting mistakes is never a bad thing, of course. But this is economics, and any step taken by the government is political. Talk of cutting taxes is profitable for any politician, while raising taxes is never a pleasant task. The difference between responsible and irresponsible politicians is that the former don't promise, or do, what they know they will later have to undo. When the government shifts into reverse, it admits its own incompetence.
 But here we're talking about more than just a mistake. Our leaders' actions are based on two basic principles. The first of these holds that lowering taxes is a good thing in itself, and that the economy will respond with a burst of growth. 
 But the economy has stalled.
 The government's second principle arises from the firm belief that by giving handouts to the rich, it will improve the situation in the country and strengthen its own hold on power. The natural course of events, however, has placed the government in the position of a person who tries to take back a gift he has just given. Not a pretty sight.
 The government can't admit that it has been guided by false principles. It has antagonized the very middle class that it hoped would serve as its support base, and hasn't been able to cultivate any new friendships.
 A more even-handed Tax Code will only benefit the country. But money won't be pouring back into state coffers anytime soon, even if the tax system is &quot;fixed&quot; once more.
 Not so long ago, the government could indeed have laid its hands on a certain amount of &quot;spare&quot; money floating around the country. It's even conceivable that our leaders might have spent this money on something useful (like paying teachers' salaries). But, alas, this spare money is no more. This is not yet a crisis. It's just a shame.
 
 <i>Boris Kagarlitsky is a Moscow-based sociologist. </i>

TITLE: the return of 'cinderella'
AUTHOR: by Gulyara Sadykh-zade
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Ever since Valery Gergiev became the Mariinsky Theater's artistic director and general director five years ago, the company's ballet reportoire has developed on an equal footing with opera, and its dance initiatives have been fittingly promoted and acclaimed, especially its reconstruction of &quot;Sleeping Beauty&quot; and &quot;The Nutcracker.&quot;
 
In the midst of the theater's enthusiasm for dance, the young ballet master Alexei Ratmansky appeared and promptly produced a formally rich, but aesthetically spartan, triptych based on music by Igor Stravinsky, Alexander Skryabin and Yury Khanon. Ratmansky's &quot;Middle Duet&quot; - the central part of the triptych - stands out for the premeditated slowing down of the movements and for its rigorous use of the choreographic lexicon, which combined with Khanon's pseudo-Baroque musical cliches to create a mysterious, enchanting geometry.
 Since that time, Ratmansky has gained a reputation as the country's most promising young choreographer, one with a gift for combing his romantic inclinations with a rare ability to step back from established dance devices, to turn them this way and that and, in doing so, to draw from them new images and new content.
 Ratmansky's choreographic instincts pull him toward miniatures rather than grand-scale affairs, toward precise and graphically strict pictures. His works lack the integrity and expressiveness of the previous generation of ballet masters. This may be why he ultimately declined to choreograph Mikhail Shemyakin's &quot;The Nutcracker&quot; last season.
 That is why it was all the more interesting to see Ratmansky's handling of Sergei Prokoviev's &quot;Cinderella,&quot; a lyrically restrained ballet in purely pastel tones that should have been long ago returned to the Mariinsky's reportoire.
 The premiere of the new &quot;Cinderella&quot; on March 9 kicked off the Mariinsky's second Annual International Ballet Festival. Although the festival winds up with a gala concert on March 18, it is not too early to assess &quot;Cinderella.&quot;
 Initially, the modern, metallic sets by Ilya Utkin and Yevgeny Monakhov were nothing short of shocking. &quot;Cinderella&quot; is, of course, a fairy tale, a magical ballet, and the audience can be forgiven for wanting an unabashedly childish celebration. But Ratmansky's staging does nothing to pander to this desire.
 In fact, it would seem that the ballet master has gone out of his way to avoid emotions that are drawn too sharply or any other hint of seriousness. He seems afraid of pompousness, which he takes as the equivalent of vulgarity. 
 Ratmansky's element, rather, is the rather cold geometry of the dance and clearly defined arabaseques. His perspective is similar to that of the removed spectator.
 &quot;Cinderella&quot; through Ratmansky's eyes is something of a paraphrasing of &quot;The Golden Age.&quot; Yelena Markovskaya's costumes spring straight from F. Scott Fitzgerald's &quot;The Great Gatsby.&quot; The comical caricatures drawn by the red-headed Stepmother (Irma Nioradze) and her daughters, Khudyshki (Irina Zhelonkina) and Kubyshki (Yelena Sheshina) are also very much in this spirit. The picture is rounded out by the ever-drunk Father (Igor Petrov) and his boon companions, the awkward and impudent dancing teachers and the pushy detectives.
 The Fairy Godmother appears as a hunched-over old lady with shopping bags. In fact, she doesn't ever straighten up until the ballet's finale.
 Audiences should also leave their expectations of miraculous transformations at home. The pumpkin does not become a carriage and Cinderella is remade as a princess somewhere off-stage. The wanderings of the Prince are replaced with visits to gay clubs.
 The collision of high style with the grotesque and of the lyricism of the duets with the viewer's unfulfilled expectations creates a confused sensation of incompleteness. Undoubtedly, Ratmansky is a master of detail and nuance, seemingly always able to come up with the perfect figure. In the course of this three-act ballet, the fact that Ratmansky's gift is for chamber-scale ballet becomes evident. For a full-scale production such as this, he lacks breadth, scale and an imperious air of command. This, for instance, is why the central ball scene is so notably under-populated and aristocratic. It also explains why the heart of the ballet is its duets, which are refined to the point of choreographic perfectionism.
 The first pair, in the scene in which the Prince meets Cinderella, is particularly successful. It is fascinating to watch how the appearances of the characters change as they pass through different stages from mutual attraction to joyful acknowledgement. Ratmansky finds the perfect dramatic approach. The crowd at the ball vanishes from the stage, leaving Cinderella alone in an austere white dress, covering her face with her hands. One can see tenderness and the expectation of happiness, as well as childish surprise in the face of such splendor in the figure of Cinderella (Natalia Sologub). Also perfect is the shining, romantic, impetuous Prince (Denis Matvienko), decked out in a white tuxedo.
 The couple itself, fittingly, is the main attraction of this ballet. Although the witty character play of the Stepmother also merits high praise.

TITLE: painting from one port to another
AUTHOR: By Alice Jones
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The notion of suffering for one's art is nothing new, but a group of Dutch artists visiting St. Petersburg this week have been practicing what they preach.
 
Shunning the comforts of air travel, Henk Elenga, Cor Kraat and Henk Tas spent four days on a ship sailing to St. Petersburg from their native Rotterdam. Their individual impressions of the journey and the cultural links between the twinned cities of Rotterdam and St. Petersburg form the basis of a new exhibition at Planetarium.
 The exhibition, entitled &quot;Three Artists at Sea,&quot; forms part of the Gallery 2000 project, which was set up by Thea Linschoten, the project's Rotterdam coordinator, and Planetarium director Mikhail Belov to strengthen cultural connections between the two towns. It is the eighth in a series of twenty exhibitions - building up to St. Petersburg's 300th-anniversary celebrations in 2003 - bringing contemporary art to St. Petersburg from Rotterdam, which was European City of Culture in 2001. 
 &quot;Three Artists at Sea&quot; is based around the similarities of the two ports, and the emotions that a life on the ocean waves conjure up. The majority of the pieces in the exhibition take the form of large photographs that have been installed by the artists themselves. Indeed, at the exhibition's opening Friday, the installation process still seemed to be ongoing, with Dutch poet Jules Deelder - whose poetry features in one of Elenga's pieces - adding the finishing touches to Elenga's large wave photograph by scrawling across it the exhibition's motto: &quot;Navigare necesse est!&quot; a Latin phrase meaning &quot;To sail is to live.&quot;
 All three artists were born and studied their trade in Rotterdam and the city remains their inspiration. Despite sharing a common muse, they have wildly differing styles. The most striking works at the exhibition are Elenga's huge photograps of the waves and Rotterdam port. They take up whole walls and portray the boundless energy of the sea, providing a dynamic visual counterpart to the Latin exhortation. On a smaller scale, Kraat's carefully reconstructed Rotterdam skyline and harbourside made up from small photographs demonstrates the artist's pride in his city. The similarities with St. Petersburg are astonishing. Best known for his monumental constructions and sculptures, which are dotted around Rotterdam, Kraat names Dutch humanist philosopher Erasmus and Peter the Great as his two main inspirations. His other works depict cranes, ships and bridges in heavy black lines on clear plastic. The transparency of these works and the shadows they cast on the walls behind them create the illusion of reflections in water - a shimmering, intangible counterpart to Elenga's powerful images.
 Henk Tas' photographs posses this same quality of transparency as they are printed on sheets of material and hung from the ceiling, allowing them to be viewed from both sides. Although born in Rotterdam, as a child Tas lived in Canada for several years, and his time there inspires his work to this day, setting him apart from the other two artists. A self-proclaimed &quot;child of pop-art&quot; his works consist of three-dimensional collages photographed using unusual light sources. The results are eerie images of Elvis and Minnie Mouse and pools of color and shade. He sees his work as uniting St. Petersburg and Rotterdam through the &quot;universal language of rock and roll&quot; citing Bob Dylan and Elvis alongside Andy Warhol as influences. Sharing a neighborhood with rock legend Neil Young at an early age still inspires a childlike awe in the artist - &quot;He actually lived in my town! Can you believe that? One of my heroes ... ,&quot; he says - and it is this long-held belief in the unifying power of music that is the cornerstone of his work.
 It is Kraat who comes closest to explaining the mysterious attraction the two cities hold for artist and visitor alike: &quot;Harbor cities are always open. Ships come and go day and night, but you never where they've come from or where they're going to ... .&quot;
 
 <i>
&quot;Three Artists at Sea&quot; runs until May 5 at Planetarium, 4 Alexandrovsky Park. Tel.: 233-2653. </i>

TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: Guitarist <strong>Marc Ribot </strong>spent two days in St. Petersburg this week, and how did he pass his time?
 
&quot;Last night, I got drunk and today I slept,&quot; he explained to this column before his concert on March 12.
 &quot;We went to a Latin-music club last night and hanged around a little bit. Then we walked around the big square in front of the Hermitage. And the more ambitious members of the band woke up and went to the Hermitage. I was going to go, but I was feeling a little weak this morning. I wanted to sleep so I could do good concert,&quot; he said.
 The sleep seems to have worked, since the concert was indeed great. However, fans encountered some inconveniences such as the long queue outside Red Club while security conducted meticulous weapons checks.
 Also, the venue couldn't hold the more than 400 fans who turned out. Red Club had the same problem on the previous night when Hurlements d'Leo drew an even bigger crowd - thanks in part to the fact that the tickets were half the price of those to hear Ribot's Los Cubanos Postizos.
 Seva Gakkel, the booking manager for the concert's promoters, Sound Lab, explained that the city just does not have a venue that can deal with an audience of around 500, so we can expect more problems of this sort in the future.
 Nonetheless, we can look forward to some more treats from Red Club. One of the more interesting will be a show on April 6 by a singer called <strong>Peaches,</strong> who is billed as a &quot;star of porn rap.&quot;
 Peaches, who is notorious for such numbers as &quot;Diddle My Skittle&quot; and &quot;Lovertits,&quot; was apparently once a Canadian experimental jazz singer named Merrill Nisker, although another source states that she was a &quot;Toronto punk rocker.&quot;
 Now she is based in Berlin and sings about sex against the backdrop of MC-505 Groovebox.
 Don't forget to bring along some extra money for Peaches' merchandise, which includes such items as a pair of &quot;Diddle My Skittle&quot; panties, perfect for gift-giving.
 <strong>Cesario Evora, </strong>a singer who is loved by many in Russia, will finally come to Moscow in April - but only to play at a closed private party organized by those who can afford such things. However, the queen of the <i>morna, </i>a soulful genre sung in Creole-Portuguese, is reported to be considering a few public concerts in Russia in June.
 A strange tendency has been observed recently. When the revived 1970s prog-rock Yes played the city last November, its former keyboardist, Rick Wakeman, soon followed, managing to perform here with his new band the very same month.
 Now, just as Russia's favorites, <strong>Deep Purple, </strong>are getting ready to play the Ice Palace on March 17, word is out that their former guitarist, <strong>Ritchie Blackmore </strong>will be in town with his band, Blackmore's Night, next month.
 Blackmore's Night, which is something of a departure from Blackmore's previous bands - Deep Purple and Rainbow - features the guitarist's wife, Candice Night, on vocals and plays something they describe as &quot;acoustic renaissance.&quot; 
 Information that the band will appear at the improbable location of the Shostakovich Hall of the State Philharmonic on April 16 could not be confirmed at press time.
 
 <i>- by Sergey Chernov </i>

TITLE: brunch with an ethnic twist
AUTHOR: by Robert Coalson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Opulent brunches at luxury hotels are one of the enchanting indulgences of expat life in Russia that for many verges on being a necessity. Even those of us without expense accounts can hardly fathom the possibility of getting through a whole St. Petersburg February without spending at least one long Sunday afternoon spilling champagne and caviar down our shirts.
 
However, after a decade of post-Soviet brunching, the concept is wearing a little bit thin, and there have been surprisingly few innovations, beyond the occasional festival of one or another sort of ethnic cuisine - events that are usually short-lived and overpriced.
 That is why I really took notice a few months ago when I heard that the Nevskij Palace Hotel had come up with a simple, elegant and tasty brunch idea that spruced up what was clearly becoming a dusty concept. The geniuses at the hotel invited several local restaurants to set up stands at the brunch, vastly expanding the selection of food far beyond the same old pastries, salads and omelets.
 Now, alongside the old standards, the Palace is offering a sampling of Indian food from Tandoor and sushi from Kyoto, two local restaurants that everyone should know about. 
 Moreover, as an extra treat, Botchkarov has set up a stand offering all the beer you could want, and a particularly energetic young woman circulates constantly through the dining room with a never-ending supply of Flagmann Vodka shots. For many people, I imagine, life doesn't get much better than this. For those with healthy livers, though, the Palace has thoughtfully set up a fresh-juice bar that is also a delight.
 Despite the fact that the restaurant idea strikes me as brilliant, it seems to be getting off to a rocky start. Originally, there was also a table of Chinese food, but that has been regrettably replaced with Russian pelmeni now. The pelmeni are fresh and it can be entertaining to watch them being made, but there is no way to make such a proletarian dish stand out in such surroundings.
 The Palace itself has joined the ethnic theme with a table of Mexican nacho fixings, including a particularly tasty chicken chili. This stop on the brunch express would have been even more highly appreciated if it included genuine tortillas so that we could make Mexican wraps.
 It is worth saying a word about Kyoto's admirable sushi bar. This is an excellent way for the sushi novice to find out what all the fuss is about. The helpful staff at the table is eager to put together a mini smorgasbord of raw fish and sauces and even to bring it over to your table. 
 All of these delights are, of course, in addition to the Palace's normal brunch, which is arguably the best in town. Not only does it feature an excellent selection of salads, appetizers and breads, it has an imaginative and varying range of hot dishes. One week not too long ago, they were actually serving bear. Last weekend, the exotic dish du jour was Peter the Great elk ragout. It was certainly interesting and worth trying, but there is little danger of elk ever replacing beef or pork as a staple meat. 
 Be warned, though, that some of the dishes definitely suffer from hot-plate syndrome. This was particularly true of the pork roulades last Sunday, which were dried out and chewy. It pays to watch carefully and move quickly when they freshen up the trough. 
 Finally, those really determined to make absolutely certain that they get their money's worth from the experience will not want to miss the caviar bar, offering black and red caviars on bliny with a wonderful range of condiments from grated cheese to green onions.
 Four hours of brunch in the Palace's bright, cheerful dining room, with some easy jazz setting the mood, passes by all too quickly. The service was generally excellent, although I was surprised to find that the waiter removed my coffee cup instead of offering me a refill. I definitely hope, though, that the restaurant idea gets a second wind: it really is a stroke of genius. Local restaurateurs interested in exposing an elite audience to their wares should give the Palace a call. That pelmeni table is crying out to be replaced.
 
 <i>
Imperial Restaurant at the Corinthia Nevskij Palace Hotel, 57 Nevsky Prospect. 275-2001. Brunch served Sundays from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. All-you-can-eat brunch with unlimited vodka, beer and Russian champagne, $35 per person. Credit cards accepted. </i>

TITLE: Israel Pushes on as New Mediator Flies In
AUTHOR: By Hadeel Wahdan
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: RAMALLAH, West Bank - Israeli tanks moved deeper into two West Bank towns on Thursday, just ahead of the arrival of a U.S. mediator, and troops killed three Palestinian gunmen in intense street fighting.
 
In the Gaza Strip, three Israelis were killed and two others were wounded when Palestinians set off a roadside bomb next to a tank, the army said.
 Israel Radio said the tank was escorting a convoy of civilian vehicles when a powerful bomb was detonated, apparently by remote control.
 In Ramallah, Palestinian witnesses initially said some Israeli forces were pulling out early Thursday. However, by daybreak it became clear that troops remained in the city.
 Israeli tanks also drove deeper into Bethlehem, with some taking about positions about 250 meteres from Manger Square.
 On Wednesday, Israeli forces and bands of Palestinian gunmen clashed on the nearly deserted streets, leaving a senior Palestinian security officer, an Israeli soldier and an Italian photographer dead.
 The photographer, Raffaele Ciriello, 42, was killed near Manara Square - the first foreign journalist killed in the 18 months of violence. 
 Fellow journalist Amedeo Ricucci said he and Ciriello were following Palestinian gunmen when an Israeli tank appeared from around the corner and fired a machine gun from about 150 meters without warning, striking Ciriello in the stomach.
 Army spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Olivier Rafowicz expressed regret at the death, but declined to discuss the circumstances without more information.
 &quot;There has been crossfire for several days and we don't know where he has been killed,'' he said.
 Israel's operation in Ramallah was part of its most expansive military operation since its invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
 Army chief Lietenant General Shaul Mofaz told a parliamentary committee on Wednesday that about 20,000 Israeli soldiers were stationed in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
 With U.S. envoy Anthony Zinni due in the Middle East on Thursday, U.S. President George W. Bush criticized the forceful Israeli reaction to Palestinian terror attacks, saying &quot;It's not helpful what Israel has recently done.''
 While Israel has a right to defend itself, &quot;the recent actions are not helpful,'' he said.
 Avoiding any perceptible tilt to one side, White House spokesperson Scott McClellan called on the Palestinian Authority &quot;to do everything it can'' to stop attacks on Israel, and chided Israel for attacks on the West Bank and in Gaza that injured civilians.
 Elsewhere on the diplomatic front, Palestinians cautiously welcomed a UN Security Council resolution endorsing a Palestinian state. Israel praised elements of the measure, but refrained from commenting directly on the statehood issue.
 More than 160 people have been killed on the Palestinian side and almost 60 have been killed on the Israeli side in March.

TITLE: Lockerbie Appeal Is Overruled
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CAMP ZEIST, Netherlands - A Scottish appeals court on Thursday upheld the conviction of a Libyan intelligence agent for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103, which killed 270 people.
 
The five-judge court ruled unanimously that Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, 49, was responsible for the bomb that brought down the Boeing 747 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
 &quot;We all concur that none of the grounds of the appeal are well-founded,&quot; said the presiding judge, Lord Cullin. &quot;This brings the procedures to an end,&quot; he said, concluding the brief verdict.
 Al-Megrahi was found guilty last year of loading an unaccompanied suitcase bomb onto a flight in Malta that was later transferred onto Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded en route from London to New York. His alleged accomplice, Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, also a Libyan, was acquitted.
 In his appeal, which opened Jan. 23, al-Megrahi's lawyers argued there had been a miscarriage of justice by the lower court in weighing the evidence. Defense lawyers also presented new evidence that they said should cast enough doubt on the prosecution case to overturn the conviction.
 Two new witnesses told the appeals court they found evidence of a break-in in the baggage area at London's Heathrow Airport hours before the Pan Am flight took off, suggesting that the bomb-laden suitcase could have been loaded in London rather than in Malta, as concluded by the trial court.

TITLE: Koreans Seek Asylum in Spanish Embassy
AUTHOR: By Joe McDonald
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIJING - Rushing past Chinese guards and into a diplomatic conundrum, a group of North Koreans streamed into the Spanish Embassy and demanded asylum on Thursday, insisting they would be persecuted or even killed if they were sent back to their homeland.
 
The two dozen men, women and children, some of whom thrust fists into the air in jubilation when they reached the embassy building, issued a statement saying they wanted to be sent to South Korea. One struggled briefly with a lone Chinese embassy guard who tried in vain to block the entrance. 
 &quot;We are now at the point of such desperation and live in such fear of persecution within North Korea that we have come to the decision to risk our lives for freedom rather than passively await our doom,&quot; the group's statement said. 
 &quot;The only power we have left is to appeal to you on our knees and with tears,&quot; it said.
 For China, North Korea's only major ally, the asylum bid presents a dilemma. Beijing has been criticized by human-rights and aid groups for refusing to grant refugee status to North Koreans fleeing repression and famine in the hard-line communist state. 
 Beijing is bound by a treaty with Pyongyang to repatriate North Korean asylum seekers. Many have been sent back. Others have been able to live in hiding along China's northeastern border with North Korea, one of three countries that U.S. President George W. Bush branded part of an &quot;axis of evil&quot; in January. 
 China's Foreign Ministry said it was still evaluating the situation Thursday afternoon but that the asylum seekers would be dealt with according to law, both international and Chinese. &quot;I think their entry into the Spanish Embassy can only be regarded as an illegal entry,&quot; spokesperson Zhang Qiyue said. 
 A man who picked up the telephone at the Spanish Embassy said no one was available for comment. In Madrid, a Spanish Foreign Ministry official said diplomats were seeking a quick solution, but it was not clear how Spain would proceed. 
 In Seoul, a South Korean Foreign Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the group should be dealt with &quot;according to humanitarian principles.&quot; 
 He said a message had been delivered to China and Spain that the issue should not be resolved against the will of the asylum seekers. 
 Arms locked, two asylum seekers approached the gate first, keeping the guard occupied while others streamed into the compound. The men then shook off the guard and rushed in themselves. 
 Minutes after the Koreans rushed in, armed Chinese guards converged on the compound, which under diplomatic law is Spanish territory they cannot enter without permission. A group of Spanish diplomats emerged, talked to some of the guards, then went back inside.

TITLE: Senior Indonesia Officials Go On Trial Over Events of 1999
AUTHOR: By Lely Djuhari
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: JAKARTA, Indonesia - Indonesia opened the first trials of senior officials accused of crimes against humanity during East Timor's drive for independence in 1999. Nearly 1,000 people were killed by Indonesian troops and militias.
 
With international observers and rights activists who have pressed for trials looking on, prosecutors read out the charges against former East Timor Governor Abilio Soares and the territory's ex-police chief, General Timbul Silaen.
 They are among 18 high-ranking Indonesian officials - including three army generals - indicted last year in connection with the violence that swept East Timor before and after its voters overwhelmingly approved independence in a UN-sponsored referendum in August 1999.
 Most of the East Timor's infrastructure was destroyed by Indonesian troops and militias opposed to it becoming independent.
 The two men, who were tried separately at the Central Jakarta District Court, are accused of allowing men under their command to commit wide spread and systematic murder of civilians. If convicted, they could face the death penalty.
 Silaen told reporters that he regarded it as about as seriously as a university examination. &quot;I am ready to face justice,&quot; he said.
 Both court sessions heard how militiamen and government officials armed with knives, samurai swords and homemade weapons took part in massacres of 117 people who had taken refuge in churches and homes of religious leaders.
 &quot;The defendant [Soares] knew of and ignored information that grave human rights abuses were taking place,&quot; prosecutor I Ketut Murtika said.
 After the charges were read out, Soares said he could not be held responsible for the violence. &quot;It was just a mass brawl,&quot; he said.
 Lawyers for both defendants argued the tribunal was illegal because it was set up by a presidential - rather than a legislative - decree.
 Both cases were adjourned until next week, when defense teams will continue presenting their arguments.
 Outside the building, about 100 pro-military demonstrators, some with their bodies painted in the red and white colors of the Indonesian flag, rallied against the trial. They said it was unfairly being held on the orders of Australia and the United States.
 Rights activists are skeptical that the suspects - many of whom retain powerful and influential positions within the Indonesian bureaucracy - will see real justice.
 &quot;The trial is primarily for show,&quot; said John Miller, spokesperson for the East Timor Action Network.
 Miller said the judges were unqualified and the legal system corrupt, and said that some of the worst atrocities will fall outside the court's limited jurisdiction.
 UN officials have told Jakarta that if those responsible for the bloodshed do not face justice in Indonesian courts, an international war crimes tribunal, akin to those for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, may be held.

TITLE: Sri Lankan PM Makes Historic Visit
AUTHOR: By Shimali Senayake
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: JAFFNA, Sri Lanka - Sri Lanka's prime minister arrived on Thursday in the northern Tamil city of Jaffna, the first such visit since 1982, a year before the start of a civil war that has killed 65,000 people.
 
The visit was expected to further the peace process with separatist Tamil rebels, which Ranil Wickremesinghe set in motion after he won the December parliamentary elections.
 The prime minister, who signed a landmark cease-fire on Feb. 22, flew into the military-run Palali airport for a two-day trip to the northern Jaffna peninsula, the tip of the island to the south of India.
 &quot;We have the popular support to end the war,&quot; Wickremesinghe said as he prepared to meet with representatives of Sri Lanka's ethnic Tamil minority, who have long said they are discriminated against by the majority Sinhalese. &quot;I want to tell the people here that we are all equals,&quot; he said.
 Jaffna, 240 kilometers north of the capital Colombo, was Sri Lanka's second largest city before the war broke out in 1983. It is the center of Tamil culture and was home to many of Sri Lanka's 3.2-million Tamil minority. More than 800,000 Tamils have fled the peninsula over the years.
 The rebels, fighting to divide the tropical island along ethnic lines, wrested control of Jaffna in 1990. But they lost it to government troops in December 1995 after a long battle that left 2,500 dead on both sides.
 The rebels have made several unsuccessful attempts since then to retake Jaffna. Today, the city and other smaller towns remain under government control, but the rebels maintain their presence in the countryside.
 Wickremesinghe was expected to address 40,000 government troops stationed on the peninsula.
 He will be joined Friday in Jaffna by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs Christina Rocca.
 Jaffna saw the birth of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in July 1983 when rebels killed 13 Sri Lankan soldiers. The killings triggered anti-Tamil riots across Sri Lanka and gave rise to the rebels' claim that Tamils can live only in a separate nation.
 Ranasinghe Premadasa was the last prime minister to visit the region in 1982, a year before the separatist war broke out. Premadasa was later assassinated by the rebels.

TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Island Detention
 

CANBERRA (AP) - The Australian government announced on Tuesday it is building a new migrant detention center on a remote Indian Ocean island.
 Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock said the new center on Christmas Island would hold about 1,200 people and would be used when the asylum seeker camps on two neighboring Pacific island countries fill up.
 Ruddock said Monday the government was likely to close down some of the old detention camps in Australia and transfer refugees to new centers.
 Last August the government began turning away all boat people, who come mostly from the Middle East and central Asia and are ferried here by Indonesian gangs.
 Australia has been condemned by the United Nations, human-rights groups and churches for its treatment of asylum seekers. But the policies are popular at home and helped Prime Minister John Howard's conservative government win a third term at elections last November.
 
 
Women's Long March
 

TORONTO (AP) - Three British women have begun a trek to the North Pole, hoping to become the first all-female group to make such a journey without guides. The team departed on Tuesday from Ward Hunt Island in northern Canada. During the 60-day hike, the women will haul sleds twice their body weight over pack ice 760 kilometers to the pole. 
 "It's just a fantastic personal challenge and an opportunity to do something to make my children proud," Ann Daniels, a 37-year-old ex-banker and single mother of triplets from Devon, said prior to departing. Joining her are Pom Oliver, 50, a building renovator from Sussex, and Caroline Hamilton, 35, a film financier from London. According to the statement, the women spent nine months preparing for the expedition, including training in the Scottish Highlands and lifting weights.
 
 
Falun Gong Protest
 

HONG KONG (AP) - Police arrested 16 Falun Gong protesters, including four Swiss, in a scuffle outside the Chinese government liaison office Thursday. The group had demanded that the Swiss be permitted to travel to Beijing, where authorities have recently rounded up Falun Gong protesters and deported some foreigners.
 Hong Kong police broke up the demo after four hours, when Falun Gong members ignored an order to move away from the office's front door.
 China has outlawed Falun Gong as an "evil cult," although the group maintains it is simply a spiritual and meditation group. Falun Gong remains legal in Hong Kong, where it carries out frequent protests against Beijing's attempts to eradicate the group in China.
 
 
Bush Threatens Iraq
 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush said Wednesday that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is a problem and "we are going to deal with him," but stopped short of saying the U.S. would take action against Iraq.
 Bush did not rule out unilateral action against Iraq, saying "all options are on the table," as Vice President Dick Cheney tours the Middle East looking for support against Baghdad.
 "I am deeply concerned about Iraq," Bush told a White House news conference. "This is a nation run by a man who is willing to kill his own people by using chemical weapons, a man who won't let inspectors into the country, a man who's obviously got something to hide.
 "And he is a problem and we're going to deal with him," Bush said. "But the first stage is to consult with our allies and friends and that is exactly what we're doing. 



TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Sampras Through
 

INDIAN WELLS, California (AP) - Pete Sampras, his overall game a bit ragged but his serve still sharp, beat Albert Costa 6-4, 6-4 Wednesday in the second round of the Pacific Life Open.
 Sampras, looking for his first tournament title since Wimbledon two years ago, got a break by playing in the afternoon. Earlier, swirling winds had kicked up the desert sand and left a thin layer of grit on the courts. But the gusts had subsided by the time Sampras and Costa began their match, and workers had used blowers to clear most of the sand off the courts.
 In a morning match, when the wind was gusting, top-ranked Lleyton Hewitt bounced back from a first-set loss to beat Andrei Pavel 4-6, 6-3, 6-0. In other men's matches, second-seeded Yevgeny Kafelnikov defeated Fernando Vicente 6-3, 7-6 and Todd Martin beat fifth-seeded Tommy Haas 6-4, 6-2.
 The wind was still whipping sand around in the early afternoon when Martina Hingis and Monica Seles won to move into a showdown in the semifinals. Hingis downed Amanda Coetzer 6-1, 6-2. Seles beat Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario 6-3, 3-6, 6-3.
 
 
Rivera Regrets
 

PANAMA CITY, Panama (AP) - Ruben Rivera said he was surprised that the New York Yankees cut him for taking a bat and glove from teammate Derek Jeter's locker.
 "Everyone makes mistakes. I haven't killed anybody," Rivera told a television station in his native Panama. "It was just a moment when I wasn't thinking right. I've repented. ... I gave it all back to him the next day. ... It wasn't correct what I was doing." The outfielder added that Yankees "didn't find out from anyone else that I had the bat. No one knew that I had the bat and glove."
 Rivera, who received a $200,000 settlement of his $1 million contract, said he's negotiating with other teams, "even though right now things are a little more difficult."
 The 28-year-old outfielder originally was signed by the Yankees as a free agent in 1990, and became the team's top prospect. He was traded to San Diego in the Hideki Irabu deal in 1997, but never fulfilled his potential. Rivera has a .218 career average with 58 homers and 185 RBIs in 562 games.
 The Yankees hoped Rivera was starting to turn his career around this spring. He batted .350 in eight games in his bid to make the team as a backup outfielder.
 
 
Strawberry Jailed
 

TAMPA, Florida (AP) - Darryl Strawberry was kicked out of a drug-treatment center and sent to jail for repeatedly breaking program rules, including a ban on sex between residents, according to court documents released Wednesday.
 The former baseball star had many behavioral problems at Phoenix House near Ocala, a state Corrections Department report said. Strawberry told his probation officer Tuesday that he had sex with a female resident three days earlier.
 In an interview at the Marion County Jail, Strawberry told WKMG-TV in Orlando that his addictive behavior lead to the affair, which he now fears will cost him his marriage. Dressed in an orange-striped jail uniform, he said he never thought the punishment from the program would be as severe as being kicked out.
 "Of course we know we're not supposed to interact with the sisters in any kind of sexual way but ... it happened," he said. "I've done some serious damage to my marriage through addiction and, at this point, it looks like it's going to cost me my marriage."
 Strawberry said he is proud he has not used drugs in 10 months and stayed in the program. He had left previous residential treatment programs in Tampa. 



TITLE: Arshavin Strike Gets Zenit Season Going
AUTHOR: By Peter Morley
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Zenit kick-started its season Wednesday, with a 1-0 home victory over Rotor Volgograd on Andrei Arshavin's 56th-minute goal. Zenit turned in a much more fluent performance than it did in Saturday's 2-0 road loss to Anzhi Makhachkala, and could have emerged with a much more convincing margin of victory.
 
The first half was almost completely dominated by the home side, which came out determined to run the match. Predrag Randjelovic and Alexander Kerzhakov both spurned numerous chances, and Vladimir Mudrinic's display - especially in the first half - showed the qualities that prompted Zenit to sign him.
 Zenit head coach Yury Morozov altered his tactics from Saturday, moving captain Alexei Igonin into central midfield alongside Mudrinic and Andrei Arshavin. The result was a much more solid and competitive presence in the center. Rotor, playing a defensive 4-4-2 formation, looked content to put in some heavy tackles and try to hit Zenit on the break.
 The first clear chance came five minutes in. Randjelovic, tightly marked all game, got away from his markers to meet a cross from the right, but could only head over. 
 At 27 minutes, Zenit had the ball in the net. Mudrinic played a sweet pass to Denis Ugarov on the right wing. Ugarov crossed and Andrei Arshavin, after having his first shot blocked by Rotor keeper Andrei Chichkin, tucked home the rebound from one meter out. The goal, however, was nullified by a handball.
 Rotor rarely threatened in the first half, although they did catch Zenit napping at the back twice on counter attacks. Oleg Trifonov saw his effort at 16 minutes shave the post, and shortly afterward captain Valery Yesipov, finding himself unmarked in the Zenit area, could only curl his shot wide to the right.
 Zenit opened the second half as it had finished the first, and the pressure paid off after 57 minutes. Igonin, coming forward from midfield, ignored the crowd's entreaties to shoot and slipped the ball into the path of Arshavin, who had lost his marker making a run into the area. Arshavin took one touch before beating Chichkin low down at his right-hand post from 15 meters.
 Having got the goal, Zenit seemed to switch off, as Rotor started to come forward. Seven minutes after the goal, Yevgeny Aldonin cut into the box, beat two defenders, and laid the ball off to Yesipov. Zenit goalie Vyacheslav Malafeyev dived in to save at point-blank range, the rebound fell to Yesipov, who blasted against the post. Again the ball ricocheted back to Yesipov, who this time skied his shot, and the danger passed.
 Randjelovic went off at 61 minutes, and his replacement, Yevgeny Tarasov, should have doubled Zenit's lead. At 69 minutes, Kerzhakov broke down the right, and curled in a low cross onto Tarasov's right foot, but Tarasov contrived to miss from three meters out, leaving crowd and players alike bewildered.
 The rest of the game was marred by deterioration in the refereeing and more over-zealous tackling from Rotor. After a particularly heavy tackle on Mudrinic, Morozov was moved to come onto the pitch to remonstrate with the official.
 The Petersburg side's display was a vast improvement on Saturday's defeat. Mudrinic covered most of the pitch in the first half, prompting play up front and coming back to help on defense. Igonin shored up midfield defensively, and sweeper Sarkis Ovsepyan was rarely troubled. Malafeyev had a much better game than on Saturday, although one cross did cause him problems.
 Zenit's next match is Sunday away at CSKA Moscow, currently in first place, having won both its games. Zenit next plays at Petrovsky Stadium on Sunday, March 23 against Torpedo Moscow.

TITLE: Blues Snap Streak With 2-0 Win in Shark Tank
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK - St. Louis has gotten over its post-Olympic blues. The only team without a victory since the break for the Salt Lake City Games, the Blues blanked San Jose 2-0 Wednesday night.
 
Scott Young had a goal at 1:37 of the third period on a slap shot from more than 10 meters that sailed under goalie Evgeni Nabokov. Jamal Mayers scored an empty-net goal with 0:40.1 left.
 The Blues snapped a three-game losing streak as Brent Johnson stopped 18 shots in his fifth shutout of the season for St. Louis.
 Nabokov drew the biggest cheers of the night at the Shark Tank, but not for anything he did Wednesday.
 The Russian goalie scored an empty-net goal Sunday night against Vancouver, a rare feat that was repeatedly shown to the hometown fans on the video scoreboard. Nabokov, last year's Calder Trophy winner, became just the seventh goalie in the NHL to score a goal, and the first to do it on a power play. But that was far more memorable than anything San Jose did against St. Louis.
 &quot;It's not too hard to figure out how to score goals,&quot; Sharks coach Darryl Sutter said. &quot;You shoot the puck and you go to the net. If you're not shooting and going to the net, you're not scoring, and that is no different from kids hockey to the NHL.&quot;
 There were no fireworks between Blues captain Chris Pronger and Sharks right wing Teemu Selanne. They faced each other for the first time since Pronger reportedly vowed retribution for a hit by the Finnish forward at the Olympics.
 Near the end of Canada's victory over Finland, Selanne hit Pronger from behind, slamming his head into the glass. Pronger needed several stitches to his forehead. During the handshakes after the game, Selanne said Pronger told him, &quot;I'm going to kill you.&quot;
 
 <strong>
Red Wings 4, Oilers 3. </strong>Chris Chelios' goal with 1:00 left in overtime won it at Detroit. The victory was the ninth in 10 games for the Red Wings. Nicklas Lidstrom scored a pair of power-play goals, and Igor Larionov had three assists for the Red Wings, all on the power play. Edmonton's Mike Comrie tied the game with 15.4 seconds remaining.
 

 <strong>
Devils 3, Islanders 2. </strong>Brian Gionta and Jim McKenzie scored early on consecutive shots, and New Jersey goalie Martin Brodeur held off the Islanders. Sergei Brylin also scored as the Devils opened a three-goal lead and then relied on some spectacular saves by Brodeur. Michael Peca and Oleg Kvasha scored for the visiting Islanders, who had a two-game winning streak snapped.
 

 <strong>
Mighty Ducks 4, Penguins 2. </strong>At Anaheim, Matt Cullen scored twice in the first period and Ruslan Salei and Steve Rucchin also scored. J.S. Giguere made 29 saves, helping the Ducks win for the 10th time in 15 games. It was the third career two-goal game for Cullen.
 

 
The night's other two NHL games finished Boston 3, N.Y. Rangers 1, and Calgary 3, Florida 3.

TITLE: Roma, Galatasary Face Disciplinary Action
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: LONDON - A mass brawl involving players, officials and riot police after the Roma-Galatasaray match overshadowed Bayern Munich and Manchester United's progress to the quarter-finals of the Champions League on Wednesday.
 
European soccer's governing body, UEFA, announced Thursday that a disciplinary hearing into the incident will take place March 22.
 Scuffling players and team officials had to be separated by riot police at the end of the game, before being shepherded down into the dressing rooms under a hail of objects thrown from the crowd. Eighteen police officers and three military police were treated for cuts.
 Before the trouble erupted in Rome, Umit Karan had put the Turks in front until Brazilian Cafu calmly answered for Roma. But the match will be remembered for the shocking post-match fighting that appeared to be sparked when Roma's Brazilian midfielder, Lima, who used to play in Turkey, clashed with the Galatasaray players.
 The result, coupled with Liverpool's battling 0-0 draw at Barcelona, leaves Group B wide open. Roma leads the group with seven points, followed by Barcelona (six), Galatasaray (five) and Liverpool (four).
 Shorn of the injured Michael Owen, Liverpool could take great heart from its draw at Barcelona, having lost 3-1 at Anfield to the Catalan side earlier in the group. Barcelona came closest to scoring when Philippe Christanval's header struck the post in the second half. Steven Gerrard wasted two excellent early chances for Liverpool.
 In Group A, holder Bayern and United drew 0-0 at Old Trafford, a result that, combined with Boavista's failure to win at Nantes, meant the two fierce rivals at the top of Group A cannot be caught with one game remaining.
 The game at Old Trafford was predictably tight, with Ryan Giggs' dazzling display the main highlight of a low-key encounter. Bayern goalkeeper Oliver Kahn saved United's best effort from Dutchman Ruud van Nistelrooy, while Bayern's Claudio Pizarro forced a good save from Fabien Barthez.
 Juan Carlos Valeron and Nourredine Naybet scored as Deportivo la Coruna beat Arsenal 2-0 at London on Tuesday night, and joined Real Madrid in the quarterfinals of the European Champions Cup. With one game left in Group D, Deportivo has 10 points, three more than Arsenal and Bayer Leverkusen.
 Bayer Leverkusen defeated visiting Juventus 3-1 as goalkeeper Hans Jorg Butt scored on a penalty kick and Thomas Brdaric and Marko Babic added goals. Igor Tudor scored for Juventus, which, with only four points, has only a slim chance to advance.
 Already assured a quarterfinal berth from Group C, Real Madrid beat visiting Sparta Prague 3-0 on goals by Santiago Solari, Jose Maria Gutierrez and Savio Bortolini. In the other Group C game, Porto defeated visiting Panathinaikos 2-1 on goals by Brazlians Deco and Pena. Joonas Kolkka scored for the Greeks. 
 Real Madrid leads the group with 15 points, followed by Panathiankos with seven and Porto with four. Sparta Prague has only one point, and has been eliminated.
 
 <i>(Reuters, AP) </i>

TITLE: Celtics, Clippers Aim for Playoffs
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK - Long-suffering Boston Celtics and L.A. Clippers fans finally have something to be happy about. With only five weeks left in the regular season, the Celtics have a chance to win the Atlantic Division, and the Clippers have a chance to snap their five-year postseason drought.
 
&quot;I think it's probably the biggest win for this organization in three or four years,&quot; Antoine Walker said Wednesday night after Boston defeated New Jersey 97-89.
 The Clippers, meanwhile, moved within one game of Utah for the eighth playoff spot in the West by defeating Washington, 96-75.
 Walker scored 30 points and Paul Pierce scored 23 of his 32 in the second half, going 6-for-8 from 3-point range. Vitaly Potapenko had 12 rebounds, and Kenny Anderson had 10 assists and a key basket for Boston after the Nets erased an eight-point deficit to tie the score at 89 with 1:53 left.
 The Celtics scored the last eight points of the game, igniting a crowd that has been waiting since 1995 for the once-proud franchise to return to the playoffs.
 The Celtics have now beaten Eastern Conference playoff contenders Philadelphia, Orlando, Detroit, Washington (twice) and New Jersey during their six-game winning streak.
 In other NBA games Wednesday, it was Sacramento 92, Philadelphia 88; Orlando 119, Phoenix 114 in overtime; Detroit 85, Cleveland 84; Houston 96, Minnesota 95; and Atlanta 105, Denver 102.