SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #789 (54), Friday, July 26, 2002
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TITLE: Chagall Work Found in Post Office
AUTHOR: By Claire Bigg
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: While its whereabouts between its disappearance after a reception in New York last year and its resurfacing in a post office in Kansas this January remain a mystery, the return of a work worth $1 million by Russian artist Marc Chagall has the State Russian Museum all in smiles.
 The painting, entitled "Old Vitebsk," was returned to the museum late last week and displayed on Wednesday at a press conference organized by the museum.
 The painting had been stolen on the night of June 7 last year, from the New York Jewish Museum, where it was on display as part of a temporary exhibition entitled "Marc Chagall: Early Works from the Russian Collections."
 According to information given to the State Russian Museum by American investigators, the theft was committed around the time of a reception hosted by the museum, which was attended by 200 guests who were given access to the museum.
 The next morning, in the process of cleaning up after the event, a bolt became lodged in the vacuum cleaner being used by a museum employee, who looked up to discover from where the bolt had come, only to realize that the picture was gone, Ivan Karlov, the chief curator of the State Russian Museum, said on Wednesday.
 Then, on January 23, the painting was found among unreclaimed pieces of mail at the post office of the town of Topeka, Kansas.
 "It is likely that the thief was one of the guests or a museum employee. This person probably returned the painting because he or she felt guilty, or became afraid of the consequences," said Karlov.
 "The post-office employee who found the package understood what it was and phoned the police immediately. It is like a movie," said Karlov at Wednesday's press conference. "The theft was not committed in Russia though, so we don't have access to a lot of information. The FBI is reluctant to release more information."
 The investigation into the theft is being carried out by the New York City Police Department and by Cunningham Lindsey International, a detective firm that specializes in locating stolen works of art. The detective firm was contracted by the Westchester Fire Insurance Company, which insures all items exhibited at the New York Jewish Museum. 
 The painting has been part of the Russian Museum's depository fund since 1992, but is owned by a private collector from St. Petersburg, who wished to remain anonymous for personal security reasons.
 "I can tell you that the owner feared for his life. He changed his address and was hiding," Karlov said after the press conference. "The theft was a real ordeal for him."
 Museum officials were quick to counter any suggestions that the returned painting could be a counterfeit. On June 19, the day the painting was returned to the State Russian Museum, 10 experts performed an examination of the painting, including X-ray analysis, in the presence of the owner of the work and Susan Goodman, a representative of the New York Jewish Museum. According to State Russian Museum officials, the results proved that the painting returned to St. Petersburg is the original.
 "The painting has undergone a thorough examination and we are 100, no, 200-percent sure that the painting that was returned to the museum is the one that was stolen," Karlov said.
 In response to a suggestion from one reporter that the whole episode could have been part of a publicity stunt on the part of the Russian museum, the museum's director, Vladimir Gusev, replied dryly "I doubt that the Russian State Museum or Marc Chagall really need to go looking for publicity."
 Gusev said that, in accordance with the wishes of the owner, the painting has now been returned the State Russian Museum's depository fund.
 "This incident will not prevent the painting from being kept by the museum and featured in further exhibitions abroad, as it has been over the past 10 years," he said.
 "Old Vitebsk," dated 1914 and portraying the artist's native city, is a sketch for one of Chagall's most famous works, "Over Vitebsk," currently exhibited in the New York Museum of Modern Art.

TITLE: Bombing Suspect Denies Guilt
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko said Thursday that he has heard from the main suspect in the 1999 apartment bombings, who claims he had nothing to do with the explosions and was set up by a childhood friend he suspects was an FSB agent.
 
Litvinenko, who fled to Britain two years ago, spoke by video link from London to an independent commision created by a group of liberal lawmakers to investigate the bombings. He presented the statement from Achemez Gochiyayev, the FSB's most-wanted man, as evidence supporting his own claim that the Federal Security Service, and not Chechen rebels, engineered the series of blasts.
 "Gochiyayev provided us with material that is very important for establishing the truth," Litvinenko said.
 A six-page statement from Gochiyayev said he had rented warehouse space at several locations in southern Moscow, including in the two apartment buildings that were blown up, but that he did so at the request of his friend and business associate, whom he did not name.
 The explosions in 1999, the first on Ulitsa Guryanova on Sept. 9 and the second on Kashirskoye Shosse on Sept. 13, claimed the lives of 94 and 130 sleeping Muscovites, respectively. Another powerful blast killed 17 in the southern city of Volgodonsk on Sept. 16.
 The FSB has alleged that Chechen warlord Khattab paid Gochiyayev $500,000 to organize the bombings. Khattab was killed this year.
 Gochiyayev said he figured out that the space he had rented had been used to store explosives and execute the attacks only after the second Moscow blast. He said he then called police and rescue services and warned them that more explosions could occur at two other locations where he was renting space in southern Moscow: in the Kapotnya neighborhood and on Ulitsa Borisovskiye Prudy.
 Authorities said Sept. 14 that they had found explosives and detonators in a building on Ulitsa Borisovskiye Prudy and prevented another tragedy.
 Litvinenko asked the commission members to urge investigators to verify that Gochiyayev had placed the calls. 
 Litvinenko also said investigators should examine a photograph the FSB released that is said to show Gochiyayev posing with Khattab. He said a British forensic imagery analyst could not say for sure whether the man in the photo was in fact Gochiyayev.
 The analyst, Geoffrey Oxlee, confirmed in a telephone interview that this was the case, The Associated Press reported.
 No FSB representatives were present at the commission's meeting Thursday, and no one answered the telephone Thursday afternoon in the FSB press office.
 In an interview with Interfax, an FSB spokesperson said the agency wanted nothing to do with Litvinenko and would not take his information seriously.
 "We do not intend to take part in the PR campaign of some dubious personalities or, all the more, to get engaged in polemics with them," the spokesperson said.
 Last month, Litvinenko was convicted in absentia of abuse of office and stealing explosives and given a 3 1/2-year suspended sentence. His troubles with the FSB began in 1998 when he accused his superiors of ordering him to kill Boris Berezovsky, who at the time was a Kremlin insider.
 FSB official Ivan Mironov said on NTV television that another suspect in the case, Adam Dekkushev, who was extradited to Moscow following his arrest in Georgia earlier this month, had implicated Chechens, including associates of Gochiyayev, in the bombings.
 Members of the commission agreed Thursday that Livinenko's claims need to be verified but are worth looking into.
 "So far Gochiyayev's claims cannot be either denied or confirmed," said Karina Moskalenko, a prominent human rights lawyer.
 Litvinenko, who co-authored a book accusing his FSB superiors of carrying out the bombings, said he was put in contact with Gochiyayev through a go-between. Litninenko said he sent questions for Gochiyayev, and he received back Gochiyayev's taped answers. This tape was not shown Thursday, however.
 Instead, Litvinenko presented a six-page statement that he said Gochiyayev sent him in April.
 Litvinenko has been closely associated with Berezovsky, who lives in self-imposed exile in Europe to escape Russian criminal charges that he says are politically driven. In recent months, Berezovsky also has accused the FSB of complicity in the 1999 bombings.
 Such suspicions, which appeared shortly after the bombings, were fueled by the lightning speed with which the remnants of the Ulitsa Guryanova building were hauled away just three days after the explosion, in what some saw as an attempt to cover up traces of foul play. 
 But the strongest tide of speculation came when a vigilant resident in Ryazan spotted two men unloading sacks into the basement of his apartment building on Sept. 23, 1999, and contacted police. 
 Upon inspection, local residents found that the sacks were wired to a detonator and a watch, and an initial test exposed vapors of hexogen. 
 However, FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev said soon afterward that the sacks had contained sugar and were planted as a dummy bomb to test the vigilance of local law enforcement and residents.

TITLE: Sorokin Summoned On Charges
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Writer Vladimir Sorokin, who is being investigated for pornography for a novel depicting sexual contact between Josef Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev, has been summoned for questioning by investigators, his lawyer Alexander Glushenkov, said on Thursday. "I don't expect anything unusual, anything dramatic," Glushenkov said. "I think the prosecutor understands that he doesn't have a very strong case."
 
Authorities opened the investigation into Sorokin after a complaint that Sorokin's 1999 book "Goluboye Salo" contained pornography.
 The publisher of the book, Ad Marginem director Alexander Ivanov, was questioned by prosecutors Thursday about the case, in which he is also named.
 On Thursday the Moscow prosecutor's office ruled his second book, "Ice," to be free of pornographic content.

TITLE: Last Residents Abandon Fallen Building
AUTHOR: By Claire Bigg
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The last 22 people still living in the partly-collapsed building at 8 Dvinskaya Ulitsa were evacuated in the early morning on Tuesday after one of the residents alerted the Emergency Situations Department (ESD) to concerns that the building might collapse entirely.
 
City authorities were quick to claim on Tuesday that the fears were unfounded, although the residents were relocated, leaving the operator of one local hotel angry.
 The collapse of one of the four sections of the nine-story apartment building on June 3, 2002, claimed three lives, and one other person is still reported as missing.
 The majority of residents in the remaining three sections of the building left within days of the accident, fearing that the structure was unsound.
 At 3 a.m. on Tuesday, one of the remaining residents called the ESD to report that a metal band that had been fixed over one of the cracks caused by the collapse to warn if the crack was growing in size, had broken. An operational group from the ESD rushed to the scene, together with specialists from Lenenergo, Lengaz and Vodokanal, city emergency rescue services, and representatives from law-enforcement organs.
 The residents were evacuated to a nearby hotel at 12 Gapsalskaya Ul.
 Interfax quoted Vladimir Khrenov, the head of the Committee for Apartment Maintenance, as saying on Tuesday that the investigation of the building had determined that the structure was safe.
 "The destruction of the metal band was most likely done intentionally. All of the other bands are in the exact same condition as when they were installed," Khrenov said. 
 Alexander Afanasiyev, the spokesperson for Governor Vladimir Yakovlev, also describes the allegations as false.
 "The conclusion of the investigation is that the building is safe," Afanasiyev said in a telephone interview on Thursday. "The governor, however, understands that, psychologically, the residents are afraid of staying in the building. This is why he has provided them with new housing," he added.
 "Tuesday's call can be compared to telephone terrorism: We are almost 100-percent sure that the claim is false, but we still have to check," Afanasiyev added. "Even if the band didn't break on its own, it was necessary to evacuate the building and carry out an assessment."
 Kommersant reported on Wednesday that, according to a source in the ESD, the residents had broken the band themselves with the aim of accelerating the relocation process.
 "Some of the residents stayed behind for various reasons," Afanasiyev said. "Most of them, though, were hoping to obtain a better housing deal from the administration," Afanasiyev said. 
 He added that the people made homeless by the collapse were given a good deal in their relocation, with the new rooms and apartments they received being more comfortable than the ones they had occupied on Dvinskaya Ulitsa.
 Nikolai Morozan, the general director of the hybrid hotel and sanatorium to which the 22 remaining residents were relocated, turned out to be among those unsatisfied with the event.
 "The head of the Kirovsky district administration, Vyacheslav Krylov, called me at home at 5 a.m. on Tuesday, and asked me to accommodate 22 people," he said in an interview on Thursday. "These people, however, were far from being model guests, with the exception of one family. They didn't return the keys when they went, and left a mess behind them."
 "We are still cleaning and airing the rooms. They were very apathetic and it seemed to me that some of them were either on drugs or had been drinking," Morozan added. "I didn't get the impression that they really cared about where they would be taken."
 A source in the ESD, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said on Thursday that it had found some of the residents to be heavily intoxicated at the time of the building's evacuation.
 The last of the 22 people left the hotel on Thursday morning, and it is still unclear where they are at present.
 Morozan said that all had left the hotel of their own volition, and that most of them had gone to relatives or to their dachas. He also said that the bill for the three nights at the hotel had not been paid.
 "When I was asked to accommodate these people, I agreed because I felt it was my patriotic duty, and I did not ask about payment. Since then the administration has not brought up the topic," he said.
 While Krylov could not be reached for comment on Thursday, Afanasiyev, said that the administration would cover the hotel bill in the near future.

TITLE: Officials Underline Need For Census
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Isachenkov
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia's first post-Soviet nationwide census, scheduled for October, is crucial for understanding a country whose face has radically changed in a decade of political and economic turmoil, officials and pollsters said Tuesday.
 
"The census is a project of national significance that is even more important than a presidential election," said Alexander Oslon, the head of the Public Opinion Foundation, a leading polling group. "The country must know itself and get an adequate and realistic self-assessment."
 About half a million questioners will conduct the census, which is expected to cost about 5 billion rubles ($161 million), Sergei Kolesnikov, a deputy head of the State Statistics Committee, said at a news conference.
 The census' results will be essential for the government to make economic and social plans, and also for demographic researchers and other scientists who have been longing for a precise data on sweeping changes in the population's structure, Kolesnikov said.
 The last Soviet census was held in 1989. 
 In the years that followed, botched free-market reforms reduced a large part of the population to poverty.
 Economic woes, declining medical care and emigration triggered a population decline unprecedented for an industrialized nation not at war: Russia's population has dwindled by half a million people or more every year during the last decade, and stood at 144 million at the start of this year, according to government estimates.
 Major changes in the census are expected in figures relating to employment, sources of income and education levels.
 Census organizers have tried to play down concerns that the project could be thwarted by the fear of letting strangers into their homes and the popular reluctance to share information with authorities. The census-takers will wear easily recognizable badges and work in close contact with police and local officials to dispel fears, Oslon said.
 Oslon said that according to a recent nationwide poll of 1,500 conducted by his organization, 88 percent of respondents said they would take part in the census. Three percent said they would boycott the census, according to the poll, which had a margin of error of about 3.5 percent.
 But skeptics have warned that along with the fear of burglary, many people could be reluctant to share information about themselves, fearing that the authorities could use it to track down their real incomes.
 Kolesnikov said that the questionnaires will be anonymous and won't ask about the size of incomes, only their source.

TITLE: EU Standing Firm on Kaliningrad Question
AUTHOR: By Steve Gutterman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russian and European Union officials stuck to their positions Wednesday in the dispute over Russia's Baltic Sea exclave of Kaliningrad, an increasingly sore spot in their relations as the EU expands into eastern Europe.
 
The EU will be flexible in talks with Moscow on the thorny issue, but stands firm on its demand that residents of the region obtain visas to travel by land to the rest of Russia when Poland and Lithuania join the EU, the EU executive commission's top representative in Moscow said.
 The governor of the Kaliningrad region, Vladimir Yegorov, said a visa requirement would violate human rights and that Russia wouldn't back down. Citing support from French President Jacques Chirac for Russia's position, Yegorov said he was confident the EU will soften its stance.
 "We expect a change," he told a news conference Wednesday.
 But the head of the European Commission's delegation in Russia, Richard Wright, said the EU requires visas for Russians entering its member countries and there will be no exception on Lithuania and Poland when they are granted EU membership as expected in 2004.
 "The ground rules with Russia are clear, and they will remain for the time being," Wright said. He said that the EU might eventually drop the visa requirements for Russians, but stressed that no such proposal is now under consideration.
 The EU requires visas for citizens of some 120 to 130 countries, Wright said, citing concerns including crime, drug trafficking and illegal immigration.
 Yegorov called for transport corridors allowing Russians to travel through Lithuania without full border controls. "The Russian position is aimed to protect the sovereignty of Russia, to protect rights and to protect the territorial integrity of Russia," he said.
 He said he hoped EU officials would listen to Chirac, who said after talks with President Vladimir Putin last week that it would be "unacceptable" to require Russians to get visas "to go from one part of Russia to the other."
 The Kaliningrad issue is emotional in Russia, where the territory is a symbol of the hard-won victory in World War II - a matter of fierce pride for the country. Formerly called Koenigsberg, it was seized from defeated Nazi Germany by the Soviet Union.
 One journalist at the news conference suggested the EU's plans to admit Poland and Lithuania amounted to German revenge, and stood up and threw anti-EU pamphlets in Wright's face, and left the room. Two young men who said they were from a nationalist newspaper then stood up and chanted "The EU is worse than the SS" and "Hands off Kaliningrad."

TITLE: RTS Undergoes Worst Day in 17 Months
AUTHOR: By Victoria Lavrentieva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - After resisting the bear market that has been mauling investors around the world for weeks, Russia's stock market finally capitulated Wednesday, plunging 7.4 percent in the largest one-day loss in 17 months.<i>
 </i>
On Thursday, stocks yielded early gains by the end of the day, led down by Unified Energy Systems after the release of negative U.S. indicators hit sentiment still shaky after Wednesday's sell-off. 
 The benchmark RTS index closed down 1.32 percent at 320.67 on turnover of $28.8 million. 
 &quot;Today is the first day that the Russian market gave in to the global downside trend,&quot; said Dmitry Kulyashenets, a trader at investment bank Renaissance Capital, speaking on Wednesday.
 The benchmark dollar-denominated RTS index gave up 26 points to close at 325 on modest turnover of $26 million.
 The ruble-based MICEX, dominated by domestic investors, fell 6.47 percent to 1,313.56 on turnover of 3.89 billion rubles ($123 million). Russian shares trading on foreign markets were off 11.02 percent, according to Reuters.
 If there is a bright spot, traders said, it is that the RTS hit only a four-month low, and is still up some 25 percent on the year, compared to the five and six-year lows posted by battered European and American markets Wednesday.
 Nonetheless, Russian blue chips - none of which ended in positive territory Wednesday - lost billions in market capitalization.
 Hardest hit was the oil and gas sector, the mainstay of the economy.
 Natural gas monopoly Gazprom, the nation's largest company, shed a record 12 percent to close at 75 cents on nearly $10 million in trades. Trailing closely were oil majors Sibneft, down 11.4 percent to $1.72, market leader Yukos, which lost 8.4 percent to end at $8.57, and Surgutneftegaz, which shed 7.95 percent to end at $0.35.
 In other sectors of the economy, Unified Energy Systems, the most actively traded company, was the victim of a massive sell-off, closing down 6.23 percent to 96 cents. National long-distance operator Rostelekom gave up 7.24 percent.
 The message is clear, said James Fenkner, chief strategist at investment bank Troika Dialog: &quot;Russia is finally catching up to the rest of the world - since July 8, the global oils, including Exxon, British Petroleum and Shell are down 25 percent.&quot;

TITLE: Local Bank Gets S&amp;P Rating
AUTHOR: By Angelina Davydova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Standard &amp; Poor's Ratings Service announced on Wednesday that it has for the first time assigned a rating to a St. Petersburg bank, Menatep.
 
Standard &amp; Poor's is one of the leading rating agencies in the world, having been founded in 1860. The company evaluates creditors risks and assigns ratings to countries, sub-sovereign institutions, financial institutions and companies. 
 S&amp;P has been working in Russia since 1996 and at the moment Russia's sovereign rating is B+. According to S&amp;P rules, no domestic borrower can have a higher rating than that given to the state within which it operates. At present, only one Russian bank, the International Moscow Bank, has a B- rating.
 Menatep St. Petersburg was assigned CCC long-term and CCC short-term ratings and its outlook deemed stable, the official statement from the ratings agency said. &quot;The ratings on Menatep are constrained by the high-risk operating environment in Russia, and Menatep's relatively weak financial profile, small capital base, and large single-party exposures. Positive rating factors include Menatep's good commercial profile and widespread retail network, which provide the bank with excellent potential to improve its market position,&quot; said S&amp;P analyst Ekaterina Trofimova in the statement.
 &quot;The bank also benefits commercially from its membership in Group Menatep, a financial-industrial group that includes Yukos, Russia's second-largest oil company,&quot; Trofimova added.
 Bank Menatep Moscow was also a member of the same financial-industrial group, but when it went bankrupt following the 1998 crisis, the Menatep group shifted much of its banking business to Menatep St. Petersburg. 
 By the end of March 2002, Menatep St. Petersburg had consolidated assets of $950 million and 2,700 employees. 
 &quot;MSPb has significant credit exposure to Gazprom through loans to Gazprom group members and through Gazprom securities in its investment portfolio,&quot; S&amp;P analysts said in a statement.
 The bank was already assigned ratings by one other credit agency, Fitch IBCA, which put it at B+ short-term and B- long-term, though the St. Petersburg Bank of Reconstruction and Development already has such a rating.
 In a telephone interview on Thursday, Trofimova said that S&amp;P is now considering other St. Petersburg banks for ratings. &quot;But ratings are only important for those banks who act as independent financial institutions - not as affiliate structures of Moscow or foreign banks - and are on the external market in their own right,&quot; she said. 
 Trofimova added that the key issue being examined is the way in which local banks are set to develop in the future.
 Many banking experts maintain that S&amp;P is now being cautious in its evaluations following the 1998 economic crisis, when rating agencies failed to predict the disaster that hit the banking sector. 
 Scott Bugie, managing director of S&amp;P's Paris office, said in an interview a year ago that &quot;Till spring 1998, all the banks that failed had good ratings, but in May [1998] we changed the outlook for negatives and decided to wait. Later, already after default, we lowered the rating to D. But anyway, none of the rating agencies can predict a global economic crisis - we just evaluate the borrower's ability to repay its debts.&quot;

TITLE: Kasyanov Sets Tough Deadline for Meeting IAS Standards
AUTHOR: By Torrey Clark
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov emerged from a four-hour meeting with business leaders late Tuesday and announced that all Russian companies must switch to international accounting standards by Jan. 1, 2004.
 
After his meeting with the Council of Entrepreneurship, which complained bitterly about Russian accounting standards, Kasyanov ordered the Finance Ministry to develop a step-by-step plan for the transition by the start of next year, according to the government's Web site.
 While Russian accounting standards have changed over the past decade, accounting experts say that they do not reflect companies' performance as well as international standards and that results are less transparent.
 Auditors and market participants called the 18-month transition period highly ambitious but overdue, and said that the transition will require an intensive education effort by companies, accountants and auditors. While roughly half of Russia's blue chip companies produce accounts to IAS or generally accepted accounting principles, thousands of other domestic companies, as well as their accountants and auditors, only follow Russian standards.
 Leonid Shneidman, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers in Moscow, said that the change will require a colossal amount of preparatory work, such as amending legislation, improving the translation of the standards into Russian, implementing effective mechanisms for using the new standards in statistics and calculating tax, as well as retraining personnel, which is key.
 &quot;It is asking an awful lot for accountants and auditors to become as familiar with IAS as they are with local standards in 18 months,&quot; said John Davies, head of business law at the Association of Chartered Certified Accounts, the world's largest global accountancy body.
 The move reflects the international trend toward using one set of standards, making financial results more comparable worldwide.
 &quot;It is another step closer to the world for Russia,&quot; said Stephen Moosbrugger, chief executive partner of Ernst &amp; Young in Moscow.
 The Foreign Investment Advisory Council had originally recommended the country make the move to IAS in 2000.
 &quot;For us, 2004 is behind the schedule we'd originally hoped for,&quot; said Moosbrugger, who is an FIAC coordinator. &quot;If they decide to switch over, there will be a moment of pain.&quot;
 The move would put Russia ahead of the European Union, where companies will make the transition by 2005. It may also put the country slightly ahead of the International Accounting Standards Board, which is updating IAS with an eye on the EU's transition, Davies said.
 The changeover has raised fears among some enterprises that IAS will show financial results in a negative light. Many banks, for whom the 2004 deadline had previously been announced, have resisted the changeover, fearing they would be bankrupt under the new standards.
 The issue is not clear cut, accounting experts say. The main concern in the United States - that new standards for reporting stock options and pension-fund returns will hit profits - are not likely to have any impact on Russian companies. The effect of the changeover will be entirely different for each company.
 &quot;It is hard to quantify, even for types of business, how this will affect earnings,&quot; Moosbrugger said. &quot;We've seen it go all different ways.&quot;

TITLE: Russia Compromises in Chicken War
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia has agreed to a six-week extension on soon-to-expire veterinary certificates needed for imports of U.S. poultry, Interfax quoted First Deputy Agriculture Minister Sergei Dankvert as saying Thursday. 
 
That will allow poultry trade, effectively frozen for the past two weeks, to resume until new certificates come into effect in mid-September. 
 Dankvert said the exact dates would be given in official documents due to be signed Friday. 
 Sales of U.S. poultry were effectively suspended earlier this month after the two countries failed to agree on how U.S. firms would comply with new Russian import standards that are due to take effect Aug. 1.
 The government imposed a ban on U.S. poultry imports in March, citing concerns about sanitary conditions at U.S. plants and cases of salmonella in imported chicken.
 The ban was lifted a month later, after the United States promised to tighten export controls, but new bureaucratic hurdles have delayed a full resumption of imports.
 Prior to the dispute, U.S. producers in 38 states sent $600 million to $700 million worth of poultry to Russia each year - making chicken the largest U.S. export to Russia.
 Profits at U.S. meat companies suffered in the second quarter of this year after a domestic glut, caused by Russia's March ban, forced price cuts.
 
 <i>- SPT, Reuters, AP </i>

TITLE: Satellites To Map Out Russian Territory
AUTHOR: By Robin Munro
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia is looking to take a lesson in German accuracy by using digital land-measurement techniques to bring the country's surveying technology and records up to date.
 
The project will use Russian satellites from the GLONASS system, foreign GPS satellites and German-made ground stations to process the information received from the satellites and produce digital land maps to an accuracy of less than one centimeter - techniques that were applied in the former East Germany after Germany's reunification a decade ago.
 German high-tech firm AJZ Engineering has been contracted to provide technology and know-how to the program, which will be staffed by Russians and has the backing of the Russian and German governments.
 &quot;The project has a special priority for both countries because it is the basis of a land registry and will open the door to investment,&quot; said Peter Lindauer, head of AJZ Engineering's office in Moscow. &quot;It will facilitate land sales and help clarify ownership issues in Russia.
 &quot;A land market can only exist when there is a clear definition of the boundaries of land plots; without such definitions, investors will not buy,&quot; he said.
 The project follows a government order issued in March of last year that urged the introduction of an automatic system of land measurement and a real-estate register between 2002 and 2007.
 Shortly afterward, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder signed a memorandum with Russian officials on cooperation in the field of land cadasters. As part of the agreement, the German side promised 49 million Deutschemarks ($25.3 million) to help create a satellite system for land surveying.
 &quot;The German government supports the project because it can create legal title for private land so that German investors will come to Russia,&quot; Lindauer said. &quot;If investors cannot be certain about the ownership or extent of land they are interested in, they won't buy and won't build a factory or any other development on it.&quot;
 The first phase of the project is to map the northwest of Russia, starting with St. Petersburg.
 &quot;The initial project will cover a significant part of the country that includes the most important economic zone in Russia,&quot; Lindauer said. &quot;What lies beyond the northwest region is not economically so interesting, and after we are finished, Russia will have to decide how much it wants to extend it.&quot;
 Lindauer declined to reveal the amount of money involved in the project but said, &quot;When you think what can be achieved with this development ... it's not much money.&quot;
 German export-guarantee agency Hermes has already allocated money to the project, and all that remains is for the Russian government to commit itself financially to the project, Lindauer said.
 Spokespeople for Hermes and the German Ministry of Economics and Technology said they were unable to comment on the project. But Alexander Melnikov, general director of Goszemkadastrsyomka, a division of the Federal Land Cadaster Service, which has been involved in preparing the project, said that there was a good chance that the government would commit to the project soon.
 &quot;We are doing everything so that the order will be given,&quot; he said in a telephone interview.
 Sergei Sai, head of the Federal Land Cadaster Service, has discussed the program with Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref and is expected to discuss it with Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, Melnikov said.
 Melnikov said that preparations have been under way for about two years and that almost all technical problems have been solved. Contracts have been signed that will come into force as soon as the governmental order is signed, he said.
 Lindauer said that, as well as furthering the development of the real estate market in Russia, stimulating more effective land use and improving land tax collection, the land measurement project could have scientific benefits, as well.

TITLE: Russian Engines Compete At Airshow
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: FARNBOROUGH, England - The Sukhoi-led Russian Regional Jet project got off the ground Wednesday as the company identified a shortlist of producers to supply the engine for the family of regional jets slated to enter the market in five years.
 
Sukhoi picked two possible engines for the project: the SM146 engine, jointly developed by France's Snecma and Moscow's NPO Saturn, and the PW800 engine of Pratt&amp;Whitney Canada and the Perm-based Aviadvigatel design bureau.
 General Electric and Rolls-Royce, both of which offered existing engines, were phased out of the tender, Sukhoi General Director Mikhail Pogosyan said at a news conference Wednesday. He said that one of the reasons behind the decision was the fact that the two firms had not entered into an alliance with Russian companies.
 Pogosyan said that Sukhoi would identify the engine supplier by Dec. 20.
 A consortium led by Sukhoi is the favorite to win a government tender to develop and produce the family of small commercial jets.
 The tender commission, under the auspices of the Russian Aviation and Space Agency, has sent out letters to all major aircraft designers and producers, including Ilyushin, Tupolev, Sukhoi, MiG and Yakovlev, and expects proposals to be filed by the end of October. The commission will identify the winner in November and pencil the project into the state civil-aviation development plan.
 Andrei Ilyin, general director of the Sukhoi civil-aircraft division, said that the winner should be able to count on government funding for about 10 percent to 15 percent of the total $600 million that he estimates participants will have to sink into the project.
 Sukhoi has teamed up with Boeing and Ilyushin, and this month it also welcomed the Yakovlev design bureau into the consortium.
 Sergei Kravchenko, vice president of Boeing Russia/CIS, played down speculation at the show that Boeing could bail out of the project.
 &quot;The long-term relationship that we have with Russian industry is not only about selling airplanes,&quot; Kravchenko said. &quot;We have decided that we will continue to work with Sukhoi on the [regional jet project].&quot;
 Aeroflot was the first company to sign up for 30 regional jets last year in a protocol agreement. Participants in the project believe that some 700 aircraft can be sold in Russia, the CIS and abroad.
 Tough competition from regional jet giants Embraer of Brazil and Canada's Bombardier has not dampened Sukhoi's or Boeing's ambitions.
 &quot;[The cost of the jets] will be significantly cheaper than what is offered on the market,&quot; Pogosyan said, although he declined to put a price tag on them.
 But Andrei Martirosov, general director of Tyumenaviatrans, who came to the show to negotiate with Bombardier and ATR for the possible purchase of three to five regional jets, said that the domestic market will not be able to afford a regional jet for even half the price of those currently on the market. A Ukrainian 52-seat An-140 offered for $8 million is not in demand, he said.
 &quot;[The investment] won't be recouped,&quot; Martirosov said. &quot;These aircraft are needed in countries that cannot pay for jets, and those countries that can pay are conservative and will stick to traditional manufacturers.&quot;

TITLE: Central Bank Official Given Acquittal
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW - A Moscow court on Tuesday overruled the acquittal of a Central Bank official charged with abuse of office for giving a loan to a troubled bank, and ordered a retrial, news reports said.
 
Prosecutors have accused Alexander Alexeyev, a deputy head of the Moscow city branch of the Central Bank, of extending the loan to collapsed giant SBS-Agro bank during the financial crisis four years ago.
 Moscow's Moskvoretsky district court acquitted Alexeyev in May, ruling that he released the loan in compliance with orders from superiors. The Moscow City Court overruled that decision Tuesday, Interfax and Itar-Tass reported.
 Prosecutors charged that Alexeyev gave the 5.8 billion ruble loan ($185.5 million at current exchange rates) to the bank in several tranches in 1998 and 1999 without ensuring that the bank had met Central Bank conditions for the credit.
 The loan was extended to stabilize the bank when the global economic crisis hit Russia in 1998, though it didn't save the bank from going bankrupt.
 The court acquitted Alexeyev after it was unable to establish a direct connection between his actions and the subsequent failure to return the credit.
 
 <i>- AP, SPT </i>

TITLE: A Decision To Usher In a New Era of Stagnation
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Ryzhkov
TEXT: THE political ice that has been holding regional political life in tense calm over the past three months was suddenly thawed by the judges of the Constitutional Court and their ruling that all terms served by regional governors prior to the federal law on the organization of regional government coming into force on Oct. 18, 1999 (including those being served out on that date) are not to count toward the two-term limit established by the law.
 
The few regions whose constitutions or charters had a provision in October 1999 forbidding the governor to run for a third-consecutive term must now decide for themselves how their governor's terms should be counted. Saratov region deputies have already decided in favor of the incumbent governor, Dmitry Ayatskov, while St. Petersburg Governor Vladimir Yakovlev, who has declared he may run for a third term, still has to work on his city deputies. He is one of the few who may have real problems getting &quot;permission&quot; to run for a third term.
 Murmurs of approval are ubiquitous. &quot;What a wise decision,&quot; regional governors and presidents of republics utter in unison. &quot;Absolutely,&quot; chime in millions of contented people. The reason is that, in reality, it is not just the incumbent regional bosses themselves that have a direct interest in the court ruling - it is many, many more people.
 In this country, the governor is much more than the popularly elected head of the regional executive branch of government. The reality is that much greater forces and interests are riding on any governor. There is the multitude of officials who owe their appointment and promotion to him. There are the regional businesspeople who owe their success to these officials and the preferential conditions they provide for their &quot;own&quot;; the national business groups that have invested in building relations with the boss and the boss's team; the heads of cities and districts who were elected with the boss's support; the media outlets that toe the line and in return receive subsidies and tax breaks; the teachers and pensioners who get their wages and pensions topped up by the governors; the construction firms that receive contracts from the boss; and many others.
 Powerful people and millions of ordinary citizens across the country all have a direct interest in preserving the status quo. Their jobs, salaries and positions depend on the stability of the pyramid, at the pinnacle of which sits the regional governor. The governor is the creator of the system, its patron and guarantor. Competitive, free elections put the whole system in jeopardy and are thus viewed as undesirable.
 Today, authoritarian regimes of differing degrees have taken root in at least 60 of Russia's 89 regions. Regions such as Krasnoyarsk, where real battles are fought at each election, are in the distinct minority.
 It is certainly the case that the authoritarian regime type guarantees political stability. Strong provincial bosses, capable of ensuring easy re-election for themselves, are well-equipped to provide a similar service to their president. Furthermore, their loyalty can prove useful for the implementation on the ground of economic reforms.
 However, such regimes give rise to three fundamental and insoluble problems. By killing off all political competition, they are no longer under effective public control, while administrative control imposed by the federal center is rarely very effective. The absence of opposition and public control contributes to the inefficiency of regional economies: Once political competition has been suppressed, economic competition is next. Regional and local markets - from gas to pharmaceuticals - are frequently carved up between well-connected groups of businesspeople. These two problems, in turn, give rise to systemic corruption, and when the authorities and business are closely intertwined, trying to make any changes becomes almost impossible.
 Many commentators see the hand of the presidential administration - and that of President Vladimir Putin himself - behind the Constitutional Court's ruling. They are of the opinion that a deal was made between the president and the governors, under which the latter are obliged to deliver votes in the upcoming presidential election and to support implementation of economic reforms on the ground. While the first is perfectly possible, the second is unlikely to come to much. Monopolistic, corrupt and unremovable regional regimes are a poor underpinning for economic growth -r ather, they are a major obstacle to it.
 A heavy blow has been dealt to democracy. Regional autocrats, once they have gained power through elections, seek first and foremost to control any subsequent elections as far as possible. The Constitutional Court's ruling will only serve to bolster this trend. Regional bosses, having been granted the right to run for one or even two more terms, will redouble their efforts to suppress all alternatives. There are now 53 governors who could rule over their regions for a total of 12 to 20 years.
 Of course, the right to run for office again and again does not provide a cast-iron guarantee of political longevity. As the experience of Alexander Rutskoi, Mikhail Nikolayev, Ruslan Aushev and several others has shown, the federal center is capable of throwing a wrench in the works if it chooses to.
 The position of governors has been further complicated by the reform of the Federation Council, stripping them of immunity from prosecution, the centralization of the budget and the introduction of party lists for regional elections. While the professional risks have increased sharply, governors' powers are - as before - very considerable. Of the 15 gubernatorial elections that took place in 2001, only in two cases did incumbents not run for another term. Eight out of the 13 that ran were victorious - and that was a relatively bad year for incumbents.
 Thus, the Constitutional Court in its ruling has supported the regional authoritarian regimes that are taking root, has hampered the demonopolization and opening of regional markets, slowed down the process of regional-elite turnover and rejuvenation, and impeded the fight against corruption. Its ruling will obstruct the democratization of regional political and public life, postponing a change of administration in the majority of regions for six to 10 years. The Constitutional Court could have ruled on the tangled &quot;third term&quot; dispute differently, but instead chose the path of trying to make everyone happy: The ban on governors running for a third term has been confirmed, but it has been deferred to a later date.
 It would seem that the highest court in the land is undergoing a worrying evolution right before our eyes. Previously its rulings, for the most part, contributed to the strengthening of democratic institutions, values and procedures.
 The Constitutional Court declared an attempt by Boris Yeltsin to merge the KGB and Interior Ministry into a security super-ministry unconstitutional. It allowed a revived Communist Party to return to the political arena. In 1993, it opposed the dissolution of the parliament. In 1997, it ruled against the possibility of Yeltsin running for a third term as president. It also approved a mixed system for State Duma elections, thereby supporting Russia's nascent multi-party system. And it came out in support of local government's constitutional rights in the famous Udmurtia case. In addition, there were liberal rulings on abolishing the propiska system, on the Criminal Procedural Code, etc.
 Now, rulings of a different kind are being made with increasing frequency. Regions have been instructed to remove the concept of sovereignty from their constitutions. The president's right to remove elected regional heads, if they violate laws, has been confirmed. And now the ruling on third terms.
 As the experience of other countries shows, constitutional courts often play a decisive role in establishing freedom, democracy and an efficient economy. They are capable of neutralizing authoritarian tendencies and spurring democratic changes.
 The latest Constitutional Court ruling, irrespective of the motives behind it, is hardly in keeping with these noble aims.
 
 <i>Vladimir Ryzhkov, an independent State Duma deputy, contributed this comment to Vedomosti. </i>

TITLE: Uniting In Defense of Citizen Zhirinovsky
AUTHOR: By Alexei Pankin
TEXT: IN a recent speech that he delivered at the Russian Foreign Ministry, President Vladimir Putin called upon the country's governmental agencies to take a more active role in the defense of the rights of Russian citizens abroad. He also spoke of the necessity to promote more vigorously the interests of Russian businesses outside of Russia's borders. Diplomats are still grappling with the question of how they should go about trying to implement the president's instructions but, in the meantime, the state-controlled media has already been doing its part and getting down to work.
 
Last week, the media took a stand in defense of the business interests of one particular Russian citizen, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, in the United States.
 The whole incident started with items in a number of publications on July 16 citing the state news agency RIA-Novosti, that provided information about how an application by Zhirinovsky for a U.S. visa had been refused by the United States. Citizen Zhirinovsky was supposed to have applied for the visa in order to deliver a lecture at the Millenium theater in New York.
 &quot;Almost 2,000 tickets were sold at a price of $50 each, and they sold out like hot cakes,&quot; the agency reported.
 TVS, which is now under the patronage of the powers that be, leapt to the defense of compatriot Zhirinovsky - subjected to repression by the United States - joining the chorus on the very same evening: &quot;There is a new scandal involving Duma Deputy Speaker Zhirinovsky: He was not issued a U.S. visa and his former compatriots in the United States have been deprived of the opportunity to attend and hear a lecture by the leader of the LDPR.&quot;
 The next day, the heavy artillery was wheeled out in order to bombard the enemies of the freedom of this Russian citizen to cross international borders. Throwing its weight behind the cause, Rossiiskaya Gazeta wrote:
 &quot;It is not hard to figure out that the latest refusal to grant a visa to Vladimir Zhirinovsky is directly linked to his friendly relations with the Iraqi leadership, the overthrow of which the U.S. administration is dreaming about.... Zhirinovsky has made it clear that the U.S. leadership today needs to undertake new military operations, as the president is beholden to the military-industrial complex, which is in need of new procurement contracts. The U.S. reaction was not a long time in coming. In the New World, such things are not taken lightly.&quot;
 Confronted by these well-coordinated actions in defense of the rights of citizen Zhirinovsky, the United States felt it had to put forward its side of the story, and the U.S. Embassy issued its own written response, explaining that Zhirinovsky had not applied for a U.S. visa at all. Even more interesting, the statement pointed out that he did not need one because, in November, he had been granted a one-year, multi-entry U.S. visa, which is still valid.
 And finally, on Saturday, Radio Liberty delivered a retaliatory strike. Its New York correspondent asked the co-owner of the Millenium theater, a certain Leonard Lev, to comment on the whole affair.
 &quot;We sold 10 to 15 tickets for the Zhirinovsky lecture; there were no more takers,&quot; he said. As a result the lecture had to be canceled. Furthermore, as was clarified in the report, tickets were being sold for no more than $30 apiece.
 Thus, as it turns out, Zhirinovsky didn't make it to America because the export of his ideas, alas, proved to be an unprofitable business.
 Nevertheless, the Russian media deserve to give themselves a pat on the back: They admirably defended the interests of citizen Zhirinovsky.
 The impressive number of column inches and minutes of airtime devoted to a story that had been conjured out of thin air must have been for Zhirinovsky great moral compensation for his lack of commercial gain.
 Keep up the good work colleagues!
 
 <i>Alexei Pankin is the editor of Sreda, a magazine for media professionals (www.internews.ru/sreda) </i>

TITLE: thriller finds strength in numbers
AUTHOR: by Kenneth Turan
PUBLISHER: The Los Angeles Times
TEXT: Think of &quot;Murder by Numbers&quot; as a classic 1940s double bill uneasily contained within the confines of a single motion picture. 
 
The A-picture at the top of the bill is a fairly standard star vehicle like those that used to be specially tailored for Joan Crawford or Barbara Stanwyck. This one features established film diva Sandra Bullock as Cassie Mayweather, a sharp-tongued &quot;get the hell out of my crime scene&quot; type of homicide detective who has to solve the toughest case of her career. 
 The B-picture at the bottom of the bill is an intriguing study in aberrant psychology that stars hot young actors Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt as two high school thrill killers who commit a murder to see if they can get away with it in order to prove their superiority to the common herd. 
 Inspired by 1924's notorious Leopold and Loeb case, this kind of story is also familiar, having been touched on before in films like &quot;Compulsion,&quot; Alfred Hitchcock's &quot;Rope&quot; and &quot;Swoon.&quot; But because director Barbet Schroeder has a documented affinity for the dark side, this part of &quot;Murder by Numbers&quot; is much more involving than its A-picture counterpart. 
 As written by Tony Gayton, &quot;Murder by Numbers&quot; is no whodunit - we know at once that the boys committed the crime in question - but rather follows a catch-us-if-you-can scenario as the lads match wits with the intrepid detective. 
 A crime-scene specialist and a pillar of the police force of the California coastal town of San Benito (modeled after San Luis Obispo), Mayweather is introduced while breaking in a new partner, Sam Kennedy (Ben Chaplin, serviceable as always). 
 Mayweather, as it turns out, has had lots of new partners. She's a tough, take-charge cop, tough on personal and professional relationships and nicknamed &quot;the Hyena&quot; around the force. Plus, she just happens to have something in her past that gets her in over her head emotionally in her newest case, which involves the seemingly random murder of an innocent young girl. 
 Though much may be made of this being a darker role for Bullock, the police story is very much the more standard aspect of &quot;Murder by Numbers,&quot; and the actress, being an executive producer, assured that this part of the film would be carefully tailored to her specifications. 
 When we first meet Richard Haywood (Gosling, who broke through as the title character in Henry Bean's &quot;The Believer&quot;) and Justin Pendleton (Michael Pitt), they look and act so stereotypical - Richard the smirky, arrogant rich kid, Justin the ultimate genius misfit - that fear arises that this part of the film will be standard as well. 
 But this doesn't happen. As they hang out together after school at a deserted house on a bluff, drinking absinthe, talking about how living fully means embracing crime, and exulting that &quot;there are no limits for men like us,&quot; an involving dynamic is visible. And as they spar over the affections of classmate Lisa (Agnes Bruckner, excellent in the Sundance hit &quot;Blue Car&quot;), the kind of twisted feeling they have for each other emerges in an increasingly intriguing way. 
 This is due partially to the energy and skill of the actors, and partially to a script that gradually reveals how elaborately planned the crime was. It takes pleasure in delineating the cat-and-mouse games between the two boys, who are determined to prove that they know what the police are thinking before they think it, and detective Mayweather, who starts with just the merest hunch that there is more going on with these kids than it might appear. 
 Also a key player is Schroeder, one of the most interesting directors working in the studio system, able to go back and forth between smaller, darker independent items such as &quot;Maitresse,&quot; &quot;Barfly&quot; and &quot;Our Lady of the Assassins,&quot; and more polished mainstream films such as &quot;Reversal of Fortune,&quot; and &quot;Single White Female.&quot; Though he makes you squirm more than you want to at the inevitable scenes of the trussed-up female murder victim, he also has the proclivity and the skill to make at least the B-picture half of &quot;Murder by Numbers&quot; of more than passing interest.

TITLE: the tale of our town's own tonys
AUTHOR: by Anastasia Boreiko
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Golden Sofit awards were created in 1995 to highlight artistic achievements in St. Petersburg's theater world, quickly becoming the most prestigious award of its kind in the city. As well as giving recognition to innovative performances, they also recognize varied genres such as puppetry and musicals, opera and ballet.
 
With so many performances being put on regularly, even whittling down candidates to a list of nominees is a tricky business, and the members of the Golden Sofit Nomination Committee are fastidious in seeing every production in the city. A secret ballot is then held with the participation of the St. Petersburg Theater Artistic Committee, the management bureau of the St. Petersburg Theater Workers Organization and an expert panel of several leading theater lights and critics.
 The nominating committee has its own award, the Golden Symbol, to honor those who contribute financially to St. Petersburg's theatrical life, with past laureates including St. Petersburg Governor Vladimir Yakovlev, the general director of the Baltika Brewery Teimuraz Bolloev, and Valery Venkov, director of the Severnaya Verf shipbuilding company. The award has a great deal of prestige among theatergoers who want to see sponsors being recognized for their contribution to their beloved theater culture.
 The awards ceremony is a performance in itself, as its director, Rinat Dulmaganov, pointed out at a press conference last Thursday. In past years, the ceremony has been held at the Alexandrinsky Theater but, this year, it will be held at the Theater of Musical Comedy. Dulmganov emphasized that the location has not been chosen by chance as many theaters are in dire need of financial help to restore them to their original grandeur, and seeing a newly renovated theater may inspire contributors to invest. 
 In many ways, the Golden Sofit is an award that highlights the achievements of St. Petersburg's theaters in order to promote them. As the producer of the Golden Sofit, Evgenei Fradin, explained at the press conference, &quot;More sponsors means more publicity, which in turn, gives theatres the chance to develop.&quot;
 The actors and producers who receive nominations and awards benefit in a similar way, receiving recognition and the chance to get prestigious roles or productions. Fradin explained that, with recognition from the Golden Sofit, recipients stand a greater chance of gaining both public and private financial support.
 Though the prize is intended to promote needy theaters, many of this year's nominations are dominated by well-established theaters, with the Mariinsky - hardly the most under-funded of establishments - perhaps unsurprisingly occupying a very strong position. Fradin drew a simple conclusion here: &quot;Money is very important. Although good productions exist at other theaters, it's hard to compete with the Mariinsky, which, for example, can afford to have Shemyakin design costumes.&quot;
 In many ways the Golden Sofit embodies a contradictionto be found in the theater life of St. Petersburg. Audiences are no longer interested in the idea of impoverished artists giving their all to their art. The sort of shows that fill seats, pulling in foreign visitors as well as locals, require a fair degree of financial backing. The Sofit, therefore, not only gives prestigious awards to deserving actors, producers, and plays, but also insures that there will be further investment in one of the city's most precious traditions.

TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: The long-awaited<strong> Neva Delta Folk-Blues Festival </strong>will hold its postponed open-air Gala Concert at 3 p.m. on July 27. The location has been changed to Yusupovsky Sad at 50 Sadovaya Ul.
 According to festival promoters, the concert's lineup will include the Blues Cousins, Mushouris and His Swinging Orchestra, the Mississippi Twins, Liapin's Blues, Big Blues Revival, Blues.Com, Contrast Blues Band, Hoodoo Voodoo, Forrest Gump, the Blackmailers, the Blues Doctors, White Crow, J.A.M. and Second Breath. The concert will be followed by a blues party and jam session at the PORT club. 
 Launched as one-day event last year, the festival has now expanded to include a bikers's tour and concerts in a number of towns in and around the Leningrad Oblast.
 Tickets for the gala cost 100 rubles. 
 Check www.nevadelta.spb.ru for more information.
 Due to the success of <strong>jazz boats </strong>this summer, the Kvadrat Jazz Club and its founder, Natan Leites, have prepared some more floating music for the city's revellers. Boats with jazz bands will embark on July 27 and 31, and August 8. 
 The jazz boats are an old local tradition promoted by the city's oldest surviving jazz club, in operation since 1967. It consists of a two-hour journey on the Neva River with dixieland bands (upper deck) and contemporary jazz acts (lower deck) featuring Oleg Kuvaitsev, Yevgeny Strigalyov, Ivan Vasilyev, Dmitry Popov and Viktor Matveyev. The boat leaves from the Hermitage Pier at 8 p.m. Tickets are available from the city's ticket kiosks. For more information call 315-9046 or 153-4020.
 The raves held at forts on the Gulf of Finland have developed quite a bit of fame and popularity in recent years, with last year's event at Fort Shants drawing somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 fans 
 This year, the <strong>Sukhoi Dok </strong>(Dry Dock) party will be held July 27 at 8 p.m. on Kronshtadt Island, in a huge, 10-meter-deep, granite-walled, 18th-century dock.
 The all-nighter will be a special event, including a live performance, for which electronic musicians Pavel Zavyalov and Igor Vdovin are currently composing music.
 &quot;Essentially, it's an adventure with a strong visual aspect - for both young people and adults,&quot; says artist and architect Mikhail Barkhin, who is promoting the event.
 &quot;First of all, it's a musical event, with very strong sound-and-light show,&quot; he says. &quot;It will be different [from other events] in that it will all be planned out in advance, so that each segment will be directed.&quot;
 &quot;The location is a great choice and people who are coming here for the first time will definitely be impressed&quot; Barkhin says.
 The team of DJs is headlined by Detroit's Juan Atkins and London's J-Majik.
 Local DJs scheduled to take part include Lovesky, Udjin, Raf, Phunkee, Kompass Vrubel, and Zorkin.
 Buses to the event will depart from Chyornaya Rechka metro station. 
 The Entry fee for the event has yet to be determined, although promoters say it will either be free, or the charges will be minimal. For more information check www.open-air.ru.
 
 <i>- by Sergey Chernov </i>

TITLE: chrome, steel, sushi and beer
AUTHOR: by Shawna Gamache
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: I've seen the future, and it is both more beautiful and more spartan than anything Hollywood has shown me. I've seen the future, and the future is the Tinkoff Brewery and Restaurant. Even Jules Verne has nothing on Tinkoff when it comes to prophesies of steel and speed, of flight and motion, of fear and anticipation. 
 
Tinkoff is a brewery and a sushi bar, a cafe and a nightclub. I arrived at Tinkoff on a Thursday morning, not sure what to expect. My visions of bamboo screens, quiet lilting music and carefully sliced fish were at odds with those of giant vats of bubbling ale and chunky, cumbersome beer stubes. 
 Walking through the metal detectors, surrounded by a sea of chrome coat hangers, and facing the glass entryway I felt a sudden impulse to return to a land less fabricated, less shiny, less new. I ascended the bright wide stairs and fell headfirst into the unknown. In the land of Tinkoff, glamorous people mill around a pristine, cavernous arena as models on a catwalk, their cold eyes reflecting chrome, glass, and bent steel, cocktails and minions, sushi and beer.
 The brewery is ubiquitous in Tinkoff, with chrome tunnels of ale propelling themselves tentacle-like in various directions from a massive serious of metal balls. Tinkoff's giant stadium-like space houses tables amassed everywhere in uncountable number, their chairs polished to a glaring shine. This space, seductive and frightening, sterile and massive, seeped into my skin, spread around my body, and propelled me to the right, where I found a smaller room whispering the promise of intimacy and bamboo. 
 We entered the sushi area, a room that embraced pine along with chrome, whose ceiling was hung with long colorful Japanese banners, reducing the massive space to slightly more human proportions. We sat, facing the sushi bar, coddled by tender coziness amid such industrial proportions, and ordered three business lunches of varying components.
 Tinkoff has a sushi business lunch on par with its massive space, offering its guests complimentary beer, mineral water, coffee or tea, miso soup, steamed rice, four pieces of Tamago (Japanese-style egg omelette), two stuffed green mussels, and a choice of three mains. Choice A consists of tuna sashimi, a salmon roll, and chicken karage (like fried chicken), Choice B of Salmon Sashimi a Spicy Tuna roll, and Tonkatsu (like pork schnitzel), and Choice C of Yellowtail Sashimi, a salmon-skin roll and Chicken Katsu (Chicken sauteed in aTeriyaki-like sauce).
 Being three, we ordered one of each, and sat back as the courses arrived. Even in the bustling world of chrome and industry, I expected a bow to certain traditions. While pleased with the bounty and beauty of items presented, I found a few beloved components sorely missed. We were not brought warm towels before our meal, and more horrifying still, Tinkoff provided teriyaki instead of Soy Sauce. I grieved over but forgave the lack of warm towels, but could not abide the lack of Sushi's necessary compliment. When grilled, the server insisted that the teriyaki sauce was in fact soy sauce infused with sweet sake, adding pointedly that all of the other patrons loved it. I felt like a relic of the past, and utopia smirked at me, laughing at my antiquity.
 I soon found that some traditions had been kept, even lovingly embraced. The miso soup was huge, with silky-smooth cubes of tofu and sprawling, thick seaweed. The rice was generous, soft, steaming. All of the fish was excellent; while the salmon and yellowtail were close to the levels reached by some of the city's best sushi restaurants, the tuna surpassed any that I have had in &quot;Peter's creation.&quot; All of the rolls were tightly packed, cold, and fresh. We sipped beer alongside the mains, and both the Porter and the unfiltered Pilsner were excellent, and served in glasses that had obviously been pre-chilled to perfection. 
 Hardly into our sushi, we were suddenly served again. All of the meat dishes were huge, with the fried and marinated chicken perfectly yummy and the breaded fried pork incredible. The pork came with karkatsu sauce (a cross between tamarind chutney and barbeque sauce) that was so good that I had to restrain myself from dipping the garnish into it. Hardly had we began these courses then the server returned bearing delicious mussels marinated in terriyaki and mustard, served on a bed of rice and seaweed, nestled into a half-shell.
 Eventually, we left the more subdued sushi area and were thrust back into the cool industrial expanse. Utopia seemed so bright, so cold, too sterile. I descended the stairs, gradually adjusting to a world that seemed sepia-hued. The future was a deliciously cool place. But I wouldn't like to live there. 
 
 <i>
Tinkoff Restaurant, 7 Kazanskaya Ul. Tel: 118-5566. Menu in English and Russian. Open Daily from 12 p.m. to 2 a.m. Credit Cards Accepted. Lunch for three with alcohol 1050 rubles ($33.90). </i>

TITLE: saving the last picture-show
AUTHOR: by Natella Kochetkova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: While most cinemas are experiencing the second coming of Men in Black, Spartak, removed from the commercial bustle of Nevsky Prospect, welcomes its visitors with the movie masterpieces of the world.
 
Spartak also attracts cinema-goers with its cozy, unpretentious atmosphere. The comfortable hall with cushy chairs, sofas and soft pillows lying on the floor makes it seem as though you are sitting at home in a favorite armchair and watching a much-loved film. Because of the nature of the films shown, Spartak's patrons are mostly students and members of the intelligentsia. &quot;We visit it only because they do not screen those stupid blockbusters,&quot; Svyatoslav Nilov said. &quot;We study at the Theater Academy and we'd love to be actors, that is why we prefer admiring the quality acting of world-renowned performers than to look at the Hollywood stars who do nothing but open their mouths,&quot; Svyatoslav continued excitedly. 
 Opened in 1939, the Spartak cinema kept on working through the siege and gladdened Leningrad people during those difficult times. In the Soviet era, it used to be called the Farewell Demonstration cinema, where visitors could see a film screened at the St Petersburg movie theaters for the last time. Despite the fact that many people believe that film was heavily censored during Soviet times, the State Film Archive cooperated heavily with Spartak until 1985, providing the cinema with any soviet or foreign film - both older silent pictures and popular movies of the fifties.
 Although the cinema administration hasn't been able to get films from the Archive over the last three years, Spartak is still proud of being a non-commercial movie theater where films are shown not for money but for pleasure. &quot;Unfortunately, the State Archive has made a major change: Now it is mostly interested in commerce and asks $50 for each film reel. We just can't afford it,&quot; says Yevgenia Plaksina, the cinema's director of programming. &quot;We are lucky to have video equipment so we can at least show films on tape. Usually we have 18 to 20 pictures a month and each of them is shown 3 or 4 times.&quot;
 When funds are low, obtaining films is particularly difficult, but even the wealthiest of cinemas would envy Spartak's extensive film collection. Special programs include a retrospective of works from the greatest actors such as &quot;The Missouri's Breaks&quot; with Jack Nickolson and Marlon Brando in title roles; showcases for commemorating actors and directors; the movie university program called &quot;Selected Pages of World Movie History,&quot; which was organized specially to teach students the art of filmmaking from the word &quot;go&quot; and which is held once monthly on a Sunday. &quot;Various programs provide the opportunity to watch quality pictures. For lack of money, we cannot possibly premiere movies, but we try to get a new film as soon as possible. &quot;Thus, we are currently showing 'Our Son's Room,' which had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this year,&quot; commented Plaksina. Watching quality pictures is cheap here, as the most expensive ticket costs just 50 rubles.
 Spartak undeniably benefits from other movie theaters and other friends in high places: the French Institute, the Goethe Institute and the Italian Consulate cooperate with Spartak by providing it with free films. &quot;We've received many tapes from the French Institute but they are not perfect as they are too narrow for our equipment and the Institute is unlikely to update them,&quot; said Plaksina. Plaksina added that - thanks to the Italian consulate - in September, Spartak will be running a new program of contemporary Italian movies.
 These days, culture has to fight for its continued existance, just like a participant of the show &quot;Survivor,&quot; but the game is rigged, with privileges and money given to mass production. Re-opened in February after remodeling, Spartak looks better than it used to, but the amount of money spent on its renovation was not enough to update the cinema - Spartak gets by on small donations alone. But its loyal patrons do not mind that it is not as modern or well equipped as the city's more mainstream venues. &quot;It possesses other merits,&quot; said Alexander Skvortsov, a Mukhinskaya Academy student, after watching &quot;The Draughtsman's Contract.&quot;
 In 73 BC, Spartak's namesake struggled against slavery; he and his faithful followers did not give up even under threat of death. In our time, the Spartak cinema is fighting for cultural and moral values. Spartak supported by its devoted Spartans ... Can it really be true that this fateful story is going to be repeated? Spartak will go on showing first-rate, non-commercial, good pictures,&quot; German Malyutic, the cinema's vice manager, answers.

TITLE: drainpipes tell the story of a city
AUTHOR: by Claire Bigg
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: French photographer Valerie Pacquet came to St. Petersburg in 1992 to visit, and later found herself mesmerized by the many images of drainpipes that she had captured. She spent the next eight years returning to the city as often as possible with the intention of documenting these torn metal beasts in their locations around the city. With her project &quot;Drainpipes of St. Petersburg&quot; on exhibit at the Pushkin Apartment Museum, Pacquet took some time to talk to Staff Writer Claire Bigg.
 </i>
 
 
q:When did you start taking pictures of drainpipes?
 

 
a:I started in 1992, the first time I came to St. Petersburg. I didn't come to Russia to photograph drainpipes, though. I took many pictures in the street, and I thought the drainpipes came out well. After 1992 I returned to St. Petersburg about once every two years. 
 

 
q:How do you explain your interest in St. Petersburg's drainpipes?
 

 
a:To start with, they are huge compared to the drainpipes in France, and you see them absolutely everywhere. Of course St. Petersburg is a beautiful city with many beautiful monuments, but I am more interested in the details of the streets, of everyday life. 
 
I also have the impression that people want to conceal drainpipes by painting them in the same color as the facade or by trying to blend them with the shape of the building, but as a result they are even more visible. 
 My idea was to make interesting pictures out of something that people tend to regard as old, ugly or insignificant.
 
 
q: Is this focus on detail recurrent in your other work?
 a:Yes, for example I have a whole series of photos of wood details. They picture wood in all its stages of transformation, when it is no longer a tree, but not yet an object. I also photograph details of walls. 
 
Generally I'm interested in taking pictures of everyday life, of street scenes. There are already so many photos of classical St. Petersburg that I don't feel that taking pictures of monuments would leave me a lot of room for creativity.
 
 
q:Have the drainpipe pictures already been exhibited?
 

 
a:Yes, in France, in Perpignan and several times in Paris, but it is the first time that I've showed them in Russia. 
 

 
q:What were the reactions in France?
 

 
a:They were rather good. People liked the colors a lot, because in France the facades are not painted like they are in St. Petersburg. 
 
I think people found the colors even more striking than the actual drainpipes. They made no comments concerning the poor conditions of the pipes or about life in Russia. 
 The response of Russians in France was also positive. I became increasingly curious to see how the Russians would react in Russia. And displaying these pictures in St. Petersburg, where they were taken in the first place, seemed logical. 
 
 
q:Where are you planning to exhibit the pictures next?
 

 
a:I have no definite plans yet. I would like to move on at some point and close the topic of drainpipes with a book, with something that stays. I am currently in contact with a writer from St. Petersburg to complement the photos with a text.
 
I am also thinking of organizing an exhibition in Paris to celebrate St. Petersburg's 300-year Anniversary.
 
 
q:Do you plan to take another series of pictures in St. Petersburg?
 

 
a:Yes, I am planning to make a series on Russian interiors, for example of little-known palaces or of communal flats. In short, I like taking photos of elements of the past that have disappeared in France but are still very present in Russia. Like drainpipes.

TITLE: the end of a dostoevsky journey
AUTHOR: by Michael Scammell
PUBLISHER: New York Times Service
TEXT: Half a century ago, the Princeton literary scholar Joseph Frank read &quot;Notes From the Underground&quot; for a study of existentialism, concentrating on what he took to be &quot;the irrationalism and amoralism&quot; of Dostoevsky's underground man. Later, dissatisfied with this approach, he took a second look and spent the next 20 years steeping himself in Russian language and culture. In 1976, he published the first volume of a biographical study of the author that was meant to run four volumes and grew to five, of which the final volume has just appeared, some 26 years after the first. Whatever else one may think, it is a monumental achievement and appears, among other things, to have edged out Leon Edel's five-volume work on Henry James as the longest literary biography in English. Edel's work (in my edition) comes to just over 2,000 pages; Frank's is almost 25 percent longer.
 
Frank's final volume follows the pattern of his earlier ones, covering the years of Dostiyevsky's last decade in painstaking detail. &quot;Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet&quot; opens with Dostoyevsky's return to Russia after an absence of four years in Western Europe, whither he had fled partly in search of a treatment for his epilepsy, and partly to escape being thrown into a debtors' prison. In those four tumultuous years he almost gambled himself to death, but also established himself as one of Russia's greatest writers: &quot;Crime and Punishment&quot; appeared on the very eve of his departure, &quot;The Insulted and Injured&quot; and &quot;The Idiot&quot; both came out while he was abroad, and &quot;The Devils&quot; was being serialized at the time of his return. 
 It was a relatively happy period for the tormented author. His practical young wife, Anna Grigoryevna, took over his financial affairs, and they purchased a house in the quiet provincial town of Staraya Russa, where much of &quot;The Brothers Karamazov&quot; was written. He was introduced to Tsar Alexander II, who asked him to act as a spiritual guide to his sons, and he became close with the reactionary Konstantin Pobedonostsev, tutor to Alexander, the tsar's oldest son. In the vain hope of acheiving financial security, Dostoevsky agreed to edit the conservative weekly The Citizen, but the work schedule proved so punishing and the pay so poor that he decided to start a monthly journal of his own. This became The Diary of a Writer, which appeared regularly in 1873, 1876 and 1877, and fitfully in 1880 and 1881.
 The Diary has certainly received its fair share of attention from the critics, but Frank goes one better, treating it as a major literary and political achievement and devoting four full chapters to it. It was a unique enterprise, a felicitous combination of reminiscences, dramatic sketches, essays, short stories and opinion pieces that enabled Dostoevsky to enter into an informal dialogue with his readers that reached far beyond the scope of even the most conversational or capacious of his novels.
 True to his earlier, more liberal convictions, Dostoevsky continued to support the consequences of the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, but he was resolutely opposed to Russia's adopting a Western-style constitution. He deeply admired the spiritual qualities of the Russian Orthodox Church, which he regarded as vastly superior to Roman Catholicism, and enthusiastically supported the Russian war against Turkey, which he saw not as an imperialist adventure but as a holy war to liberate the Orthodox Slavs of the Balkans. Dostoevsky was also an unrepentant anti-Semite, and was deeply preoccupied by the issue of terrorism. Repeated attempts by the Nihilists to assassinate the tsar seemed, in fact, to confirm the fictional scenario laid out in &quot;The Devils.&quot;
 Frank is at his impressive best setting out Dostoevsky's intellectual positions in the context of Russian politics and trends in the late 19th century. These were years when the chief opposition to the tsar came from members of the Populist movement, successors to the radical &quot;new men&quot; and revolutionaries of the 1840s, men with whom Dostoevsky had been allied before he was sent to Siberia and returned a mystical conservative. Dostoevsky now opposed most of the Populist program, but that did not stop him from opportunistically publishing his short novel &quot;A Raw Youth&quot; in the chief Populist journal of the day, an ambiguous gesture that baffled friends and enemies alike. Frank, however, is able to show that just as Dostoevsky had clung to his Christian faith even at moments of youthful revolutionary fervor, so now in maturity did he harbor a lingering attachment to the radical friends and utopian beliefs of his Socialist youth.
 True, the main goal of the Populists and that of the increasingly reactionary Dostoevsky were similar - to realize the greatest happiness for the greatest number of their fellow citizens - but their programs were poles apart. The Populists advocated political and economic reform and a constitution, whereas Dostoevsky looked to the spiritual transformation of the individual, based on the inherent sanctity of Russians, and the compassion of the tsar.
 Frank does full justice to the excellent short stories that found their way into The Diary of a Writer, and to his last and greatest novel, &quot;The Brothers Karamazov.&quot; True to his method of close critical analysis, Frank devotes a further eight chapters to a minute dissection of the novel, demonstrating that it represents the apotheosis of Dostoevsky's thinking on &quot;the great theme that had preoccupied him since 'Notes From Underground': the conflict between reason and Christian faith.&quot;
 Dostoevsky, in Frank's view, is comparable to Dante, Shakespeare and Milton in the grandeur of his thought and the power of his spiritual vision. His goal in this novel, Frank says, was both to portray the breakdown of social and family life and to warn, through the three Karamazov brothers and their corrupt father, against the impending collapse of Western civilization, which was inevitable unless humankind embraced a return to the [Orthodox]Christian faith.
 Frank rarely stoops to the literary gossip that is the staple of so many literary biographies these days, but he does track some aspects of the rivalry between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and the literary and political rivalry between the Slavophile Dostoevsky and the Westernizing Turgenev, recounting various points of contention between the writers.
 The Dostoevsky-Turgenev episodes illustrate some strengths and weaknesses of Frank's approach. His great strength is the scrupulousness with which he disentangles the intellectual arguments of the Westernizers and Slavophiles and charts the ebb and flow of the rivalry between these two great writers; another is the skill with which he portrays the debate through the prism of Dostoevsky's own ideas and emotions at the time. But Frank's avowed partisanship entails a certain loss of credibility, while his painstaking scholarly digressions exact a heavy price in loss of readability. 
 Similarly, to take another example, at the start of Chapter 10, Frank neatly summarizes the few virtues and multiple defects of &quot;A Raw Youth&quot; in a couple of terse pages. But he then persists for 24 pages more in dissecting the novel chapter by chapter and scene by scene - this after devoting the entire previous chapter to the notes for the novel. The writer's notes, indeed, are meat and drink to Frank: he pounces on them like a hungry cat, seeming more interested in the plans for a book than in the quality of the finished product; one can almost hear the pathos when he remarks on the regrettable paucity of author's notes for &quot;The Brothers Karamazov.&quot;
 Frank's reverent devotion to his hero presumably explains why the familiar Dostoevsky is entirely missing from these pages. Gone is the agonized, pathological gambler of legend, the sadomasochistic lover, the demanding friend and splenetic adversary collapsing in epileptic convulsions on the floor at moments of emotional intensity. In their place we get a kindly patriarch, loving husband and father, loyal friend and patient editor and correspondent. 
 In his discussion of The Diary of a Writer, for example, Frank is obliged to acknowledge Dostoevsky's &quot;ugly anti-Semitism&quot; and &quot;deep-rooted xenophobia.&quot; But he attempts to mitigate them with the comment that Dostoevsky was merely exhibiting &quot;the prejudices that prevailed in Russian society,&quot; which were &quot;not particularly abusive if judged by the standards of his time and place.&quot; Describing Dostoevsky's notoriously prejudiced essay &quot;The Jewish Question,&quot; Frank is at pains to suggest that its conclusion nevertheless &quot;holds out the hope of a resolution&quot; through the operations of human charity and benevolence.
 Frank's literary style is no better than workmanlike, marred by a plethora of &quot;thuses&quot; and double-barreled adjectives (&quot;social-political,&quot; &quot;moral-philosophical&quot; and so on) that have a mildly soporific effect. He is no Leon Edel, searching for the figure in the carpet, attempting to honor art with a biographical work of art - but nor, in all fairness, does he aspire to be. At the very outset of his enterprise he wrote that Dostoevsky's personal life interested him only to the degree that it could be shown to illuminate his books. &quot;My work is thus not a biography, or if so, only in a special sense - for I do not go from the life to the work, but rather the other way round.&quot; And in this final volume he is even more explicit. What he has written is not so much about Dostoevsky as an individual as it is &quot;a condensed history of 19th-century Russian culture, with Dostoevsky at the center.&quot;
 
 <i>
Michael Scammell, who teaches nonfiction writing in the School of the Arts at Columbia University, is the author of &quot;Solzhenitsyn,&quot; a biography, and is completing a biography of Arthur Koestler. 
 
 &quot;Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881&quot; by Joseph Frank. Princeton University Press. 812 pages. $35. </i>

TITLE: ingenuity, inhibition 'in print'
AUTHOR: by Aliona Bocharova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The exhibition &quot;In Print&quot; is being held in two neighbouring venues - Anna the Akhmatova Museum in Fontanny Dom (Liteiny pr., 53) and the St. Petersburg Centre of Books and Graphics (Liteiny pr., 55) - is quite an unusual way to acquaint the Russian audience with the works of internationally acclaimed Young British Artists, and other significant figures of British art who have never been exhibited in Russia before. The works presented are not the original paintings or installations that brought the artists fame, but prints, a medium that was previously unfamiliar to the majority of the artists.
 
This original idea to ask the artists to do prints - which is quite similar to asking a poet to write a screen-play or a Shakespearian actor to switch to film - belongs to a British publisher Charles Booth-Clibborn. He commissioned 25 artists, who live in London and have already gained international acknowledgement, to make a series of prints at his publishing house, The Paragon Press. This brainstorm turned out to be quite brilliant and the exhibition - impressive in its unpredictability - marked the renaissance of graphic art in Britain today. &quot;The exhibition appeared to be so successful that the British Council (BC) decided to be its chaperone and take it on world tour,&quot; says Anastasia Boudanoque, the arts co-ordinator at BC and curator of the project in Russia. &quot;It was shown in Britain and Yugoslavia - Israel and Switzerland are to follow.&quot;
 The whole project was a rather risky affair as only two of the artists - Terry Frost and Patric Herron - had any serious experience with printmaking, while the other 23 had hardly seen a printing press since graduating from art school. The risk certainly paid off in the artists' freedom from preconceived notions and bold search for innovation. Some artists even invented new ways of making prints: Adam Lowe presented the etching of a microscope-video record depicting tracks of cosmic rays after nuclear explosion. And no one could expect that Peter Doig, used to working on huge canvases, could create miniatures with a tiny etching needle, or that the Chapman brothers, famous for their mannequins with pimples of genitals, would deign to work on traditional etchings. 
 Yet those familiar with the artists' work will enjoy tracing their peculiar motives in this print interpretation. In the &quot;The Disasters of War,&quot; a series of 83 prints, Jake and Dinos Chapman copied Francis Goya's technique using brass plates of the same format and even borrowing the name and exact number of etchings in Goya's portfolio. However, they managed to combine highly traditional technique with radical content. Apocalyptic and funny etchings depict a Fuck Face character or a man with a phallus instead of a nose. The culmination of the series is a huge red etching &quot;A Double Deathhead&quot; with two skulls, their phallic eyeballs hanging out on springs. 
 The originality of the exhibition's concept compensates for the fact that few of the works depart from postmodernist tradition. &quot;A printing press is a symbol of compression, the essence of etching technique is the birth of an image out of compressed time and space that become one at this very moment,&quot; reads the inscription under McKeen's work &quot;Between Time and Space.&quot; Themes explored, such as semiotics of urban architecture in &quot;the Dulles&quot; by Sarah Morris, television in the &quot;Wounds and Absent Objects&quot; by Anish Kapoor, and the story of &quot;The Last Supper&quot; told with pharmaceutical wrappings are quite regular postmodernist concepts, yet worth seeing in this new interpretation.
 So, the exhibition is a successful attempt to radically renew the artistic potential of print as a medium. It shows that, in the beginning of the 21st century, printmaking provides a virtually unlimited field of experiment, which, amongst other things, calls for serious reassessment of the traditional relationship between a &quot;copy&quot; and the &quot;original.&quot; Understanding of this relationship also helped Charles Booth-Clibborn make a smart commercial move. &quot;The original works of YBA are almost unaffordable,&quot; explains Boudanoque. &quot;Their prints however - viewed as a copy and thus generally a cheaper piece of art work - were purchased on the spot in Britain. The prints presented at the exhibition belong to the Paragon Press. 
 &quot;As we were preparing the exhibition and searching for a museum to host it, some major city museums refused to place it, doubting its success,&quot; says Boudanoque. &quot;Yet it turned out to be quite a sensation with everyone from the art in-crowd present at the opening.&quot; Although the majority of visitors were grateful to finally get a chance to see original works by Jake and Dinos Chapman, Damien Hirst or Gary Hume, others found it a bit pedestrian. &quot;This exhibition could be good for some provinces where the audience is not fastidious and would enjoy these second-rate works by great artists,&quot; complains Olga Tobreluts, a well-known local artist. 
 To commemorate the significance of the exhibition, Jake Chapman is expected to visit St. Petersburg in September. Also, according to Boudanoque, leading local art historians and critics such as Olesya Turkina, Viktor Mazin, and Ivan Chechot, will deliver lectures on contemporary British art, and a series master-classes for print-makers is planned.
 
 <i>
&quot;In Print&quot; runs through September 15 at both the Anna Akhmatova Museum in Fontanny Dom (Liteiny pr., 53) and the St. Petersburg Centre of Books and Graphics (Liteiny pr., 55). See Listings for more information. </i>

TITLE: Puccini's last sees first staging
AUTHOR: by Larisa Doctorow
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The production of Giacomo Puccini's last opera &quot;Turandot,&quot; which opened on July 25th, is the Mariinsky Theater's first ever full production of this opera, though a concert version has been given from time to time over the past couple of years. The new staging will be an important addition to the Puccini repertoire till now consisting of his earlier masterpieces &quot;La Boheme&quot; and &quot;Madame Butterfly.&quot;
 
The libretto of the opera is based on a fairy tale by Carlo Gozzi and portrays the cruel Chinese princess Turandot defeated by the power of love. In 1926 the composer lay mortally ill in Brussels begging fate to grant him enough time to complete the score. But the fates were not so kind, and his student Franco Alfano wrote the last 20 minutes of music, giving rise to a controversy in the musical world that even now boils furiously.
 &quot;Turandot&quot; has been prepared at the Mariinsky by a French team headed by Charles Roubaud. 
 Charles Roubaud started his career as director in 1986 with a production of &quot;Don Quixote&quot; by Massenet in his native town of Marseilles. After spending several years working with French and Italian repertoire primarily in France and Italy, he moved on to German operas in 1993, when he produced Richard Strauss's &quot;Die Frau ohne Schatten&quot; to the acclaim of French music critics, who named it the best production of the year. His stagings are regularly seen at the music festival in Oranges, in the Arena di Verona, in Monte-Carlo, in Washington's Kennedy Center, and in many opera houses of Europe. 
 &quot;Turandot&quot; is his first work for the Mariinsky Theater. 
 Roubaud sat down with Larisa Doctorow to discuss the new production.
 
 
q:How did you find yourself here? Have you had any previous contacts with the theater? 
 

 
a:Never. The theater was looking for someone to stage &quot;Turandot.&quot; I met Maestro Gergiev in France and he invited me to come here and to work at it. I agreed. And here I am since June 17th. We have had close to six weeks to prepare the premiere. 
 

 
q:Do you work with several casts?
 

 
a:Exactly. For me, this was rather unexpected. But the theater explained that in order to have it as part of their repertoire they needed to have several casts. I am working with four.
 

 
q:So the system here is different from what you are accustomed to?
 

 
a:Yes. I find it rather new to work in a repertoire theater and use all the resources of the theater. For example if I need ballet dancers, I can have them. Certainly it is not easy to work with several soloists for the same role. I think the job of a director is not only to move people around the stage but to instruct them on how best to present the psychological portrait of a character. 
 
 q:I understand that you have done &quot;Turandot&quot; a couple of times before. Does this one differ from previous ones?
 

 
a:Certainly. Each time I want to have a new vision. But the main thing remains: I see 'Turandot' as an opera about love, and about a person who is transformed by love. You could say that this is Puccini's only opera with a happy ending, if you put aside the question of Liu's death. This opera combines many elements. It starts with bloody, very solemn scenes, like the decapitation and then passes to burlesque scenes, involving three masks. The opera is very rich and it is very interesting to stage
 
I keep the finale written by Puccini's pupil: Turandot seizes the knife from the guard and threatens Liu with it and Liu pushes herself into it. Turandot looks on in horror at what she has done. For me it is an opera about love. Liu commits suicide with the hope of saving the life of Calaf, whom she loves more than life. 
 
 
q:So you are not interested in the lesbian undertone which some stage directors like to explore?
 

 
a:It is possible. But I don't want to accentuate that. Because it would take us in a completely different direction. For me Turandot is more a woman who feels the pain of her ancestor who was raped many thousand years ago and she is horrified by that and she is afraid of men, of them touching her. 
 

 
q:How do you work with the soloists, with the chorus? 
 

 
a:I turn the chorus into a single ensemble. It is much more dramatic. If the chorus members are dispersed around the stage, their force diminishes and the public has a harder time understanding the plot. I like when the chorus makes stage movements together. 'Turandot' is an opera with big chorus scenes and I try to use the chorus to make a strong impact on the public. I always think about the public as if they came to hear the opera for the first time and from my staging they have to understand what it is all about ... They have to be carried along by the story. I try to coordinate the movements of the singers and of the chorus, to make them logical. 
 

 
q:So for you the music is the most important thing. 
 

 
a:Yes. Music is very important. This is the reason why the singers sing. And it is the reason for my staging. 
 

 
q:What do you think of the tendency in opera staging to 'remake' the operas?
 

 
a:I don't agree with that. I think that if a person wants to remake an opera he should write a new opera and not 'modernize' those which are written. For me, opera music is untouchable.
 

 
q: So you will be willing to come again if the theater invites you?
 

 
a:Certainly. I am lucky to have a chance to work in this renowned theater. But I don't want to come here to stage Russian operas. I won't feel comfortable doing big Russian classical things. I think that if a stage director does not know the language of the libretto he can't feel well enough the music of the piece. I think it's very important to know the language of the piece.

TITLE: finale warms tepid season
AUTHOR: by Gulyara Sadykh-zade
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: It could be argued, and with some justice, that this year's Philharmonic season has been a fairly tepid affair. Even the Arts Square Festival in the winter, billed as a key event, brought little that was unexpected, with the line up of those performing, for the most part, being made up musicians that have already appeared at the festival in years gone by, such as Gidon Kramer, Gennady Rozhdestvensky and Viktoria Postnikova. 
 
There were, however, a few striking concerts in the year's program: the performance of the pianist Murray Peraya, of the German baritone Matthias Goerne, and Svetlanov's last concerts with the Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as the tours of Fedoseyev's orchestra which recalled almost forgotten levels of quality in musicianship here. And, of course, there was the yearly concert by Grigory Sokolov, a genius of perfect intellectual piano playing.
 The Philharmonic closed the season with a fittingly large degree of pomp and ceremony and in stages: as is the tradition, the Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Yuri Temirkanov, was the first to bid a seasonal farewell to the concert-going public. It was followed by the Academic Orchestra, conducted by Dmitriev. Slightly more unexpected, was the privilege of seeing Yuri Khatuevich taking up the baton twice in the space of two weeks, something which he doesn't do too often in St. Petersburg. 
 At the first Temirkanov concert , Nikolai Demidenko played the solo in Prokofiev's second piano concerto. An intelligent and serious musician, Demidenko studied in Moscow but has now lived in Great Britain for 12 years. He was able to give the performance the dark, moody devotion of a fanatic, which wasn't even marred by a certain technical unevenness apparent in the orchestra. The pianist played with almost total concentration, as if performing for himself alone in a tense dialogue with the text of another. 
 Another musician to be invited specially for the season's closing was Bruno Leonardo Gelber, a 60-year old pianist from Argentina. Though reports of his playing had been glowing, when he got to the keyboard for a Schumann concerto, it soon became clear that listeners were in for a major disappointment as a result of his inaccurate, sugary-sweet playing and inability to hold the rhythm - the orchestra struggled to keep time.
 After the intermission, Temirkanov tried to make amends by playing Debussy's &quot;La Mer,&quot; one of the conductor's standards. The maestro loves the impressionists, and is very much in tune with their philosophy. The atmospheric swaying, with lightning bursts at the culmination, and bursts of sunlight across green rolling waves - everything in this symphonic poem was overflowing with color and timbre. In short, &quot;La Mer&quot; was played the way it should have been, and it is an excellent repertoire choice for the Philharmonic Orchestra.
 &quot;La Mer&quot; was followed by Ravel's &quot;Waltz,&quot; which, in its elegance, made a fitting conclusion to the evening. 
 Both concerts by the Academic Orchestra featured the Brazilian pianist Elian Rodrigues with her femme fatale appeal, phenomenal speed across the keyboard and fiery Latin temperament. She first came to St. Petersburg two years ago to appear at the Five Evenings chamber music festival where she made a stunning impression, playing virtuoso pieces at incredibly fast tempos and with astonishing accuracy. This time round, Rodrigues chose two diametrically opposed works to demonstrate her playing style: Rachmaninov's lyrical second concerto and Shostakovich's rousing and rowdy first concerto. She played with enviable confidence and energy.
 For the last month of its season, the Philharmonic worked hard to fill its schedule with interesting concerts and top-draw names as the peak of the tourist season comes at the end of June and beginning of July. Vladimir Ashkenazy came and conducted Elgar's First Symphony, while Nikolai Alexeyev, the second conductor at the Philharmonic, performed a series of concerts with large symphonic and chamber ensembles in preparation for a tour of Japan. This summer, the first Philharmonic Orchestra will be heading off for a tour of Latin America, while the second Philharmonic will be playing at festivals in Switzerland and France in August.

TITLE: Mass Grave In Bosnia Linked to Srebrenica
AUTHOR: By Alexandar S. Dragicevic
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - Forensic experts discovered a mass grave in northeastern Bosnia that may contain up to 100 bodies of Muslims killed at the end of the country's 1992-95 war, officials said Tuesday.
 
Murat Hurtic, a member of the Muslim Commission for Missing Persons, said the mass grave was found Monday near the Serb-held village of Kamenica, 45 miles northeast of Sarajevo.
 &quot;We believe they were Muslims killed in Srebrenica in 1995,&quot; Hurtic said.
 Srebrenica was declared a U.N. &quot;safe haven&quot; at the end of the Bosnian war, and thousands of Muslims flocked there to escape Serb attacks. But Bosnian Serbs later overran the town, rounding up and executing men and boys.
 Up to 8,000 Muslims were believed killed in the massacre, considered Europe's worst since World War II. The remains of more than half of the victims have already been found in various mass graves in eastern Bosnia.
 Hurtic said the newly discovered grave contained bodies that had been brought from graves elsewhere for reburial in an attempt to hide the remains from war-crime investigators.
 The preliminary investigation that occurred Monday showed it would not be possible to determine immediately exactly how many bodies are in the grave &quot;because they were disintegrated somewhere else and then dumped into this mass grave.&quot;
 &quot;But there will be 100 for sure,&quot; Hurtic said. The final count on the number of victims will be determined after DNA tests are done, he said.
 Also on Tuesday, another agency - the International Commission on Missing Persons - opened Bosnia's third DNA laboratory in the Serb administrative center of Banja Luka. The labs analyze DNA samples from surviving family members to match and identify victims' remains.
 Labs in Sarajevo and the northern town of Tuzla have identified around 550 victims during the last two years.
 Ed Huffine, the international commission's director of forensic science, said the lab in Banja Luka will specialize in the most challenging cases, while labs in Sarajevo and Tuzla will continue to process the majority of cases.
 &quot;Beginning in September, we plan to process in all three labs a total of 250 to 300 cases per month,&quot; Huffine said.
 Since the end of the war, which killed an estimated 200,000 people, close to 10,000 bodies have been exhumed. Experts believe it could take years to identify them all.

TITLE: Liberal Appointed To Be Leader of Anglican Church
AUTHOR: By Robert Barr
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON - Welsh archbishop Rowan Williams, a renowned theologian and outspoken opponent of U.S. policies in Afghanistan and Iraq, was chosen Tuesday to be the 104th archbishop of Canterbury, spiritual leader of the world's 70 million Anglicans.
 
Williams, who was chosen by Prime Minister Tony Blair, succeeds the Most Reverend George Carey, who is retiring on Oct. 31 after 11 years.
 &quot;If there is one thing I long for above all else, it is that the years to come may see Christianity in this country able again to capture the imagination of our culture, to draw the strongest energies of our thinking and feeling,&quot; Williams said at a news conference after his appointment was announced.
 Williams, 52, has been praised in some church quarters as an orthodox Christian and a deep thinker. Desmond Tutu, the former archbishop of Cape Town, describes Williams as &quot;the leading theologian in our communion.&quot; But some conservatives have been alarmed that he admitted ordaining a priest whom he suspected of living in a homosexual relationship.
 Williams, who was in lower Manhattan on Sept. 11 as terrorist strikes brought down the World Trade Center, has criticized the U.S.-led war on terrorism, and has condemned sanctions against Iraq and the American threats of military action against Saddam Hussein.
 Writing recently about the war on terrorism, Williams said, &quot;It is just possible to deplore civilian casualties and retain moral credibility when an action is clearly focused and its goals are on the way to evident achievement.
 &quot;It is not possible when the strategy appears confused and political leaders talk about a war that may last for years.&quot;
 In his newest book, &quot;Lost Icons,&quot; Williams criticized the way many children grow up, including their exploitation as consumers.
 &quot;The perception of the child as consumer is clearly more dominant than it was a few decades ago,&quot; he wrote.
 &quot;The child is the [usually vicarious] purchaser of any number of graded and variegated packages - that is, of goods designed to stimulate further consumer desires.
 &quot;A relatively innocuous example is the familiar 'tie-in,' the association of comics, sweets, toys and so on with a new film or television serial; the Disney empire has developed this to an unprecedented pitch of professionalism.&quot;
 Williams was born June 14, 1950 in Swansea to a Welsh-speaking family.
 He received a Ph.D from Oxford University in 1975; was a tutor at Westcott House, the Church of England theological college in Cambridge, from 1977 to 1980; was lecturer in divinity at Cambridge University from 1980 to 1986, and professor of divinity at Oxford University from 1986 to 1992. He was elected to the prestigious British Academy in 1990.
 He was elected bishop of Monmouth in 1991, and in 1999 was elected archbishop of Wales, the senior member of the clergy of the Church in Wales, the Anglican church in the principality.
 He married Jane Paul in 1981. They have a daughter, Rhiannon, 14, and a son, Pip, 6.
 Williams takes the helm of a Church of England which is suffering a steep long-term decline in attendance and increasing pressure on its financial resources. He has advocated &quot;disestablishment&quot; - ending the church's privileged position as England's legally established church, whose supreme governor is the monarch.
 Within the Anglican Communion there are deep rifts between traditionalists and liberals, particularly on homosexuality and ordaining women.
 &quot;I think the church is in for an exciting ride with someone who is not defensive and who is open and who will engage with contemporary issues,&quot; Christina Rees, a member of the governing General Synod of the Church of England said Tuesday.
 Frank Naggs, a conservative evangelical member of the General Synod, told the BBC that his group had &quot;problems with his radical agenda, but in the Christian way we'd like to have him clarify some of these issues, so we are arranging an early meeting hopefully to clarify some of these fundamental concerns.&quot;
 On ordaining homosexual priests, he added: &quot;As far as we are concerned it's against the Biblical revelation ... and we are prepared to go to the wall on this one.&quot;
 Williams was quoted this year as saying it was not his job to be &quot;going around the bedroom with a magnifying glass doing surveillance.&quot; And he said it was not necessary for homosexual priests to be celibate &quot;in every imaginable circumstance.&quot;
 According to the BBC, Williams is the first cleric from Wales to be elevated to Canterbury in at least 10 centuries. Records before then, going back to the first archbishop in 597 are murky.
 Carey, who was appointed archbishop in 1991, held the Church of England together as it decided to ordain women, but his successor will face the equally difficult issue of whether women should become bishops - as they already do in the Anglican churches of Canada, New Zealand and the United States.
 The Anglican Communion includes the Episcopal Church in the United States. Like other members of the body, it administers its own affairs.

TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: <b>Blair's Iraq Waffle
 </b>

LONDON (AP) - The British government is not on the verge of deciding whether to commit troops to any military action in Iraq, Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Thursday while refusing to promise to seek Parliament's approval before joining such strikes.
 "I think we are getting ahead of ourselves on the issue of Iraq," Blair told reporters at a televised news conference. "We're not at the point of decision."
 However, he added, "I'm not going to commit myself to any particular form of consultation."
 Blair has said he believes Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is seeking to develop nuclear weapons, besides his chemical and biological arsenal. But the prime minister would not say on Thursday how close he believed Iraq was to acquiring them.
 Blair, a strong U.S. ally, said in a recent interview with a British magazine that if the time comes for U.S.-led military action against Iraq, "people will have the evidence presented to them" to show that Saddam "is trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction, in particular a nuclear capability."
 
 
<b>New Delhi President
 </b>

NEW DELHI, India (AP) - A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, a missile scientist who advocates nuclear weapons as a war deterrent, was sworn in as India's new president Thursday.
 In his acceptance speech, Kalam said India should brace itself to face the growing threats posed by terrorism, internal conflicts and unemployment, and should have a long-term vision to transform itself into a developed country.
 "To face these challenges, there must be a vision to ensure the focused action of 1 billion citizens of this great country with varied capabilities," he said.
 
 
<b>November 17 Arrests
 </b>

ATHENS (NYT) - Greek authorities said Thursday that they had arrested two more suspected members of the Greek urban guerrilla group November 17, including a hospital telephone operator believed to be the organization's second in command.
 The police identified one suspect as Constantine Tellios, 36, a schoolteacher, but did not provide details of the second man, a suspected senior member. He was identified in reports on state-run television as 42-year-old Pavlos Serifis.
 A police spokesperson, Eleftherios Economou, said at a news conference that Mr. Tellios, turned himself over to authorities in Salonika, northern Greece, on Tuesday.
 
<b>
 Christian Re-Burial
 </b>

LONDON (REUTERS) - A British vicar is asking his congregation to adopt 1,000-year-old Anglo-Saxons at around $16 a skeleton so that they can be reburied as Christians.
 The Reverend Chris Boulton wants to raise the money to bury 670 Anglo-Saxons dug up after building work revealed an ancient burial site, The Times of London reported Thursday.
 "Common decency and a sense of the importance of our heritage require that we treat these ancestors with respect," the vicar told the newspaper.
 Experts said the Saxon remains found near St Andrew's Church in Cherry Hinton, Cambridge, were between 900 and 1,300 years old.
 They said the skeletons were probably Christian, because they had no artifacts buried with them and were buried lying from east to west, a practice that symbolized the deceased's readiness to hasten to the Holy Land.
 The vicar said the appeal to raise the $7,900 needed for reburial had received a good response.
 "I don't think anyone thinks it is too macabre," the vicar was quoted as saying. 



TITLE: Fetisov Has Master Plan For Sports
AUTHOR: By Kevin O'Flynn
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - In Soviet days, the national Dinamo and Spartak sports societies gave hundreds of thousands of people the chance to take part in sports. <i>Sportivnaya Rossiya</i>, or Sporting Russia, is hoping to do the same now.
 
The government-backed sports organization, which was to be born Friday at Moscow's Luzhniki sports complex, aims to promote a healthy way of life and &quot;to fulfill the constitutional right of all Russians for health and sport.&quot;
 Sporting Russia has the blessing of Vyacheslav Fetisov, the former star hockey player turned sports minister who has sent a whiff of revolution through the Russian sporting world since he took office in April. Along the way he has caused a fair bit of resentment.
 Organizers have kept quiet about who is funding Sporting Russia - although they have said they hoped that money could be raised by selling sports equipment - and who the founders are, but they have not been shy about their aim: to bring back mass sport a la the <i>Spartakiady </i>of Soviet times, to improve and build sports arenas and to provide sports equipment all across Russia. Sporting events will get full coverage in newspapers to be printed throughout the country, they said.
 The organization was mentioned in a letter to President Vladimir Putin that Fetisov wrote earlier this month, which set out preliminary ideas for a plan to restore the nation's health and restore sports pride in Russia. Sporting Russia has quickly gained the backing of virtually all the sports federations.
 The attention it has received is a reflection of the way promoting sports has become a political act. 
 Putin asked Fetisov to take over the State Sports Committee just two months after a major speech in which the president bemoaned the collapse of the Soviet sports system and the disastrous effect it was having on the health of the nation. Putin called for a plan to make the nation fit again.
 Pavel Rozhkov was pushed aside as head of the committee to make room for the former TsSKA Moscow and Detroit Red Wings hockey star. Fetisov said he refused a lucrative coaching job with an NHL team to accept the government post, which comes with a salary of less than $200 a month.
 Since his arrival, he has reiterated the stark set of problems set out in Putin's speech, from the crumbling state of sporting infrastructure, to the poor health of the nation's children to the exodus of experienced sports specialists. 
 &quot;It's horrible that the average life expectancy of Russian men is 59 years,&quot; Fetisov said in an interview published earlier this month in Argumenty i Fakty. &quot;The rich can't live in a vacuum, raising children behind high gates, when all around is alcoholism, drug- abuse and prostitution.&quot;
 Since arriving at the committee, Fetisov has set about reasserting its authority. In his letter to Putin he spelled out an increase in control over sports for the State Sports Committee with the creation of a new sports association for professionals and a new sports organization for mass sports. 
 It is unclear exactly what these organizations will do, but the professional sports organization will likely infringe on what previously had been the prerogative of the Russian Olympic Committee and perhaps other professional sports federations.
 The letter came as a surprise to the Russian Olympic Committee, with furious officials complaining that they had not been consulted, Kommersant reported last week.
 The Olympic Committee and State Sports Committee have often been in conflict in recent years.
 &quot;This situation caused too many problems for athletes,&quot; said Yelena Vaitsovskaya, a journalist at the Sport Express newspaper, saying the two sports authorities did not coordinate well.
 Both committees say publicly that they have a good relationship, but tension between the two is showing with sniping between Fetisov and Olympic Committee head Leonid Tyagachyov.

TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: <b>Sabres Staying
 </b>

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) - Five groups are interested in buying the NHL's Sabres and keeping them in Buffalo, commissioner Gary Bettman said Thursday, a day after the team's outgoing owner was arrested on fraud charges.
 Bettman, who did not identify the potential ownership groups, said it was "purely a coincidence" that he was in Buffalo 24 hours after John Rigas and two sons were arrested in connection with the financial meltdown of Adelphia Communications.
 Bettman said he and Buffalo Sabres general manager Darcy Regier planned Thursday's meeting "well before" Rigas' arrest.
 The NHL took over control of the Sabres last month. The arrangement, which could continue into next season, follows an agreement with Rigas, the founder and former chairperson of Adelphia, who remains owner of the team in title only.
 
 
<b>Hope for Rivaldo
 </b>

MADRID (Reuters) - Atletico Madrid still hopes that Rivaldo will reject a lucrative offer from AC Milan and, instead, stay in Spain to play for it on its return to the first division.
 The Brazilian World Cup winner, who is a free agent since he terminated his contract with Barcelona last week, is in talks with the Serie A club, but has not yet made a final decision.
 "There are times when money is not the most important consideration and I am optimistic," Atletico's sporting director Paulo Futre was quoted as saying on the club's official Website on Thursday.
 "I have made a proposal to Rivaldo's lawyers and now we have to wait and see what happens," said the former Portuguese international.
 
 
<b>Williams' Will
 </b>

ORLANDO, Florida (AP) - Ted Williams signed a pact with two of his children asking to be frozen after his death, according to court documents filed on Thursday.
 Williams' scrawled signature, along with those of son John Henry and daughter Claudia, appears at the bottom of a handwritten note dated Nov. 2, 2000 - more than three years after he signed a will requesting to be cremated.
 "JHW, Claudia and Dad all agree to be put into bio-stasis after we die," reads the pact, which family attorney Bob Goldman said was written in a Gainesville hospital room before the Hall of Famer underwent surgery.
 "This is what we want, to be able to be together in the future, even if it is only a chance," said the crude printing on the pact.
 It was not immediately clear who wrote the note or why it was never included in Williams' will.
 
 
<b>Major Swim
 </b>

POTSDAM, Germany (Reuters) - Edith van Dijk of the Netherlands led from start to finish to win the first gold medal of the European swimming championships in Thursday's women's 25 kilometer open-water race.
 Van Dijk opened up a five-minute lead at 10 kilometers in the chilly waters of a lake outside the city of Potsdam, some 30 kilometers from the center of Berlin.
 The Dutchwoman, who took the silver medal at the last European championships two years ago in Helsinki, was never challenged on a cool, grey day with occasional drizzle.
 The 29-year-old won in 5:27:34. Russians Olessia Shalyguina and Natalia Pankina, who came second and third, were over seven minutes behind in 5:34:47 and 5:34:51.