SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #784 (50), Tuesday, July 9, 2002
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TITLE: New Hope in Fight vs. AIDS
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: BARCELONA, Spain - In the last two years, the world has awakened to the AIDS tragedy and what it takes to bring it under control, but there is no indication that the epidemic is leveling off worldwide, and strategies known to prevent the spread are still grossly underused, the UN's AIDS chief said. 
 
In its first full day Monday, a weeklong conference also heard of scientific developments that could offer hope of containing an epidemic the United Nations says could kill 70 million people in the next 20 years. 
 A U.S. biotechnology company said that a preventive vaccine against HIV/AIDS could be available by 2005, if results from human safety and efficacy trials were as good as expected.
 Two other firms released data on a revolutionary AIDS drug that stops HIV from entering cells. It may offer new hope to thousands of patients resistant to current therapies. 
 "From a historical perspective, we are still in the early days of the epidemic," said Dr. Peter Piot, executive director of the UN AIDS program. "There are no indications that the AIDS epidemic is leveling off, not even in the most affected countries." 
 Piot said it is clear that, in China, the former Soviet Union, and other countries in Asia, that HIV is now really getting off the ground. In Russia, reported cases have increased more than 15-fold in the last three years. 
 "The major challenge we have is growing in scale - expanding to more regions the strategies known to work - and for those countries where HIV is starting to expand, to make sure, by intervening early enough, that they don't go the way that Africa has gone," Piot said. 
 "AIDS is starting to destabilize entire nations in Africa. A destabilized part of the world, however far away it may be from where you are, is having an impact on your own country," he said. 
 Last year, one million children in Africa lost teachers because of AIDS, Piot said.
 However, Piot said that progress has been made since the last International AIDS Conference, held at ground zero of the pandemic in Durban, South Africa, two years ago. 
 "Durban was the beginning of a wake-up call, and since then a lot of things have happened," he said. "We are moving into an era where AIDS has become a top global issue in politics." 
 "That will was not there six years ago. It started appearing in many countries over the last two years," Piot said. "In March, I met with the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. The fact that he was willing to see me ... we had a discussion, it was on national TV. This would have been impossible before." 
 On the scientific front, the California-based developer of a preventive AIDS vaccine, VaxGen Inc., said it was optimistic that the vaccine will work, although early results from the world's first Phase III trials of such a vaccine will not be available until early next year. 
 "I think we will get protection, but I don't know what level we will get," said VaxGen President Donald Francis. 
 Francis said that the vaccine used a standard approach and worked in chimpanzees. 
 "We expect to see in humans what we have seen in animal studies," he said. "If all goes well, it could be available by the end of 2004 or early 2005." 
 VaxGen's vaccine works by inducing the immune system to produce antibodies that attach to the gp120 protein on the surface of the virus. The theory is that it will prevent the virus from attaching to cells, thereby blocking infection. 
 The company is testing the vaccine on 5,400 high-risk volunteers in the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico and the Netherlands to see if it can stop sexual transmission of HIV. 
 A similar trial in Thailand, involving 2,500 injecting drug users, will determine if it can prevent blood-borne transmission.
 The charity ActionAID welcomed the news but advised caution, saying it was far too early to celebrate. 
 Drug-maker Roche Holding AG of Switzerland and U.S. biotech firm Trimeris Inc. released data showing that their revolutionary AIDS drug, T-20, slashed the amount of virus in the blood of many patients running out of treatment options. 
 Experts said that the drug should be on the market by next year. 
 T-20 is the most advanced experimental drug in a new class of AIDS medicines, called entry inhibitors, which attack the virus by preventing it from getting into the blood cells it kills. 
 Activists from the group Act-Up Paris were not impressed. They invaded Roche's exhibition stand blowing whistles and chanting "Greed kills, access for all!" in protest at the firm's failure to cut drug prices further. 
 <i>- AP, Reuters </i>

TITLE: Pilot Followed Advice From Tower
AUTHOR: By David Rising
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BERLIN - Cockpit voice-recorders show that a Russian pilot received contradictory messages from Swiss air-traffic control and his cockpit collision warning system seconds before he collided with a cargo jet last week, killing the 71 people aboard both planes, German investigators said Monday. 
 
The Bashkirian Airlines Tu-154's collision-avoidance system told the pilot to climb, but he appears to have followed the Zurich tower's order to descend, putting him on a collision course with the DHL International Boeing 757. The planes were over southern Germany but under Swiss control when they crashed. 
 Swiss air-traffic control said that the Zurich tower would have had no way of knowing that the pilot was receiving a contradictory instruction from his cockpit warning system - Traffic Control Advisory System, or TCAS. 
 &quot;He only finds out about it if the pilot tells him,&quot; spokesperson Markus Luginbuehl said. &quot;If the pilot reacts to a TCAS alarm, he is supposed to advise the controller. And the pilot assumes responsibility for the maneuver.&quot;
 Russian aviation officials said that the pilot's reaction in the seconds before the July 1 crash was correct, but Western aviation experts said pilots are trained to give the cockpit warning system precedence. 
 According to the cockpit voice recorders, the planes' warning systems gave simultaneous orders for the Tu-154 to climb and the cargo jet to dive 45 seconds before they eventually collided. 
 One second later, Swiss air traffic control told the Tu-154 to descend. 
 The Tu-154 did not immediately respond, and the Zurich tower repeated the command 14 seconds later. The planes crashed 30 seconds after that, killing all 69 people aboard the Tu-154, including 44 students headed for a Spanish beach vacation, and the two DHL pilots. 
 German investigators have not released a transcript of the cockpit voice recorders, and refused to elaborate on any of the findings. 
 Investigations in Germany and Switzerland have focused on the role of the control tower in the crash, and prosecutors in Zurich have launched a criminal investigation to see if charges of negligent homicide are warranted. 
 Russian aviation officials, Bashkirian Airlines and Domodedovo Airport said that in the case of a contradiction between the on-board anti-collision system and the air traffic controller's instructions, a ground command takes priority. 
 &quot;The air traffic controller gets the last word,&quot; said Sergei Rybanov of Bashkirian Airlines. 
 Rybanov and Yulia Mazanova, a spokesperson from Domodedovo Airport, where the Russian flight originated, said that this is an international rule. 
 But Herbert Schmell, spokesperson for the national airline Swiss, said that the cockpit warning system should have been obeyed over ground control. 
 &quot;A TCAS system makes no sense if it is overruled, especially in a phase when there isn't much leeway anymore,&quot; Schmell said. 
 The spokesperson for Germany's pilot association, Georg Fongern, agreed, adding that the planes never should have been allowed to get so close that the warning systems kicked in. 
 &quot;Never in the life of an aircraft should this system be activated, and if it has been activated, there have to be a lot of mistakes and deficiencies beforehand,&quot; said Fongern. 
 Other experts said that the planes would have had enough time to avoid each other had they both followed the cockpit warnings. 
 In another development, German air controllers said Monday that they tried to warn the Zurich tower after receiving an automatic radar warning in the control tower about two minutes before the crash that the planes were on a collision course. But when they called, the only available line was repeatedly busy. 
 German investigators said last week that the telephone system at the Zurich control center was being worked on at the time of the crash and that the lone controller on duty was using the reserve line to communicate with air controllers at Friedrichshafen, Germany, about a different flight. In addition, Zurich's collision-warning system was out of service due to routine maintenance. 
 Most of the wreckage from the crash has been recovered and brought to the Friedrichshafen airport for investigation, and a German lab in Braunschweig is examining the flight data and cockpit voice-recorders of both planes.
 President Vladimir Putin made an unannounced visit to the Ufa cemetery to pay his respects during a memorial for the Russian victims in Ufa. 
 Speaking to the widow of the Tu-154's captain, Putin said that, according to his information, &quot;the Russian pilots were not to blame for the tragedy.&quot; 
 &quot;The Russian pilots were professionals of the highest class,&quot; he said.

TITLE: Media Feeling Heat After Raising Issues
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A reporter may want to think twice the next time he gets the chance to ask President Vladimir Putin a question.
 
Media outlets in Tuva and Nenets are under fire after they brought allegations of regional corruption to Putin's attention at a news conference last month.
 The head of Tuva's election commission has asked the local prosecutor's office to investigate Dina Oyun, 39, who runs the Tuva Online web site, for a question she posed at a June 24 news conference about election law violations in the remote Siberian republic.
 The editor of the newspaper Naryana Vynder, or Red Tundra-Dweller, based in the northern Nenets autonomous district, was fired last week after one of her journalists asked Putin why three local prosecutors in a row had lost their jobs after summoning Governor Vladimir Butov for questioning.
 Nenets law-enforcement agencies have opened a criminal investigation into the editor's alleged financial mismanagement of the newspaper, Interfax reported Sunday.
 Deputy Press Minister Mikhail Seslavinsky on Friday called the incidents in Tuva and Nenets &quot;disgraceful,&quot; Interfax reported.
 He said that the &quot;administrative drive&quot; to deal with journalists by calling in prosecutors was out of line, RIA Novosti reported.
 Oyun of Tuva Online asked Putin at the news conference what he thought should be done to prevent voting fraud and restore people's trust in the electoral process. She told the president that recent elections in Tuva &quot;have been conducted with an unprecedented number of violations of election law.&quot;
 Oyun, who is currently studying in Moscow, said by telephone Friday that one of the most common election violations in Tuva is distributing alcohol in exchange for votes. This spring, seeds and agricultural equipment were given out for votes, she said.
 Putin promised Oyun that he would bring up the issue of election fraud with Central Elections Commission head Alexander Veshnyakov. 
 Back in Tuva, however, the local authorities were not quite so receptive to the allegations.
 On June 27, the local-government-backed Tuvinskaya Pravda newspaper ran an editorial that accused Oyun of &quot;driving a wedge between federal and regional authorities&quot; and &quot;causing the republic colossal damage.&quot; 
 At about the same time, local election-commission head Sholban Mongush filed an appeal with the prosecutor's office to investigate the matter further and either prove Oyun's fraud allegations or bring charges against her.
 &quot;If she knows of violations of the election law, why didn't she come straight to us?&quot; Mongush said in a telephone interview Friday.
 Mongush said that he had turned to the prosecutors because he wanted to fight election fraud, and that his commission had been unable to locate Oyun to question her personally. 
 &quot;I just did not know where to find Oyun, so I turned to the prosecutors,&quot; he said.
 Mongush said that if Oyun could not prove her allegations, she should be punished for spreading incorrect and damaging information. 
 Tuvinskaya Pravda managing editor Vasily Maslov refused to say who wrote the editorial criticizing Oyun, which discussed, among other things, whether journalists like Oyun should have been allowed into the news conference.
 &quot;For events like this, there should have been some kind of approval of all participants by, say, the Union of Journalists, which would decide who should represent the region,&quot; Maslov said by telephone.
 Maslov was surprised to find out that all that was required to attend the news conference, which was attended by 700 journalists, was a faxed letter requesting accreditation.
 &quot;We did not try [to get accredited],&quot; he conceded.
 Oyun said that she is prepared to defend her allegations.
 &quot;I am actually very pleased and surprised,&quot; she said Friday. &quot;All day today, I have been getting phone calls and e-mails of support and people offering help with gathering evidence of election fraud.&quot;
 Oyun also said that she was excited to talk to Putin.
 &quot;It looked like he really was after the truth at this news conference,&quot; she said. &quot;All I wanted to do was to give him that truth.&quot;

TITLE: Crash Victim Was a Budding Biologist
AUTHOR: By Alexei Vladykin
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: UFA, Bashkortostan - Fifteen-year-old Arsen Masagutov headed off to Spain, eager to hunt for new amphibians he did not encounter in the creeks around his central Russian home.
 
Now his mother weeps ceaselessly, while his father twirls stalks of wheat plucked from the German field where Arsen was killed in a plane collision.
 Mixed with their grief is a need to know who is to blame. Arsen was one of 44 children from Ufa killed when a Bashkirian Airlines Tu-154, en route to Barcelona, slammed into a Boeing cargo jet last week. Investigators have focused on Swiss air-traffic controllers in charge of the two flights.
 &quot;Where was the much-praised Swiss accuracy and reliability that night? They give watches a 100-year guarantee, but they couldn't separate two planes in the empty sky,&quot; Guzel Masagutova, Arsen's mother, said bitterly in her tidy, modest Ufa apartment.
 The trip to Spain, arranged for stellar Ufa students, would have been Arsen's first journey outside his country. A budding biologist, he was especially excited about the prospect of studying amphibians from Mediterranean shores.
 Arsen's parents were persuaded to allow him on the trip when the father of his best friend, Kirill, called to say that Kirill wanted to go, but wouldn't without Arsen.
 The Masagutovs said that they paid $830 for the two-week trip, canceling plans to travel together on a summer bus tour around Europe.
 When the horrible news arrived, Arsen's parents tortured themselves over their decision. Driven by shock and grief, they flew with other victims' families to Germany to see the crash site on Thursday. Before departing, they collected a fistful of German soil and 15 stalks of wheat from the field where their son died.
 Arsen's mother spends most of her time now in his room, where he continues to smile down from a large portrait. His belongings lie neatly folded on the shelves, and his school shoes are polished to a shine.
 &quot;He was like a small aristocrat, striving to do everything correctly and with a smile,&quot; Radik Masagutov said of his son. &quot;He could face down pain and wouldn't hurt a fly.&quot; Masagutov, a psychologist working on his doctoral dissertation, admits his academic background cannot help him control his sorrow.
 &quot;I thought at first that we should have died with him. But then Guzel and I decided to try to have another child. Perhaps Arsen's soul will transplant itself,&quot; he said.
 The Masagutovs' phone rings constantly with offers of support and condolences. Police and medics stop by to collect documents and materials to help identify Arsen's body.
 &quot;We very much hope that the investigation is conducted carefully. We're pinning our hopes on Germany,&quot; Guzel Masagutova said.
 At School No. 91, which Arsen and three other crash victims attended, classmates have been showing up despite the summer holidays every day since the crash. They place flowers and candles on the steps.
 &quot;They shined like stars. They were abruptly extinguished,&quot; said Dasha Kolosnitsina, clutching a Valentine's Day card from one of the students, 14-year-old Dennis Dinislamov. &quot;I will always be with you,&quot; it reads.

TITLE: Liberals Unite for Nomination
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces, the country's two main liberal parties, announced Friday that they will work out a joint political platform for backing a single &quot;democratic&quot; candidate in the next presidential election, in 2004.
 
After a meeting between the two parties' political councils, Yabloko's Vladimir Lukin said possible presidential candidates were not discussed, but added that he is optimistic that the alliance will be successful.
 &quot;I hope [it will work] and I think my hopes have some political grounds,&quot; Lukin said.
 Irina Khakamada, a leader of the Union of Right Forces, or SPS, was also positive about the decision.
 &quot;It will become the basis for endorsing a single democratic candidate,&quot; she was quoted by Interfax as saying.
 Both Khakamada and Lukin are deputy speakers of the State Duma.
 Khakamada said there are no plans to unite Yabloko and SPS ahead of next year's parliamentary election in order to reach the required 5-percent voting barrier. But she said that the two parties will agree to support the same single-mandate candidates running in December 2003 and will then focus on nominating a single presidential candidate.
 Half of the 450 seats in the Duma are assigned to parties on a proportional basis, while the other 225 seats go to single-mandate candidates elected directly by their local constituencies.
 Khakamada said that Yabloko and SPS have, so far, agreed on 40 to 45 candidates running in the regions, but have yet to discuss representatives from Moscow and St. Petersburg.
 Given their similar positions on many issues, Yabloko and SPS have been criticized for failing to join forces in the past. One sticking point has been a complaint by SPS members that Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky has been unwilling to cooperate unless he could lead the coalition and run for president himself.
 Andrei Ryabov, a political analyst at the Moscow Carnegie Center, said Yabloko and SPS's cooperation will probably fail because Yabloko is becoming slightly more moderate at the same time that SPS is losing popularity among voters. SPS, which finished fourth in the 1999 parliamentary election with 9 percent of the vote, has been supportive of some of President Vladimir Putin's more controversial policies, and its inability to show a clear independent political line has hurt its popularity.
 Ryabov said SPS lost a great deal of credibility last month when it could not prevent the passage of a bill on alternative service, drafted by the government and military, that was described as draconian by some liberals, even though army reform was one of its key policies.
 Yavlinsky, who was re-elected as Yabloko leader for another three years in December, has recently become more moderate, and said that he embraces many of Putin's policy goals but not his methods.
 Meanwhile, Pyotr Kucherenko, a member of the SPS political council, and leader of the party's youth movement, has suggested that former President Boris Yeltsin be asked to head the democratic bloc in the Duma elections in 2003.

TITLE: Gubernatorial Candidate At Peace In Coffin Trade
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A series of downtown billboards that popped up and disappeared in recent weeks left puzzled Muscovites wondering if they weren't the butt of a bad joke: &quot;You Don't Need Workouts or Aerobics to Fit Into Our Coffins,&quot; the ads read, or &quot;Fragrant Coffins from Fresh Cedar.&quot;
 
But for German Sterligov - would-be politician, proud owner of the Sterligov Brothers Coffin Company and the man behind the eyebrow-raising posters - the advertisements are no laughing matter.
 &quot;This is business and we need to advertise our product to boost sales. What's so funny about that?&quot; Sterligov said in a recent interview from Krasnoyarsk, where he is now angling for the gubernatorial seat.
 Sterligov's latest incarnation as a coffin tycoon and budding politician follows a colorful and varied career that he describes as a &quot;chain of coincidences.&quot;
 Sterligov achieved fame during the perestroika era as a wily entrepreneur who co-founded Russia's first private commodity exchange, named after his dog, Alisa. He later campaigned against abortions, produced kvas and hunted for Ivan the Terrible's long-lost library.
 Now 35, Sterligov describes himself as a &quot;well-off man&quot; who has finally found an occupation that brings meaning to his life, as well as financial rewards.
 &quot;This business is close to my heart,&quot; he said of the coffin trade. &quot;It has made me look more closely at my whole existence; it has made me live, always remembering about death.&quot;
 Indeed, the only thing Sterligov says is as precious to him is his beloved Krasnoyarsk region, where he is trying to gather the 23,000 signatures needed to register with the regional election comission as a gubernatorial candidate.
 &quot;I work a lot in and with the region and I am running because I feel like I owe it to residents,&quot; said Sterligov, who founded the obscure, ultraconservative movement Word and Deed, named after the 16th-century system of political informing and interrogation introduced under Ivan the Terrible's secret police.
 Sterligov has until Aug. 3 to collect the signatures needed to run in September's elections for the region's top post, vacated in April, when then-Governor Alexander Lebed died in a helicopter crash. So far, 23 contenders have notified the election commission that they intend to run, including Sterligov's one-time business-partner turned bitter rival, Artyom Tarasov - another perestroika-era mogul and an Alisa co-founder.
 A spokesperson at Sterligov's campaign headquarters said last week that he was &quot;very close&quot; to collecting the necessary signatures.
 Sterligov said that he made the decision to run for governor at the request of the same friends and business partners in Krasnoyarsk who provided him with his campaign headquarters.
 &quot;I know that the analysts don't give me a chance, but I have seen many times how forecasts do not come true,&quot; Sterligov said, adding that if he loses, he will turn his attention back to coffins.
 Sterligov started his latest business five years ago, and now considers himself an industry leader.
 He specializes in gleaming, upmarket coffins made from a dozen types of wood in several Siberian regions, including Krasnoyarsk. He works as a wholesaler, providing minimum shipments of 500 coffins - each priced $1,500 and higher - to undertakers across Russia and in some European countries.
 Sterligov said that frequent philosophical musings about life and death have convinced him that so important an acquisition as that of a coffin should be arranged &quot;well in advance.&quot;
 &quot;It is surprising that we surround ourselves with luxury furniture, but somehow fail to bother making arrangements for our final refuge,&quot; he said, conceding, however, that most people don't have the space to accommodate such a voluminous purchase. Sterligov added that he has already set aside his own coffin, although he has yet to take it home.
 But Steriglov's concept has not found much support from advertisers, who have shied away from the subject matter. 
 &quot;When we explained to these people what we wanted, they immediately started knocking on wood and spitting three times,&quot; Sterligov said, referring to the superstitious gesture meant to keep bad luck at bay.
 Sterligov said that he had submitted draft television commercials and poster designs created by his firm's marketing experts - in collaboration with a poet who Sterligov said was too famous and too shy to allow his name to be mentioned in connection with coffins - but most media outlets, including state-controlled ORT television, turned the ads down.
 Ultimately, a handful of Moscow advertising agencies did agree to help sing the praises of Sterligov's coffins.
 But once Sterligov started collecting signatures for his gubernatorial bid, the controversial billboards disappeared as quickly as they had gone up, as electoral law places strict limitations on the ways candidates for public office can promote themselves during a campaign.
 Sterligov said he doubts that signs like &quot;All Roads Lead to Us&quot; or &quot;This Is Your Coffin, It's Waiting For You&quot; will ever reappear on Moscow's streets, because the advertisers were no longer enthusiastic about promoting his wares.
 Pavel Shmidt, deputy head of the city's outdoor advertising department, said his agency had sent a request to the Anti-Monopoly Ministry, which oversees the quality and content of street billboards, to evaluate &quot;the ethical side&quot; of Sterligov's advertisements.
 &quot;Not every product can be advertised that way,&quot; Shmidt asserted in a telephone interview.

TITLE: Ukranians Blame Meteor In Missile Sightings
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: The pilot of an El Al Israel Airlines flight from Tel Aviv to Moscow reported seeing a surface-to-air missile explosion as he flew over Ukraine on Thursday night, Israel's transport minister said Friday.
 
But Transport Minister Ephraim Sneh said the Israeli plane was never in danger, and voiced doubt that it had come under attack.
 Ukraine said it had not conducted any missile launches since accidentally downing a Sibir airliner travelling from Tel Aviv to Novosibirsk last October, killing 78 passengers and crew. 
 Sneh said he had spoken at length with the El Al pilot, whom he described as an experienced combat veteran of the Israeli air force.
 &quot;There is no doubt that he saw a missile that exploded in the air, apparently far from the plane,&quot; Sneh told Israeli Army Radio. &quot;Circumstances suggest it was not launched at the El Al plane.&quot;
 Pilots of two other planes flying over the Dnipropetrovsk region at the same time reported seeing a blue fireball resembling a missile explosion, Ukrainian aviation officials said Saturday.
 The Ukrainian Defense Ministry released a statement Saturday saying that no missiles had been fired in the area that night, suggesting that the pilots may have seen a meteor.
 Officials from Ukraine's National Space Agency, and Yaroslav Skalko, Deputy Chairperson of Ukraine's civil aviation department, concurred.
 <i>-AP, Reuters </i>

TITLE: Mission To Mars Being Proposed by Russians
AUTHOR: By Mara D. Bellaby
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Refusing to be deterred by a string of failures in exploring Mars, space officials proposed an ambitious international project Friday to send a six-person team to the Red Planet around 2015.
 
Russia's space program hopes to work closely with the American agency NASA and the European Space Agency to build two spaceships that would be capable of transporting the crews to Mars, supporting them on the planet for up to two months and then safely bringing them home, said Nikolai Anfimov, head of the Central Research Institute of Machine-Building.
 The roughly 440-day trip - which would be a milestone in space travel and international space cooperation -is expected to cost about $20 billion, with Russia suggesting it would contribute 30 percent.
 &quot;It must be an international project,&quot; said Vitaly Semyonov, head of the Mars project at the M.V. Keldysha Space Research Center. &quot;No one country could cope with this task alone.&quot;
 Space officials said they are receiving encouraging signs of interest from NASA and European counterparts.
 But NASA spokesperson Delores Beasley said Friday that the Russians have not submitted a formal plan and that until NASA sees something official from Russia, it will not comment on the proposal. Because of demands from the U.S. Congress to scale back costs, human travel to Mars has not been on the space agency's radar recently.
 &quot;We are still very far away,&quot; said Alain Fournier-Sicre, head of the European Space Agency's permanent mission in Russia.
 &quot;But this kind of program is a long-term initiative for every space agency in the world,&quot; he said.
 Even in the heyday of the Soviet space program, its attempts to reach Mars were marked by failure. Soviet scientists whispered of a &quot;Mars curse.&quot;
 The Soviet Union kicked off Mars exploration in 1960 by launching two unmanned spacecraft four days apart, but both failed to make it as far as Earth's orbit. One resulted in an engine explosion scattering debris and contamination over the Baikonur launch pad in one of the worst accidents in Soviet space history.
 The bad luck for Russia continued on Nov. 16, 1996, when the Russians launched an ambitious $300-million spacecraft, Mars 96, which they hoped would prove to the world that, despite their economic struggles after the Soviet breakup, they could still run a first-rate space program. Mars 96 suffered an engine failure just after launch and crashed into the Pacific Ocean.
 NASA's Mars program, plagued by its own series of setbacks, got back on track earlier this year when the unmanned Mars Odyssey spacecraft entered orbit around the Red Planet and began mapping the mineral and chemical makeup of the surface.
 Anatoly Grigoryev, director of the Institute of Medical-Biological Problems, which works with all cosmonauts, said Russia's plan calls for a cargo and a six-person crew. Three members of the team would descend to Mars, while the restwould remain onboard the ship in orbit.
 Grigoryev said the trip could answer many of the remaining questions about Earth's mysterious neighbor.
 &quot;Is there life on Mars? If there is, what kind of life?&quot; Grigoryev said, barely able to suppress his excitement. &quot;This would be historic.&quot;

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Drink Up
 

Moscow (SPT) - According to the Public Health Ministry, alcoholism has risen by almost 30 percent over the last two years, while the number of cases of alcohol-related psychosis has risen by 50 percent, Interfax reported Monday.
 "Of every 100,000 people in Russia, 1,500 are suffering from alcoholism or alcoholic psychoses - that's 1.5 percent of the Russian population," a spokesperson for the Public Health Ministry told Interfax. 
 The Ministry reported that men make up the majority of Russians suffering from alcoholism, though the portion of women also suffering from alcoholism has increased significantly.
 
 
Railway Damage
 

St. Petersburg (SPT) - More than 10 graves have been damaged at the Preobrazhenskoye Jewish cemetery as a result of construction work to extend a railway line at the Sortirovochnaya and Obukhovo stations, Valentina Sidorova, the director of the cemetery, reported to Interfax on Monday.
 She said that the exact number of graves couldn't be determined without confirmation from the relatives of those buried there.
 Sidorova added that a similar incident took place in January 2001, when 12 graves were destroyed. She said that neither the management of the Baltic Building Company, which is responsible for the construction, nor the Oktyabarskaya Railway company, which commissioned the work, have taken any measures to repair the damage caused last year, Interfax reported.
 
 
Georgia Blasts Russia
 

TBILISI, Georgia (AP) - Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze on Monday lashed out against Russia for granting citizenship to Abkhaz residents, calling it akin to the annexation of that part of the country.
 Shevardnadze told journalists at his regular news conference that more than 50,000 residents had been given Russian citizenship.
 "What is that called? Either annexation or justification for annexation," he said.
 Abkhazia won de facto independence in 1993 after routing Georgian government troops in a two-year war. Russian peacekeepers have been deployed in Abkhazia since 1994.
 Meanwhile, Shevardnadze denied that Russia would assist in anti-terrorist operations in the Pankisi Gorge, a lawless region bordering Chechnya where U.S.-trained Georgian troops are planning operations. Officials acknowledged last week that they were having problems getting enough soldiers to sign up for the training program, with only 100 applicants for 500 spots.
 Vladimir Rushailo, secretary of Russia's presidential Security Council, was expected Tuesday in Georgia for a visit, but Shevardnadze said it was just a routine consultation with his Georgian counterpart and had nothing to do with potential cooperation in the Pankisi Gorge.
 
 
Blaze Claims Two
 

St. Petersburg (SPT) - Two women, aged 19 and 29, died as a result of a fire on Kamyshovaya Ulitsa on Monday, the press center for the St. Petersburg office of the Emergency Situations Ministry announced.
 The fire was first reported at 6.56 a.m. on Monday and was put out within 30 minutes, according to anInterfax report.
 An investigative group was examining the cause of the fire Monday, and Interfax reported ministry representatives as saying that there was a strong suspicion of arson. 



TITLE: Ex-PM Makes Cautious Growth Forecasts
AUTHOR: By Angelina Davydova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: One of the &quot;founding fathers&quot; of economic reform in Russia, Yegor Gaidar, presented his predictions for the future development of the Russian economic situation at a press conference in St. Petersburg on Monday.
 
Gaidar was one of so called &quot;young reformers&quot; in the Russian government in the early 90s. In 1991, he was appointed Finance Minister, before being named acting prime minister in 1992. He was moved back to his ministerial post in 1993, before finally resigning in 1994. 
 He became famous for his tough monetary-policy measures and promotion of reform, though equally unpopular for the hardships that those reforms were percieved as having caused. Currently, Gaidar is a deputy in the State Duma and one of the leading lights in the Union of Right Forces (SPS) political party.
 Gaidar was also in St. Petersburg to attend the &quot;Second 10 years of Russian reform: problems in the improvement of the federal system&quot; international conference.
 Gaidar urged caution with regard to the current economic situation in Russia, despite the general mood of optimism that has been evident in the country in recent months. &quot;Public opinion as to what economic growth actually is, is incorrect,&quot; Gaidar said. Laypeople, according to Gaidar, believe that President Vladimir Putin and his structural reforms have been the main cause of growth. Many analysts, on the other hand, believe that the effects of any structural reform have not yet made themselves felt. Other economists, predominantly foreign, believe that it is ruble depreciation and favorable oil prices that have been the most decisive factors. 
 Yegor Gaidar has other ideas. He maintained that the Russian economy has now reached its production limits, which were already established during the Soviet era. In order to achieve further growth, investment will be needed. The danger, according to Gaidar, is that the government will unnecessarily support industries that are &quot;already on their way out,&quot; such as steel and textiles, which both have strong lobbies in Russia. 
 &quot;For now, mineral resources are the most profitable goods that Russia has, but we have good prospects for hi-tech industries, services and software, which are other good examples,&quot; Gaidar said. 
 Another serious obstacle to stable economic development, according to Gaidar, could be the coming elections, both those for the State Duma in December 2003, and presidential elections slated for the spring of 2004. &quot;The government is already going to be weak on the budget next year. We've had a few deficit-free budgets over the past years, so now there's a trend toward &quot;being kind&quot; to the electorate in order to attract their votes,&quot; Gaidar said. He added that the state authorities are tending to overestimate and exaggerate current levels of financial stability. 
 Despite these cautious words, Gaidar said that it was unlikely that an economic crisis on the scale of that of August 1998 would occur in the near future. Nevertheless, he said that a smaller crisis may be ahead in the coming months, either as a result of a fall in oil prices, on which the Russian budget is heavily dependent, or a crisis in the banking sector.

TITLE: Major Loan Granted To Cargo Line
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - International Finance Corp. has signed off on a $29.9-million loan to the Volga-Dnepr airline to help finance the construction of a giant An-124-100 Ruslan, the first foreign credit to the civil aviation sector.
 
The craft, to be completed in 2003, will join nine other Ruslans flown by Ulyanovsk-based Volga-Dnepr, the global leader in the outsized-cargo market, which services clients from rock stars to industry majors, including Lockheed Martin, General Electric and British Petroleum to the United Nations.
 IFC, the private-lending arm of the World Bank, is extending the credit for 10 years at an annual interest of LIBOR plus 4.75 percent, IFC director for infrastructure Declan Duff said at a news conference on Friday.
 &quot;This is an exceptional investment for IFC ... We believe that Volga-Dnepr is a most exceptional company,&quot; Duff said.
 The airline's management was a major asset that the IFC took into consideration in granting the loan after two years of negotiations, he said.
 The An-124 will be built at the Aviastar-SP production plant in Ulyanovsk.
 Part of the loan will be used to help pay off an earlier $16-million loan from Sberbank.
 Volga-Dnepr Chairperson Alexei Isaikin said the loan is a breakthrough for the airline, which can now look for financing on international markets.
 International financing offers long-term credits at low interest rates and on conditions that are unattainable on the domestic market for airlines that are desperately in need of new planes to meet growing passenger and cargo traffic.
 Volga-Dnepr is currently working to obtain European certification for the An-124 and register its planes in lower-risk Britain, which would make it easier to secure international loans.
 Due to political risks, the management's 51-percent stake in Volga-Dnepr, five Ruslans, the airline's insurance policy and additional guarantees from a group of companies related to Volga-Dnepr are security for the loan, said Sergei Shklyanik, Volga-Dnepr's deputy general director.
 &quot;It's a very solid security for their loan, but as this is the first loan of its kind made to Russia, maybe that's not surprising,&quot; said Paul Duffy, an independent, Moscow-based aviation analyst.
 &quot;We do have some security, [but] we are regarding this as an opportunity rather than a risk,&quot; IFC's Duff said, adding that there will be more loans coming up for the transportation sector, including civil aviation.
 Volga-Dnepr's Isaikin said that the company has other projects that it would like to bring to the IFC's attention, including the refitting of its IL-76 cargo planes with newer engines and the obtaining of more Ruslans.
 Volga-Dnepr plans to purchase an airplane a year to eventually bring the fleet of Ruslans to 20.
 Deputy Transportation Minister Karl Ruppel said the loan would work toward revitalizing production at Aviastar-SP.

TITLE: First Shipment Arrives in Texas
AUTHOR: By Kristen Hays
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HOUSTON - The first shipment of Russian oil directly to the United States arrived in Houston last week, and U.S. officials hailed the delivery as a step toward reducing dependence on Middle East oil.
 
Mikhail Brudno, first vice president of No. 2 oil company Yukos, which made the shipment, said it would be the first of five or six to the United States this year.
 The 200,000-metric-ton shipment arrived in the Port of Houston aboard the supertanker Astro Lupus.
 Brudno said the shipment had been purchased by Exxon Mobil Corp. and another buyer, whom he declined to identify.
 Yukos announced in May that it would send its first tankers to the United States this summer. That announcement followed a summit meeting in Moscow at which President George W. Bush and President Vladimir Putin signed an energy-cooperation statement.
 Michael Smith, U.S. assistant secretary of energy for fossil fuels, said at a news conference Wednesday that Russia needs to increase its share of world oil exports and the United States must diversify its sources of oil.
 &quot;I hope this will be the first of many shipments in the future,&quot; Smith said.
 U.S. Representatives Ken Bentsen and Nick Lampson said the shipment was a necessary first step towards increasing U.S. sources for oil.
 &quot;This opens up the lines for more oil in the market to meet our demands,&quot; Bentsen said. &quot;We're always going to want to expand the marketplace.&quot;
 Russia currently supplies a tiny percentage of U.S. imports, and oil is its chief export.
 Shipping to the United States, however, is costly because of Yukos' lack of infrastructure - primarily deep-water ports - and increased transportation needs, Misamore said. The company would need to add infrastructure before it can really make a dent in the U.S. market, he said.

TITLE: Investor Aton Contests Tver-Pivo Beer Sell Off
AUTHOR: By Sergei Rybak
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: MOSCOW - The investment group Aton is crying foul after paying $1.5 million for a 40-percent stake in the Tver-Pivo brewery, only to have the brewery turn round and sell off its prize asset.
 
Tver-Pivo's general director Maxim Larin confirmed that the asset, a 77-percent stake in the Afanasy-Pivo brewery, which accounts for 1 percent of all beer brewed in Russia, had been sold.
 Aton announced it had bought the stake in Tver-Pivo in May. Fifty-one percent of Tver-Pivo is owned by the brewery's management.
 Aton is accusing Larin of transferring assets to Tver-Pivo's Swiss affiliate, Eastern Union, and blocking its attempts to enter its shareholder status on the company's register.
 According to the Federal Securities Committee, Tver-Pivo sold its 77-percent stake in Afanasy-Pivo to Moscow-based Brau Servis on June 20. An Afanasy-Pivo official, who asked to remain anonymous, said that Brau Servis is connected to Eastern Union Holding, which already owns 23 percent of the brewery. Even the telephone number for Brau Servis is the same as that of the Tver-based brewery.
 Tver-Pivo maintains that the sale actually took place in the second half of April this year, and insists that the FSC needed two months to register the deal.
 German Lukyanov, the head of the Tver region department of the Anti-Monopoly Ministry, said that he could not recall signing any documentation permitting the sale of the Afanasy shares.
 Aton Vice President Vadim Soskov said he had been assured only last week by Tver-Pivo management that the Afansy shares were still on their books.
 It is unclear what will happen next. Lawyers say that the deal could be ruled illegal if it took place after Aton became a shareholder in Tver-Pivo.
 On the other hand, there are sufficient gaps in the law on joint-stock companies to make the transfer of property possible without the need for consent from minority shareholders, said Tatyana Sotnichenko, a lawyer with Zapolsky and Partners.

TITLE: Russians Take Pride in New Round of Financial Scandals
AUTHOR: By Victoria Lavrentieva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - After the U.S. financial scandals surrounding Enron, WorldCom and Xerox, a number of Russians are feeling a sense of affirmation that their graft-riddled corporate culture is no worse than that of the West.
 
The American Chamber of Commerce, impressed with how some Russian companies have of late been cleaning up their act, intends to tell the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it should take a lesson from Russia.
 The scale of business and economic theft in Russia in the 1990s was certainly of a greater magnitude than anything that has been uncovered in the United States in recent months.
 But that means little to Russians weary of a decade of allegations about corruption and money laundering.
 &quot;For many years we were told that Russians are corrupt and nontransparent,&quot; said Yevgeny Yuryev, president of the Aton brokerage. &quot;Now this stereotype has finally been broken and people will see that Russia is no worse than other countries, probably even better.&quot;
 Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref said an Enron-style scandal in Russia would be years away because business is not yet transparent enough to meet the international standards under which Enron was being audited.
 &quot;It is too early to talk about the full transparency of Russian companies,&quot; Gref commented at a news conference last week.
 &quot;They are not yet a part of the international accounting system, and this might happen only after most Russian companies and banks - not only the large ones - introduce Generally Accepted Accounting Principles or International Accounting Standards,&quot; he said. &quot;This will not happen earlier than 2004.&quot;
 Furthermore, Gref said, the financial consulting and auditing market in Russia remains in its infancy.
 Some Russian companies are already suggesting that this lack of financial infrastructure might be to their advantage.
 &quot;I have already heard a lot of people saying: &quot;Look how bad America is, why do we need to improve ourselves?'&quot; said William Browder, head of Hermitage Capital Management.
 But he cautioned: &quot;If Russia uses America's problems as an excuse to stop fully implementing the transparency and corporate governance reforms that have been pushed in the last couple of years, then this will be doing harm to Russia.&quot;
 Browder said that the major difference between the U.S. and Russian markets is that in the United States people evaluate companies as if everything is clean. Therefore, investor confidence and stock prices dove during the current scandals.
 In contrast, Russian stocks tend to be cheap, because people price in risks such as possible corporate fraud, he said.
 Andrew Somers, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia, himself a lawyer, said that the problem in the United States is that the rules of running a business have become overly complicated.
 &quot;We often create rules on top of the rules. Although in the end they work and people will be punished, it does not help make business more transparent,&quot; he said.
 As a result, lawyers and consultants often dominate business activities and sometimes even the top managers don't have a clear picture of what is going on in their companies, Somers said.
 Yuryev agreed that the U.S. market is overregulated. &quot;As the head of a company that received a brokerage license in New York in the middle of the Bank of New York [money-laundering] scandal, I can say that Russian regulation is nothing compared with SEC rules,&quot; he said.
 Somers said that Russia was taking a better road than the United States with a voluntary corporate governance code the Federal Securities Commission approved last year.
 He said that he was going to present the code to the SEC as an example of what it should be doing. &quot;It looks like they have forgotten what their real business is,&quot; he said.
 Federal Securities Commission head Igor Kostikov said he was pleased that Russia's corporate-governance code was being considered a model.

TITLE: Yukos-UES Deal Made on Energy
PUBLISHER: The Moscow Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Unified Energy Systems and No. 2 oil major Yukos have agreed to coordinate the sale of their stakes in regional power companies and cooperate on sector reforms, the companies announced Friday.
 
The memorandum of understanding, which was signed by UES CEO Anatoly Chubais and Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky, smoothes the way for the inclusion of Tomskenergo, Kubanenergo, Tambovenergo and Belgorodenergo in overall sector restructuring.
 Khodorkovsky said that the deal is part of plans for expansion. &quot;Yukos intends to become a total energy company, a leading player, not only in the oil and gas market, but also in power generation,&quot; he said in a statement.
 Yukos pledged to support UES's proposal that the four regional companies be included in the revamp as transmission companies and have separate generating and distribution companies spun off. Shareholders would receive proportional stakes in the separate companies.
 UES and Yukos will sell their stakes of the companies spun off from Tomskenergo in a tender. UES will have at least 24 percent in the companies after the restructuring, while Yukos will have at least 25 percent.
 The tender will be held no later than four months after a Tomskenergo general shareholders meeting on the restructuring. An independent appraiser will set the minimum bid price.
 The shares may be bought with cash or with shares in UES, UES subsidiaries, the transmission company incorporating Tomskenergo, Tomskenergo itself or a combination. The same process may be applied to the other regional energos, according to the memorandum.

TITLE: Bad News Better Out Than In
AUTHOR: By Jay Hancock
PUBLISHER: the baltimore sun
TEXT: WHO wouldn't be mad at corporate America? I assume even Ken Lay's dog is a little hacked off at how things are going.
 
Last August, Enron boss Lay said there were &quot;no previously unknown problem issues&quot; at the energy company. A short five months later, Enron was deep in bankruptcy proceedings, and Lay had presided over the breathtaking, almost instantaneous destruction of $70 billion in wealth.
 If three examples of anything make a trend, as journalists like to joke, the corporate dishonesty exposed in the last eight months can be safely regarded as a megatrend and as an era-defining avalanche of bad news.
 The Enron outrage has been joined by dozens of large accounting problems at some of America's biggest and most respected companies. Even Microsoft was forced, this month, to admit to the fact that it misrepresented results.
 The Securities and Exchange Commission has already opened 128 potential financial-fraud investigations this year, setting a record pace for the investigation of alleged malpractice in financial disclosure.
 Every time someone like me says things will get better, they get worse.
 Arthur Andersen is guilty of obstructing justice. Tyco's L. Dennis Kozlowski is being accused of having evaded taxes. ImClone's Samuel D. Waksal is arrested on an insider-trading charge, and his friend Martha Stewart, the doily and crushed-lavender tycoon, is under scrutiny for her ImClone trades.
 Perhaps the biggest bomb of all came last week: WorldCom's disclosure that it overstated its cash flow by more than $3.8 billion since 2000. Holy Toledo.
 Corporate leaders finally seem to be coming out and joining the boss of Goldman Sachs, Henry Paulson, in recognizing the current state of crisis for what it really is: a scary threat to the public confidence that supports the system. Legerdemain on the ledgers by the jerks at Enron, WorldCom and the others has already wiped out life savings, put tens of thousands out of work and driven down the stocks of good, honest companies in the general market downdraft.
 So, at the risk of summoning another bolt from the financial angels, let me try it again: This will fade.
 Although it probably doesn't feel like it, the current frenzy of revelation, accusation and fear is healthy and far more preferable to the alternative - hiding accounting problems and letting them ooze.
 No matter how good our laws, clever scoundrels will always find ways to cheat, chisel, embezzle and lie, although one must admit that they exceeded expectations this time. 
 What's crucial, however, is the action of corporate boards and regulators once they have discovered skulduggery of this magnitude.
 In Japan, authorities and investors have known for years that most banks are insolvent and hold what some Western analysts estimate is $1 trillion in uncollectible debt, most of which is listed as good. 
 This is a disaster 10 times the size of the U.S. savings and loan crisis. Numerous non-financial companies are also hiding bad debts and inflating asset values.
 What has Japan done about it? To avoid a blowup like the one rattling the United States, nearly nothing. 
 The Japanese books have been cooking so long they're starting to melt, and the direct result is that people literally keep cash in mattresses, the Nikkei stock average is where it was in 1984, and the country has basically been in recession for a decade. How's that for trust?
 In an amazing deed of denial, Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry unveiled a plan last week to study whether the country's molasses-speed accounting reforms, including a rule requiring the correct valuation of assets on balance sheets by 2005, are too radical.
 Instead, I'll take Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill, who urges corporate leaders to &quot;get on the tabletop and scream out against the abuses.&quot; 
 I'll take the Securities and Exchange Commission, which said last week that &quot;accounting improprieties of unprecedented magnitude have been committed in the public markets.&quot;
 I'll take surprise, screaming headlines, lurid trials and a $3.8-billion WorldCom restatement. 
 How American it is. We're facing ugly truths, naming names, flushing out excesses, cleaning up the mess and getting ready to go back to work.
 Most U.S. companies do not have accounting warts. And, despite what you might think, this country has the best corporate financial-disclosure requirements in the world. Now they will get better.
 It is reasonable to think that the flood of shocking corporate disclosures is a trailing economic indicator, a recoil from past indulgence, not a portent of future pain. In the 1990s, we binged. Now it's time to purge.
 
 <i>
Jay Hancock is a columnist for The Baltimore Sun, to which he contributed this comment. </i>

TITLE: Kremlin Stands By As Contenders Slug it Out
AUTHOR: By Yulia Latynina
TEXT: LAST week, the Sverdlovsk District Court in Perm froze 25 percent of the shares in the joint-stock company Aviadvigatel (formerly Perm Motors), belonging to Pratt &amp; Whitney, in response to a lawsuit filed by Sergei Permyakov, a board member of Aviadvigatel.
 
In the suit, Permyakov requested $10 billion in compensation for damages from Pratt &amp; Whitney Russia. Permyakov, who maintained that Aviadvigatel would lose $10 billion over the next 15 years as a result of Pratt &amp; Whitney's investment, is also chairperson of Tekhnologii Motorov. The president of this company is Sava Kujundzic, the vice president Andrei Khovanov. Kujundzic is considered an intimate of former Gazprom chief Rem Vyakhirev and Moscow Deputy Mayor Iosif Ordzhonikidze. Kujundzic's insider status allowed him to get in on a swindle.
 The scam took advantage of Moscow's law on profit tax breaks. Under this law, businesses investing in programs approved by the Moscow city government can deduct the sum invested from their tax bill. Moscow taxpayer Gazprom made full use of this loophole. It spent some $60 million on the construction of a water park on Aminevskoye Shosse and $500 million on construction of the Moskva-City business center.
 All of the Moscow companies that received money from Gazprom had one thing in common - they were all headed up by Kujundzic's partners, Khovanov and Yevgeny Yankovsky. The construction of the water park, for example, worked like this. The money was paid to the project's general contractor, Assotsiatsiya Zamoskvorechye. The contractor transferred the money to another firm, Spetsstroiservis-2000. Yankovsky was the general director of both companies. The money was then spent on buying equipment from a German company, USI Universal GmbH, run by Yankovsky's wife. USI then transferred the money directly to a Swiss company, Taurus Holdings, whose president was none other than Kujundzic. USI then disappeared, with the equipment nowhere to be found and the water park was never built.
 All of the contracts, documents and receipts in this case are in the hands of the Prosecutor General's Office because the management of Legprombank, through which Kujundzic and Khovanov laundered the money, had a falling-out with their owners. As the two sides concentrated on battling each other, crucial documents found their way to the prosecutor. But the case never went public.
 The Kremlin rightly adopted a hands-off stance when Tekhnologii Motorov moved to snuff out Legprombank in the courtroom. The two sides deserve each other. But the Kremlin shouldn't stand back when a major player in the aviation industry is booted out of a Russian plant simply because a handful of people who had got fat laundering Gazprom tax money decided to enter big business.
 
 <i>
Yulia Latynina is a journalist with ORT. </i>

TITLE: Worldcom Scandal Could Be the Last Straw
AUTHOR: By Robert Reno
PUBLISHER: newsday
TEXT: JUST when we thought there was nothing to top the depravity to which a major corporation might sink, along comes WorldCom.
 
It reminds us that the prosperous 1990s were a period when corporate misconduct was being bred and nourished in ways that would not become visible until the present decade revealed the weaknesses that permitted and incubated a thriving culture of corporate greed.
 The difference between this and earlier corporate scandals is that WorldCom's sins were as crude and simple as Enron's were secretive and, to most investors, unfathomable. If Enron was a sinister chess game, WorldCom was an artless round of checkers.
 WorldCom was a long-distance telephone company that, with breathtaking audacity, simply overstated its financial results by $3.8 billion, more than enough to give it a smell of success that concealed the degree to which it was hemorrhaging money. Starting last week, the company began the cruel business of laying off 17,000 employees in a bid to salvage what was left of a credibility that is all but unsalvageable.
 The WorldCom shipwreck is but one in a series of corporate scandals that signal a perilous period for the American economy. Will, for instance, President George W. Bush be equal to the task of restoring corporate credibility? Or will he suffer from the perception that he is owned by the oil companies because he named an embarrassing number of former Enron executives to his administration; allowed them extraordinary influence and access at the White House; picked a fellow oil man to be his vice president and is advised by a Treasury secretary, former Alcoa chairperson Paul O'Neill, who typifies the business culture with which Bush's presidency is infected and the entitlements it imagines are owed it?
 The other critical danger is that American investors will react to these scandals by doing something either silly or precipitous. They could decide that Securities and Exchange Commission Chairperson Harvey Pitt, with his close former ties to the now-notorious Arthur Andersen accounting firm, is a rotten choice to police the securities markets.
 They could be spooked by the revelations of New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who blew the lid off Wall Street without any help from the SEC. If so, they could panic, liquidate their shares, and take the fate of a lot of perfectly sound corporations with them. Or these same investors could adopt a cynical everybody-does-it attitude toward corporations and go on searching, in an already depressed market, for the Enron or the WorldCom that wasn't a house of cards. Either could spell disaster.
 Meanwhile, Enron and WorldCom are but a series of cracks in the corporate system that suggest serious structural flaws. These include the Tyco scandal, which began as a simple scam to avoid sales taxes and now has spread to a civil lawsuit.
 Elsewhere, corporate titan Martha Stewart is having her own problems trying to explain that the dumping of her stock in ImClone Systems was nothing but an innocent act that just happened to save her a ton of money when the company's promising cancer drug was refused approval by the Food and Drug Administration on the very next day. 
 I suppose that she'll be comforted by the news that Wal-Mart has been hit with a class-action lawsuit that charges it with oppressing and exploiting its employees in ways that suggest that the world's largest retailer was running a plantation in which slaves were not beaten but locked in its stores, sometimes forced to work unrecorded overtime.
 This may or may not soften the image of Martha as a harridan of a manager who shrieks at her help and makes her employees grovel. But the rate at which soiled linen of America's corporations is being hung out to flap in the breeze for all the neighbors to see is cause to worry about the infectious level of investor suspicion that it will inspire.
 
 <i>
Robert Reno contributed this comment to Newsday. </i>

TITLE: Entrepreneurs Face Increased Liability
AUTHOR: By Maxim Kalinin, Igor Gorchakov and Sergey Zhestkov.
TEXT: ON July 1, 2002, a new &quot;Code of Administrative Offences&quot; came into force, establishing administrative liability for officers who have committed tax offenses. From now on, the company's officers will also face tax and administrative penalties. 
 
The code defines a company officer as an individual entrepreneur, a manager or any other employee of the company who carries out administrative and executive functions. As a rule, penalties for officers committing tax offenses vary from between one and 50 times the minimum wage, which is now 100 rubles ($3.17). This is unlikely to strike fear into your hearts, but failure to pay customs duties, on the other hand, can entail a fine of up to double the amount of unpaid levy.
 The main administrative offenses connected with the payment of taxes include violation of the terms of registration with tax authorities; failure to file a tax declaration on time; failure to report the opening of a bank account or violation of the procedure for its opening; failure to provide required tax-control information; violation by the bank of the terms of a tax transfer; failure by the bank to execute the tax authorities' decision to postpone operations on the taxpayer's accounts; and gross violation of accounting records.
 The new descriptions of most administrative offenses in the tax sphere are similar to those already stipulated by the Tax Code. For example, the code provides that the officer of a bank will be subject to a penalty in the amount of 10 to 20 times the amount of minimum wages for procedural violations committed when opening an account for a taxpayer. In contrast, the Tax Code provides that the offence will only be constituted by a submission for the opening of an account without a tax registration certificate being submitted. Though the code provides penalties for such violations, the legislation doesn't require the submission of a state non-budgetary fund registration certificate for opening an account.
 The penalties laid out in the code can be applied for the three years following offense or the relevant tax-period expiration. In contrast, under the Code of Administrative Violations (in effect until June 30, 2002), the term is limited to a year.
 If a company is penalized for a violation under the Tax code, the tax authorities must also impose administrative liability on the officers. Thus, the code essentially enhances their liability and gives tax authorities discretion in deciding whether to impose liability on them.
 
 <i>
Maxim Kalinin is a partner and Igor Gorchakov is an associate at Baker &amp; McKenzie St. Petersburg. Sergey Zhestkov is an associate at Baker &amp; McKenzie Moscow </i>

TITLE: Bringing Back Insanity
AUTHOR: By Masha Lipman
TEXT: THE power of the once-mighty Communists is slowly fading away. The Communists' support in the polls is still at 30 percent, but thanks to clever maneuvering by the Kremlin, they have lost all chairpersonships in the Duma. Even more importantly, Communist Gennady Seleznev, speaker of the Duma and one of the most prominent politicians in Russia, refused to comply with party discipline, and the Communist leadership was forced to expel him. Sensing the impending decline in Communist fortunes, a couple of local governors who had won on the party ticket announced their desertion, and more are likely to follow.
 
This sounds like wonderful news to those, including myself, who hated the oppressive Soviet Communist regime and thought of Boris Yeltsin's victory over the party in 1991 as the most blissful moment in 20th century Russian history. But I'm not rejoicing today.
 Yeltsin regarded ridding Russia of the Communist danger as his historic mission. He dropped the Communist state symbols: the anthem, the flag, the emblem. He yearned to rebury Lenin and, up until his last day in office, he maintained a passionate desire to ban the Communist Party. There was not a single day in his presidential years when he didn't have to repel vehement Communist opposition.
 Vladimir Putin, anointed president by Yeltsin, did not inherit this sense of mission from his predecessor. The Kremlin's recent effort to reduce the political weight of the Communists is purely situational tactics. The Kremlin regards political parties as mere voting numbers, and reshapes them as it sees fit.
 Two and a half years ago, as the hastily mustered pro-Putin party Yedinstvo entered the Duma with limited voting strength, the Kremlin ordered it to side with the Communists, thus alienating the pro-reform liberals and discarding Yeltsin's anti-Communist legacy. Over the past year, the Kremlin has reshuffled the political parties and ensured a new, favorable majority in the Duma.
 So, for a few months now, the Kremlin has pursued an anti-Communist campaign. But in doing so, it has sent hardly any message to the public as to what is so bad about the Communists - except that their Duma faction would not support the Kremlin's legislative initiatives. The Communists' responsibility for the tragic history of 20th century Russia is not an issue. Nor are they accountable for the Soviet Union's economic collapse or for the terrible damage that the years of terror inflicted upon the national identity.
 Putin himself appears to be uncertain about his attitude toward the Soviet past. He has vaguely blamed the country's current economic disaster on &quot;the previous decades,&quot; which may be interpreted as an allusion to the damaging effects of the Communist economy. But he has hardly said it point-blank. On the other hand, he thinks nothing of visiting the get-togethers of veterans of the KGB, the very tool of the Communist Party dictatorship. He brought back Stalin's anthem and is proud of it. In a public news conference on June 24 he emphasized that this is where he breaks with Yeltsin's legacy.
 During his latest visit to Poland, Putin paid homage to Polish workers shot by the pro-Soviet Polish government. But he did it only as a matter of diplomatic courtesy. He did not make a public statement, let alone an appearance, on the 40th anniversary of the killing of Soviet workers in Novocherkassk this spring. Nor has he ever visited any of the sites of Stalin's mass executions, at least two of which lie abandoned within a half-hour's drive from Moscow.
 Putin's defenders say pragmatism is what counts: Once he has a solid pro-Kremlin majority in the Duma, Putin can get his reform legislation approved, and as the country reforms economically, everything else will fall into place. The point itself is not fully convincing, as Putin's loyal elite includes both reform-minded liberals and KGB-mold hard-liners. Putin's mixed signals encourage both factions to act on what they regard as Putin's backing, thus pulling Russia in different directions.
 Moreover, because of Putin's uncertain attitude toward the Soviet past, the ugliest practices of the old system have become useful. In a recent example, the Russian court used the expertise of one of the most notorious institutions of the Soviet police regime, forensic psychiatry, in the trial of Colonel Yury Budanov, who allegedly kidnapped and killed a young Chechen woman.
 Because the evidence was impossible to deny and the military establishment sought to protect one of its own, the colonel claimed temporary mental insanity. To certify his mental incapacity, Budanov's military defenders have resorted to the services of the same psychiatric &quot;experts&quot; who in the 1970s declared Soviet dissidents mentally ill and helped the Communist regime lock them up indefinitely in asylums. Still, there are grounds to believe that somebody important in the Kremlin is displeased about unleashing the relics of the totalitarian past. At the end of Budanov's trial, which has lasted for a year and a half, the judge postponed the sentencing and ordered a new, and third, psychiatric evaluation.
 
 <i>
Masha Lipman, deputy editor of Yezhenedelny Zhurnal, contributed this comment to The Washington Post. </i>

TITLE: Abandoning The Last of The Dictators
TEXT: WITH most of his neighbors preoccupied with the war on terrorism or crises in the Middle East and South Asia, Europe's last dictator was enjoying a quiet year until recently. Alexander Lukashenko, who rules the 10 million people of Belarus, was free to continue propping up his regime with the kind of police-state tactics associated with the former Soviet Union.
 
For years the United States and most European governments have isolated Lukashenko, but to little effect. That's because Lukashenko doesn't need much from the West - economically or politically. Though wretchedly poor, Belarus has been able to limp through thanks to massive subsidies from Russia. Lukashenko has helped to keep the money flowing by pledging fealty to Moscow; unlike every other leader in Central Europe, he scorns NATO and the European Union. That's why Europe still has a dictatorship, two years after the downfall of Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic - because both of Russia's post-Communist presidents, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, have found it convenient to preserve Lukashenko's regime.
 Putin, who says Russia belongs in the club of Western democracies, looked on last September while Lukashenko blatantly rigged a presidential election to extend his term in office. Putin's government did not act on abundant evidence that Lukashenko was murdering his political foes, even though one of them, Dmitry Zavadsky, worked for a Russian news organization. Now, at last, Putin is suggesting a change of policy. Twice in the past few weeks he has publicly condemned Lukashenko's fondest scheme: the construction of a union between Belarus and Russia in which Minsk would have equal weight with Moscow. There is no reason to recreate &quot;something like the Soviet Union,&quot; Putin said; if the two countries really were to join, Belarus would have to give up its sovereignty or accept a limited partnership along the lines of the European Union.
 Until now, however, no Russian leader has been ready to say publicly that Lukashenko's plan - which allows him to dream of someday ruling from the Kremlin - is &quot;legalistic nonsense.&quot; Now that he has popped Lukashenko's bubble, Putin has the chance to demonstrate that he genuinely shares the values and interests of the Western democracies by joining in their effort to end a dictatorship that, without Russia, would have collapsed long ago. Belarussian activists and Russian lawmakers reported last week that Putin had agreed to take up the cases of Lukashenko's disappeared opponents; that would be an excellent way to start.
 
 <i>
This comment forst appeared as an editorial in the Washington Post. </i>

TITLE: The Feel-Good Factor With a Russian Twist
TEXT: HOW predictable was it that WorldCom would be seized upon as evidence all is well in the Motherland? And that Russia's theft, graft and contract killings would now be justified, because Merrill Lynch misled investors and Xerox overstated its revenues?
 
&quot;For many years, we were told that Russians are corrupt and non-transparent,&quot; the president of the Aton brokerage says. &quot;Now this stereotype has finally been broken and people will see that Russia is no worse than other countries, probably even better.&quot;
 The American Chamber of Commerce in Russia intends to give the United States its own advice - based on the Russian experience - on how to clean up Wall Street. (Never mind that Merrill Lynch was penalized $100 million and Xerox $10 million, while virtually no one in financial Russia ever gets penalized for anything.) The Chamber, which lobbies for corporations, has an answer straight from the Enron playbook: &quot;voluntary&quot; codes of behavior and deregulation of the stock market.
 Few now dispute that, as The Wall Street Journal puts it, &quot;the scope and scale of the corporate transgressions of the late 1990s, now coming to light, exceed anything the U.S. has witnessed since the years preceding the Great Depression.&quot;
 Only time will tell how truly bad this is. But I doubt that it will rival the 1990s in Russia - with the MMM-style pyramid schemes, the theft of oil and gas fields, the disappearing IMF and World Bank loans, the so-called domestic-debt market and the so-called banking sector. And don't forget FIMACO: Things are bad, but Alan Greenspan has yet to admit to laundering U.S. currency reserves through a shell company in the Bahamas.
 I also doubt Americans will ever take comfort by saying: &quot;Well, we've made a mess of it - but so has Russia, so that's OK.&quot; That's a uniquely Russian response. It's of a piece with the old joke about the muzhik who is offered a single wish, but warned that this wish will be given twice over to his neighbor, and so wishes to go blind in one eye. (Imagine the muzhik crowing: &quot;Now people will see that I am no worse than others, probably even better!&quot;)
 When NATO was bombing Kosovo, the Russian military aped those made-for-CNN briefings, and started to brag about the thousands of sorties that were being flown in Chechnya. When al-Qaida attacked the United States on Sept. 11, Russian security services announced that they had seized a flight map in Chechnya involving the twin towers, with &quot;jihad&quot; scribbled on the back. (Sure they did!).
 And I remember the financial-market players who made their careers in Moscow, fleeing in a giant herd to go play the Internet stocks in New York. Then that bubble burst, the Enrons sheepishly emerged and the Dow Jones Index sank - so now Russia is back in vogue again, and we hear all of the fairy tales about oligarchs finding the gospel of &quot;transparency.&quot; No doubt when this fad ends tragically, there will be a stampede off to somewhere else. And then, maybe, a stampede back, to cries of vindication: &quot;And now people will see, again, that Russia is no worse than other countries!&quot;
 
 <i>
Matt Bivens, a former editor of The St. Petersburg Times, is a fellow with the Nation Institute. </i>

TITLE: Global Eye
TEXT: The curtain of lies that shields the benighted and betrayed American people from the grim reality of its rulers-that corrupt tyranny of plutocrats, sycophants and frothing extremists which has taken power in Washington - was pulled away last month and briefly, tantalizingly, the truth was revealed:
 
Dick Cheney is President of the United States.
 For two whole hours on June 29, Cheney held in name what he has long wielded in fact-the executive power of the United States government-when dimbulb frontman George W. Bush was rendered unconscious for an anal probe. Before going bottom up for the medical exam, Bush utilized a rarely invoked constitutional mechanism to transfer the power of the presidency to Cheney for the duration of the procedure. In an unintentionally revealing statement, the Regime said that Cheney went about his &quot;normal work&quot; at the White House during the inspection of the Oval Orifice.
 No doubt.
 Soon however, Bush was settling - gingerly - back on the presidential throne and Cheney descended once more to the bowels of the &quot;secret government&quot; of Republican officials and corporate leaders that the Regime installed after CIA pal Osama bin Laden left his calling card last September. The curtain was closed again, and the enthralled (in every sense of the word) populace received the grateful news that the covert op in Bush's colon found &quot;nothing abnormal&quot; in his internal Tora Bora - no polyps, no lesions, no shredded Enron documents, not even a wayward pretzel.
 
 
Family Values
 
Speaking of &quot;frothing extremists&quot;-and one can hardly avoid the topic these days - the Bush Regime's bloodthirsty Taliban wing was in full cry recently, rubbing their stained hands in anticipation of Bush's decision to eliminate U.S. funding of a UN program aimed at helping the world's poorest women receive a modicum of health care.
 
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) provides a bare minimum of reproductive health care for women in developing countries - or in cases like Afghanistan, completely destroyed countries. UNFPA runs maternity hospitals, provides family-planning advice and dispenses sterile emergency birth kits for refugees. It is not involved in any way with abortion.
 But this fact - verified by several independent investigations, including one by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell just last year - cuts no ice with the bug-eyed fanatics that Bush and Cheney have empowered. They insist that UNFPA is in cahoots with China's forced abortion and sterilization programs, and thus not a cent of sacred American money - doesn't it say &quot;In God We Trust&quot; on every precious greenback? - should be spent on the devil's handiwork.
 Although forced abortion and sterilization were once lauded by good Christian Rightists as a means of ridding the world of &quot;inferior breeds&quot; (indeed, the Bush family has a long history of involvement with the &quot;eugenics&quot; movement and its modern offspring), the &quot;pro-life&quot; battle now provides convenient cover for the Right's larger anti-woman (no, anti-human) agenda.
 Bush has plucked extremists from several pseudo-religious culture-war factions to represent the United States in high-level UN negotiations on such controversial issues as protecting children, combating AIDS, and the truly heinous Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. The Bushvolk have aligned the U.S. with enlightened states like Sudan, Iran and Iraq to thwart even these extremely modest attempts to provide a few scraps of human dignity to the &quot;insulted and injured,&quot; the weakest, most brutalized and vulnerable of our common species.
 Bush's Bug-Eyes say such efforts are &quot;unscriptural,&quot; and threaten the God-given order of slaveowning, childbeating, woman-hating and ethnic cleansing enshrined in that rattle bag of Bronze- Age texts called the Bible. And the polyp-less president agrees - for hath not the Lord made His healing light to shine upon His exalted servant's pure and gleaming colon? Therefore doth His appointed regent perform His work upon the earth.
 So this month, Bush will kowtow to the Bug-Eyes' fevered ignorance by officially eliminating America's $34 million contribution to UNFPA - a sum which he had previously approved, then &quot;froze&quot; in January, pending &quot;further investigation,&quot; i.e., investigation of the political impact of putting the lives of destitute women and their newborn babies above the financial loot he rakes in from well-wadded Bronze Age text-worshippers ranting and raving in their cozy suburban churches.
 Of course, that's a no-brainer - the money is out, The Washington Post reports. What's more, Bush will indulge himself in the further pleasure of humiliating the most powerful black man in America by insisting that Powell himself make the announcement - despite Powell's public approval of the program. The excuse will be that yet another investigation has found that UNFPA operates in some of the same counties where China's ubiquitous forced-abortion measures are active.
 Of course, that means the UN is actually offering an alternative to abortion in these areas. UNFPA's family-planning advice means fewer abortions around the world - by force in China, and in filthy backrooms in other desolate nations ruled by Bronze Age strictures. But logic doesn't operate in the gaseous moral swamp of fundamentalism.
 Every year, more than 78,000 women die as a result of illegal abortions. The annual total of pregnancy-related deaths - caused chiefly by poor prenatal care, malnutrition, disease and lack of contraception to help mothers space their childbirths - is 600,000. Every minute, a woman dies for want of the kind of services provided by UNFPA-and other private programs which Bush has stripped of U.S. funding.
 More dead women, more back-alley abortions, more AIDS, more poverty - that's &quot;family values&quot; in action!
 
 <i>
For annotational references, please see Global Eye in the &quot;Opinion&quot; section at www.sptimesrussia.com. </i>

TITLE: Ukraine Coal-Mine Fire Leaves 35 Dead
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: DONETSK, Ukraine -Two more people died from a fire in a coal mine in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region, bringing the death toll in the country's deadliest mine accident this year to 35, officials said Monday.
 
According to a preliminary investigation, a conveyor malfunction at the Ukraina mine in the town of Ukrainsk on Sunday prompted its line to catch fire some 352 meters underground, filling the shaft with smoke, mine officials said. Seventy-nine miners were rescued.
 Rescue teams initially found 30 dead miners in a trolley and three nearby; another body was found Monday.
 One miner also died at the hospital, mine trade union head Viktor Vernykovskyi said on Monday, adding that nine miners remain hospitalized, two in critical condition. The FireVictims ranged in age from 21 to 72.
 The miners died from suffocation after a wave of smoke filled the shaft.
 The dead miners had received respirators, according to officials, but were found without them. The lack of any earlier accidents from methane explosions at Ukraina mine could have lulled the miners into complacency and caused them to leave without the respirators, according to Valentyn Adamchuk, deputy head of the local miners' union.
 He also said that the respirators were outdated, and that the mine had ordered new respirators for all of the workers, but had not received them yet.
 The blaze likely resulted from neglect and slow reactions by the miners, according to Vernykovskyi.
 &quot;When I started to work at this mine in 1988, it had more automated equipment,'' he said. &quot;A worker controlled seven conveyors then, while today each conveyor is controlled by one worker, and even that one missed something.''
 Mine officials believe that unsafe conditions and unstable paychecks prompted many miners to quit, reducing professionalism.
 Ukraine's largely unprofitable mines have one of the world's highest accident rates due to poor maintenance and serious neglect of safety regulations. According to local mine-accident statistics, most of the accidents occur on holidays or weekends, because of lax attention to safety rules.
 More than 3,700 miners have been killed in job-related accidents in Ukraine since 1991. The State Labor Safety Committee says that 116 miners have been killed in Ukraine over the first six months of this year.

TITLE: Afghanis Mourn Slain Leader, Debate Murderers' Motives
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: KABUL - Abdul Qadir, the Afghan vice president and ethnic Pashtun leader assassinated Saturday, was mourned on Sunday amid heavy security at a prayer ceremony in the capital, then laid to rest in his native city of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan.
 
A spokesperson for Afghani President Hamid Karzai's government Monday asked international peacekeepers to help track down the killers.
 &quot;The transitional government of Afghanistan, at [Monday's] meeting, has decided to seek the help of ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] in the investigation of the assassination,'' the spokesperson, Sayed Fazel Akbar, said.
 Turkish Army Coloniel Samet Oz, the ISAF spokesperson, said on Monday that the Afghan government's request for assistance would be approved. 
 The atmosphere was grim in Kabul, where Qadir, 48, was gunned down along with his son-in-law, as his vehicle left the Public Works Ministry, where he had just assumed his duties as minister. 
 Thousands of Afghan citizens and Senior government leaders, including President Hamid Karzai, two former presidents, and several former militia leaders, attended the prayer ceremony at the vast Eid Gah mosque. 
 Qadir had been a controversial figure in Afghan politics, and there was speculation that the hit could have been carried out by drug barons or rival powerbrokers in Nangarhar.
 Earlier this year, Qadir's troops confiscated opium in the village of Ghani Khiel, the country's largest opium market. It was widely rumored that Qadir's men burned only 20 percent of the contraband and sold the rest. 
 Abdul Khader, a teacher of Islamic law at Kabul University, speculated that Qadir was killed either because of a private feud or murdered by al-Qaida.
 &quot;If it is al-Qaida [responsible for the hit], it means the other government ministers are also in danger,'' he said.
 Afghan government officials say that they are looking at all possible motives.
 
 - <i>NYT, WP </i>

TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: Deadly Chemical Spill 
 

BEIJING (AP) - Liquid ammonia spilled from a burst pipe at a fertilizer plant in eastern China on Monday, killing 13 people and injuring 11, a local official and state media said.
 The ammonia pipe, located in a workshop at the Shenxian County Fertilizer Company in Shandong province, burst around 2 a.m. (local time), the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
 One person died on the spot, Xinhua reported, and police and fire officials sent the injured to a nearby hospital.
 The exact causes of death were not immediately clear.
 It was not clear how many people were at work at the time, said an official from the provincial Work Safety Supervision Administration. He would only give his surname, Wang.
 A man who answered the phone at the factory would not comment.
 
 
March Turns Violent 
 

PORTADOWN, Northern Ireland (AP) - Protestant hard-liners battled riot police Sunday, after being barracadd against parading through the main Catholic section of Portadown, an annual confrontation that often triggers sectarian violence across Northern Ireland.
 The rioters, cheered on by several hundred members and supporters of the Orange Order brotherhood, injured 24 officers, four seriously, the Police Service of Northern Ireland said.
 Police charged into the mob after rioters battered down most of a 2-meter-high steel barrier across the roadway. They arrested three men and fired three plastic bullets, seriously injuring a rioter's arm. Several other Protestants suffered bruises and small cuts.
 The violence abated once British army engineers, protected by the riot police, erected a taller steel barrier. Police later fired water cannons at young men trying to cut through barbed-wire fences in surrounding pastures.
 
 
Nightclub Fire Kills 20
 

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) - A fire gutted four floors of a popular karaoke bar in Indonesia's South Sumatra province, killing at least 23 people, police said on Monday.
 Some people leapt to their deaths from the top of the four-floor bar in the provincial capital of Palembang, 290 kilometers northwest of Jakarta, as flames engulfed the roof late Sunday and early Monday, police Captain Arum Prioyono said.
 Police used explosives to blow up a hole in a nightclub wall to allow desperate patrons to escape the raging fire.
 The deadly blaze is believed to have been caused by a faulty electrical installation, he said.
 Prioyono added that the karaoke bar, located in a busy downtown shopping area, did not have proper fire exits and the only elevator was broken.
 
 
Deadly Flood in Manila
 

MANILA, Philippines (AP) - Monsoon winds and heavy rains lashed the Philippines over the weekend, flooding streets in the capital and killing at least 17 people, authorities said on Monday.
 The National Disaster Coordinating Council said three South Koreans died and two others were missing after their motorboat overturned in high waves on Saturday. Another seven people died in landslides, six drowned and one died in a weather-related car accident.
 About 14,773 people were evacuated to shelters in the Manila area and four outlying cities. 



TITLE: Hewitt, Williamses Dominate Wimbledon
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: WIMBLEDON, England - If there were ever any doubts about Lleyton Hewitt's status as the world's top men's player or about the domination of the womens' game by the Williams sisters, there aren't any more.
 
The 21-year-old Australian Hewitt crushed David Nalbandian in straight sets Sunday in the Wimbledon final to win his second Grand Slam title, solidify his No. 1 ranking and confirm the changing of the guard in men's tennis. Following Serena Williams' victory over her two-time defending-champion sister Venus, 7-6 (7-4), 6-3 on Saturday, the two teamed up to beat French Open champions Paola Suarez and Virginia Ruano Pascual 6-2, 7-5 Sunday to take the women's doubles title.
 In a men's draw where aging former champions Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi ost in the second round, Hewitt swept through without a hitch and put on a ruthless performance Sunday to win 6-1, 6-3, 6-2 in less than two hours.
 Hewitt became the youngest Wimbledon men's champion since Boris Becker won his second title in 1986 at age 18. His victory also was the most dominating final in terms of games lost since John McEnroe beat Jimmy Connors 6-1, 6-1, 6-2 in 1984.
 The match shaped up as a mismatch: the top-seeded Hewitt against No. 28 Nalbandian, a 20-year-old Argentine playing in his first grass-court tournament and his first match on Centre Court.
 And a mismatch it was.
 Hewitt never wavered, whipping his ground strokes with power and precision, dictating the points, making very few errors. Nalbandian couldn't cope with the occasion or Hewitt's supremacy, making countless unforced errors.
 Hewitt's only show of nerves came when he served a double fault on his first match point at 5-2, 40-0. But when Nalbandian hit a shot long on the next point, Hewitt fell onto his back in exhilaration
 He got back to his feet and slammed a ball into the crowd. After shaking hands with Nalbandian, Hewitt left his racket on his chair and pumped his fists above his head to the crowd.
 Hewitt then climbed up through the stands to the guest box, emulating the celebrations of Pat Cash, the last Australian to win Wimbledon in 1987.
 Hewitt embraced his coach, Jason Stoltenberg; kissed his girlfriend, Kim Clijsters; and hugged his parents before returning to the court to accept the winner's trophy.
 Hewitt, who won the U.S. Open last September, has now added the most prestigious title in tennis to his resume and validated his legitimacy as the top dog in the game.
 And he did it without any of the controversy that has dogged his career: no tantrums, no abrasive behavior, no tirades at umpires or line judges.
 Hewitt, who dropped only two sets in the tournament, seemed to come of age both on and off the court.
 What's more, he became the first baseliner to win Wimbledon since 1992.
 The statistics told the story: Hewitt, the more aggressive player, had 30 winners and 25 unforced errors, while Nalbandian had only 12 winners and 41 unforced errors.
 Hewitt broke eight times, while Nalbandian converted on only two of 10 break chances.
 Nalbandian, the first player to reach the final in his Wimbledon debut, had played all of his previous matches on outside courts or Court 1. He made it onto Centre Court for the first time Sunday morning for a 30-minute practice session with his coach.
 But he was clearly shaken by the occasion. He double faulted to open the match, was broken in the first game and never really recovered as Hewitt grabbed the match by the throat and didn't let go. Nalbandian double-faulted to drop the first set.
 There was some light relief during a 15-minute rain break with Hewitt up 1-0 in the second set. A male streaker shed his clothes and shoes on Centre Court, did a little dance and somersaulted over the net before being escorted away with a red sheet around him.
 Serena Williams' win on Saturday came in a match where the two sisters put on a pulsating display that featured more stellar shots than their title matches at the U.S. Open and French Open combined.
 &quot;It was really fun,&quot; Serena said. &quot;We were really serving and returning. Venus was running down balls. I was running down a lot of balls, too. It was a good match to watch.&quot;
 There's now little doubt that Serena is No. 1, which she was for the first time in Monday's new rankings.
 Serena didn't drop a set en route to her first Wimbledon championship, has won a season-best 19 straight matches, and is 36-3 with a tour-leading five titles in 2002.
 Plus, she's beaten her older sister three straight times to pull within 5-4 in their pro careers. At 20, Serena is 15 months younger.
 &quot;She was just tremendous today,&quot; said Venus, who drops to second in the rankings. &quot;There wasn't a lot between us. Just on some of those points, she was getting some that I couldn't get.&quot;
 Particularly in the first set, each Williams was at the top of her game. They traded powerful strokes and dueling grunts from the baseline, aiming for the lines - and hitting them.
 It came down to two key statistics. Serena had more winners, 20-14, and Venus had more double faults, 6-2.
 The last came on break point in the eighth game of the second set, on a serve that fluttered over the net at 106 kilometers per hour and landed 15 centimeters wide. Quite out of character for four-time major champion Venus, who regularly tops 160 kilometers perhour, but had a sore right shoulder. She stretched it during the last changeover and after the match.
 &quot;I noticed it. Definitely,&quot; said Serena, who won the family's first major title at the 1999 U.S. Open. &quot;If I'm a competitor, I'm going to have to notice it. Unfortunately, it's like a war out there. If there's a weakness, someone's going to have to be attacked.&quot;
 Todd Woodbridge won his seventh Wimbledon men's doubles title on Sunday when he and his Swedish partner Jonas Bjorkman defeated Daniel Nestor and Mark Knowles 6-1, 6-2, 6-7 (7-5) in the final.
 Woodbridge teamed up with fellow Australian Mark Woodforde to win six men's doubles crowns at Wimbledon, including five straight from 1993 to 1997. 
 He now stands just one title short of the record held jointly by Wimbledon-born brothers Hugh and Reginald Doherty, who won eight in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the defending champions only played the final.
 
 <i>- AP, Reuters </i>

TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Inkster on Target
 

HUTCHINSON, Kansas (Reuters) - Juli Inkster fired a closing 66 to win her second U.S. Women's Open title by two shots over Sweden's world No. 1 Annika Sorenstam on Sunday.
 The 42-year-old American's four-under-par round equalled the best score of the week and gave her a four-under final total of 276. It was the seventh major victory of Inkster's career and earned her a first prize of $535,000.
 Sorenstam, 31, bidding to win the tournament for the third time, carded an even-par 70 for 278, and was the only other player in the field to complete the 72 holes under par at the Prairie Dunes Country Club.
 
 
Johnson Resting
 

MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin (Reuters) - Randy Johnson of the Arizona Diamondbacks was one of three pitchers to withdraw on Sunday from Tuesday's All-Star Game.
 Johnson joined Tom Glavine of the Atlanta Braves and Matt Morris of the St Louis Cardinals in withdrawing from the National League's pitching staff.
 An announcement was made during Arizona's home game with the San Francisco Giants that Johnson was pulling out of the All-Star Game so that he could get some extra rest ahead of Thursday's matchup with the Los Angeles Dodgers.
 
 
Home, Sweet Home
 

EINDHOVEN, Netherlands (Reuters) - Guus Hiddink, who took South Korea to the World Cup semi-finals, is to return as coach to Dutch first division side PSV Eindhoven.
 "Coach Guus Hiddink has given a definitive answer and will coach the club's first team for the next two seasons," PSV Eindhoven said in a statement on Monday.
 Hiddink, 55, coached South Korea for 18 months. They beat Poland, Portugal, Italy and Spain and finished fourth in the best World Cup showing by an Asian team in the tournament's 72-year history.
 
Russia's New Chief
 

MOSCOW (Reuters) - CSKA Moscow coach Valery Gazzayev replaced Oleg Romantsev as Russia national team coach on Monday and immediately pledged to change the team's management style.
 "This is a new chapter in the national team. My first steps as head coach will be to make the national team open to the media and to the public," Gazzayev told a news conference after his unanimous appointment by the Russian Football Union (RFU).
 Gazzayev, 48 next month, was Russia's under-21 coach last year before joining CSKA and leading them to the Russian Cup in May. He is to stay on as CSKA coach until the end of the year.
 Vyacheslav Koloskov, RFU president, said Gazzayev had been the sole candidate presented to the union's 24-member executive board.
 After Russia's early exit from the World Cup, top oil executives offered to pay up to $1 million per year to hire a foreign coach and an opinion poll showed an overwhelming majority of Russians favoured hiring someone from abroad.
 Koloskov said that there was no justification for the proposal.
 "Initially, we had in mind six foreign coaches and three Russians," Koloskov told reporters. "I spoke directly myself with some candidates while I had enough information on the others to make the right choice."
 
 The New Kids
 n ALMATY, Kazakhstan (Reuters) - Kazakhstan outplayed Estonia but was held to a 1-1 draw in its first international as a member of European soccer union UEFA on Sunday.
 Both goals came within two minutes at the end of the first half, Oleg Litvinenko putting Kazakhstan ahead after 38 minutes before Meelis Rooba equalised two minutes later.
 Kazakhstan, inspired by substitute Alibek Buleshev, dominated after the break, but could not score again on a hot summer evening in Almaty.
 "It was an average match but Kazakhstan had the better chances," Alim Anapyanov, editor of the Kazakh twice-weekly newspaper Pro-Sport, said. "You can say we've registered as Europeans. A draw in our first game in Europe isn't bad."