SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #812 (77), Tuesday, October 15, 2002
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TITLE: Money Matters Muddle Music
AUTHOR: By Claire Bigg
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: An investigation carried out by the Interior Ministry's investigative department has turned up evidence of embezzlement of funds at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory, Interfax reported on Friday, and foreign students at the music school say they are not surprised.
 
The Interior Ministry report charges that Vladislav Chernushenko, a major musical figure in St. Petersburg as the artistic director of the Cappella choir and the rector of the conservatory, has overseen the misappropriation of over $3 million of tuition fees paid by foreign students between 1996 and 2000.
 Representatives of the special investigation unit at the Interior Ministry refused to comment on Monday.
 The Interior Ministry report says that its investigation turned up sufficient evidence to bring charges against Chernushenko under Article 293, paragraph 1, and Article 160, paragraphs 2 and 3 of the Russian Criminal Code, covering negligence, forming a group with the purpose of using the professional position of its members to misappropriate funds, and the misappropriation of a significant volume of funds, the Interfax report said.
 As a result, the investigators have ordered Chernushenko, who often tours abroad, not to leave St. Petersburg unless he obtains special authorization. Interfax reported on Friday that Chernushenko was abroad on a concert tour.
 The criminal investigation into Chernushenko's activities was initiated on May 14, suspended the next day due to the 67-year-old rector's health, then resumed on Oct. 8. The preliminary investigation into tuition fees at the conservatory was launched in March 2001.
 Most of the conservatory's 300 foreign students, who Interfax reported pay between $3,000 and $5,700 per year for their schooling, are not at all surprised by the findings of the investigation.
 "This is no news to me. Since I arrived I have heard all the foreign students speak about it," said one current foreign student at the conservatory, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Foreign students pay this money knowing very well that it will end up in somebody's pocket." 
 For Russian students, the cost of an education at the conservatory is about $800 per year, while some qualify through auditions for a free education.
 The $3 million that the investigators say was paid by the foreign students but did not find its way into the institution's coffers were transferred to companies set up by the conservatory, such as Harleston Properties and Belford Trading.
 Foreign students interviewed say that, from 1999 to 2001, they were required to pay almost 90 percent of their fees to Harleston Properties Inc. through a bank in Finland. Prior to payment, the students had to sign a contract with a person named Brian D. Anderson, according to which the students confirmed the money would be spent for musical purposes.
 "In my opinion, the document didn't mean anything legally. It was all very ambiguous. There was no mention of the St. Petersburg conservatory in the contract, and it wasn't outlined anywhere that the student received an education there," said a second student, who also asked not to be named.
 In 1998, foreign students paid their entire fees to Belford Trading, a company located on the Island of Belize, a Caribbean tax haven. 
 The unusual character of the way the students were asked to make their payments has sparked anger and frustration among a number of foreign students, who also complain that their teachers get paid only a few hundred dollars a year to teach them.
 "We never got to see this Brian D. Anderson. We always suspected that he didn't exist, that he was just a name for Chernushenko and his cronies," the first student said. "I hope that Chernushenko gets thrown in jail. The conservatory will do a lot better without him," the student added.
 But, according to the student, students as well as teachers are reluctant to speak up and complain openly, as they are afraid of being expelled or fired. He added that Gintautas Zhyalvis, the head of the conservatory's foreign students' office, told the students not to speak about their payments to foreign accounts. 
 "Zhyalvis made it clear that, if we were to speak about it to our embassies, for instance, we would run into trouble with the conservatory."
 The payment methods for foreign students, however, has changed little since the investigation was first launched, over 1 1/2 years ago.
 Foreign students say that, since 2001, they have been required to transfer almost $4,000 each year, depending on the instrument or subjects studied, to the Glazunov Cultural Foundation, which was created by the conservatory as a charitable organization. This sum is not defined as a fee, but as a charitable donation, but students say they would not be able to study if they did not pay it.
 "It's funny that all of the contributors are foreign students from the conservatory. I am pretty sure that without paying this money, there would be no studies," said the second student.
 Zhyalvis swiftly dismissed allegations that the foreign students were required to pay their fees through the Glazunov Foundation. "The monies they give are not fees, but voluntary charitable donations," he said on Monday. He described the allegations that the foreign students would not be able to study if they refused to donate money to the foundation as "criminal."
 Although the foreign office acts as a link between the foreign students and the foundation, Zhyalvis said that he did not know how the foundation spent the money it received from the students.
 Zhyalvis, who has been working in his post for over a year, says that he knows nothing about Harleston Properties or Belford Trading, or about the $3 million that the Interior Ministry investigators claim Chernushenko embezzled.
 "I don't know anything about these figures. Our office doesn't deal with such questions. We invite students to come and study here, and help them sign contracts, that's all," he said.
 The contract that the foreign students sign with the Glazunov Foundation contains a number of points, the first of which is that the donations will be used for "the remuneration of the conservatory's staff, the purchase of musical instruments and parts thereof, the supply of technical aid and equipment to the conservatory, the maintenance of buildings ... ."
 The following two points leave many foreign students scratching their heads.
 "The Foundation shall use the funds strictly in accordance with the purposes specified in part one of this contract," the document, a copy of which was obtained by The St. Petersburg Times, says.
 The third point reads: "In the event that funds may not be used according to the intended purposes specified in part one, they may be put by the foundation to other uses according to the foundation's statute."
 The news of the investigators' report created a mix of surprise and concern in the city's music circles.
 "That's corruption," said Gianandrea Noseda, who is the principal guest conductor at the Mariinsky Theater. "I am surprised, it's unusual in art. It makes me sad, because I have a great respect for Russian artistic traditions. I really hope that everything will be solved in the best way possible, and that those guilty will be punished."
 An ex-colleague of Chernushenko, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Chernushenko had wanted to invest the money and help the conservatory benefit from returns gained by investing the funds, adding that the Ministry of Culture no longer provided sufficient funding to keep the conservatory functioning. The source added that Chernushenko had probably received bad advice from financial advisers.
 Foreign students, for their part, say they want justice to be done and hope that their money will be spent directly on the conservatory in the future. 
 "Chernushenko has behaved over-confidently. I just hope that he will be punished if he is guilty," the second student said. "They should care more about their reputation. The conservatory is a great institution and it would be a shame to ruin its name because of one greedy person."

TITLE: City's Anthem: Just Add Words
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: As St. Petersburg's 300th anniversary draws closer, the city's anthem is bound to be heard with increasing regularity, and now the city is trying to give people the chance to sing along.
 
So far, people wanting to give their work an anniversary flavor, including those repainting building facades or repairing roads ahead of the event, have been forced to hum - the anthem has no words. In June, however, the city's Legislative Assembly launched a competition to select lyrics for the anthem.
 "As we near the 300-year anniversary of St. Petersburg, the anthem will be very important for the celebrations," said Andrei Petrov, the head of the St. Petersburg Union of Composers and a member of the jury for the contest.
 Currently, the anthem consists of a movement from the ballet "The Bronze Horseman," written by Belgian-born Russian composer Reinhold Gliere in 1949 and adopted as the anthem in 1991.
 Last year, in the first attempt to add words to the music, the St. Petersburg Union of Composers chose the opening stanzas from Alexander Pushkin's famous poem, after which the ballet is named, and set them to Glier's music. But, said Petrov, they realized that parts of Pushkin's masterpiece would have to be edited to fit the meter of the music.
 "Eventually, it became clear that some degree of editing would be necessary," Petrov said. "But who would dare edit Pushkin - the national poet. We had to drop the idea."
 All the same, a wordless anthem was still seen as unacceptable. "It really needs words," said Alexander Afanasyev, spokesperson for Governor Vladimir Yakovlev. "It's hard to consider a wordless piece of music to be a true anthem."
 According to Vadim Tyulpanov, the vice chairperson of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, more than 350 texts were submitted to the organizing committee between July 1 and the submission deadline of Sept. 15. The rules for submissions were relatively simple.
 "The lyrics have to be ceremonial, patriotic and fit well with the music," reads the basic explanation in the competition's guidelines.
 In charge of choosing the best set of lyrics is a jury comprised entirely of honored citizens of St. Petersburg and a special jury made up of representatives from the Union of Composers, the Union of Writers, the Institute of Russian Literature and the city administration.
 The honored citizens of St. Petersburg on the panel form a rather disparate group, including physicist Zhores Alfyorov, skier Lyubov Yegorova, Mariinsky Opera singer Irina Bogachyova, actor Kirill Lavrov and Igor Spassky, the head of the RUBIN bureau, better known for its submarines than its poetry.
 An initial decision from the jury is scheduled for Oct. 25, but this might not mean that they have decided on a winner. The jurors may decide to pick a winning submission, extend the contest, or to simply close the contest without naming a winner. The winner of the contest, if one is selected, will receive a prize of 30 minimum wages, or about 13,500 rubles ($425).
 City and Legislative Assembly officials said that they wanted a contest truly for the people, so there were no restrictions on who was allowed to participate. Submissions have rolled in from people in all walks of life, including engineers, navy captains, chemists, art teachers, sculptors and pensioners. 
 "We deliberately didn't turn anybody down and passed on all of the lyrics to the jury," Tyulpanov said. He said that most of the submissions received focused upon a similar set of symbols and ideas, painting a fairly standard picture of how the writers viewed their city.
 "I wish that there was more creativity and less stereotypical thinking," Tyulpanov said. "I saw the same images circulating through most of the anthems: palaces, parks, the Neva River, Peter the Great, etc."
 But, sometimes, these images showed up in unusual combinations or situations, with interesting, if not humorous, results. "The city emerged like a sphinx from a swamp," reads one lyric, while another reads "St. Isaac's Cathedral catches clouds with its cross." Another writer describes the city as rising like a "fairy tale genie."
 Some of the submissions didn't discriminate in the traditional Russian symbols they selected to capture their idea of the city. "I love your gardens, palaces, museums and banyas - and the sound of your bells," one would-be author suggests.
 Already-known and published poets and songwriters have, for the most part, stayed away from the competition.
 "Perhaps they think that it is not very creative to write for a contest, thinking that it is artificial, instead of coming naturally from the heart," Petrov said. "But the bard Alexander Gorodnitsky sent us a beautiful lyric about St. Petersburg, written years before the competition; his verses stand a very good chance."
 Yury Prozorov, the academic secretary of the Institute of Russian Literature and a member of the contest's committee, said that the competition hasn't provided a wide choice of acceptable lyrics.
 "Unfortunately, I would only pick one, the verses by Alexander Gorodnitsky," he said.
 Some authors included personal political views in their creations, while there were sports references in others. One of the proposed anthems rings out: "We know Palace Square from our childhood, we are devoted fans of Zenit," referring to the city's Russian Premier Division soccer club.
 The competition has generated some unorthodox ideas. Composer Oleg Romanov, the artistic director of Otyechestvo musical studio of the Ingria Church in St. Petersburg, suggested that there should be two variants of the anthem - one in Russian and the other in Finnish.
 "The Finnish version can be performed by a choir collected from local Finnish churches," Romanov suggested.
 Even though the pressure may be on because of the approaching anniversary, Legislative Assembly deputy Leonid Romankov, the head of the commission on culture, education and science, would rather wait.
 "It is nice to see that citizens are proud of St. Petersburg and I'm glad to support the contest, but I have to admit that I haven't seen an acceptable option," Romankov said. "It is better to have a wordless anthem than a poor anthem."

TITLE: Legislation Aiming To Help Witnesses
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Only one witness showed up at the opening of a trial in August of five young men accused of beating dozens of people with metal pipes in a skinhead rampage at the crowded Tsaritsyno outdoor market in Moscow.
 
The clearly frightened witness, an Azeri merchant, then refused to testify against the suspects.
 The problem that gummed up this trial, as well as many others, is the fact that witnesses do not want to put their lives on the line to help the police obtain convictions, lawmakers and analysts said Monday. The solution, they said, could well lie in landmark legislation to set up a U.S.-style witness protection program, which is to go for a first hearing in the State Duma in November.
 Critics agreed that a witness-protection program was crucial to ongoing judicial reforms, but cautioned that the bill contains loopholes that open the door to numerous abuses.
 "Nobody knows how many criminal cases collapsed in court because people weren't offered state protection," said Valery Fyodorov, a Federation Council senator and a co-author of the bill, said at a conference Monday.
 "I am sure the number of crimes brought to light would grow if the government provided protection," he said.
 Fyodorov's bill, which is largely modeled after the U.S. witness-protection program, envisions security measures for witnesses such as bodyguards, plastic surgery and resettlement to new towns with new identities. It allows the authorities to declare a witness dead or missing.
 Among its controversial components, the legislation allows the police to provide bodyguards against a witness' wishes and obliges a witness to report any threats.
 It also gives the authorities the option of changing a witness' appearance and identity papers without saying whether the witness can object.
 The bill does give witnesses the right to know whether their documents have been modified and allows them to complain about mistreatment in court.
 "The existing Criminal Procedure Code protects a witness' rights only inside the walls of the courtroom," said Yegor Doroshenko, an analyst at the non-governmental Foundation for the Development of Parliamentarism in Russia. "Without such a law, the code doesn't provide justice because, traditionally in Russia, the indictment is based mostly on the testimony of witnesses."
 According to police statistics, 10 million people appeared as witnesses in court last year, and one-fourth were pressured to recant their testimony.
 Some witnesses change their minds after being offered money or valuables. But many do so or outright refuse to testify for fear of being killed, Fyodorov said.
 He pointed out that only a handful of the several hundred witnesses in a case against Chechen warlord Salman Raduyev appeared in a Dagestani court last year. Raduyev was accused of leading a deadly raid on the Dagestani town Kizlyar in 1996, and the court sentenced him to life in prison.
 Ronald Zhuravlyov, the deputy head of the Duma's security committee, said the recent killing of lawmaker Vladimir Golovlyov was linked to a public pledge he had made to name the parties involved in the improper privatization of companies in the Chelyabinsk region. Golovlyov was a witness in a criminal investigation that has been dragging on for five years.
 In the Tsaritsyno trial, the judge adjourned proceedings for three days and ordered prosecutors to produce a few more of the 32 witnesses who had earlier been interviewed by investigators.
 The trial in the October 2001 rampage that left three dead is still going on and has faced further delays due to a lack of witnesses.

TITLE: Putin's Stand A Wait-and-See Manouver
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin's softly worded, but firm, refusal to acquiesce to the U.S.-British push for automatic use of force against Iraq over any disruption of the planned weapons inspections demonstrates his unwillingness to cross the Rubicon before it becomes crystal clear whether and when the Anglo-American alliance will attempt a forceful change of regime in Baghdad.
 
After meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Putin told reporters that Russia could agree to a new UN Security Council resolution on Iraq, but only to ensure the return of inspectors and not to authorize the automatic use of force in case of non-compliance. He then said the West has not produced " trustworthy data" that Iraq has amassed weapons of mass destruction, thus leaving open the possibility that Russia may modify its position if such evidence in supplied.
 Although Blair has enjoyed a close relationship with the Russian leader, it would have been unrealistic for him to have hoped that Putin would declare public support for the removal of Saddam Hussein at this point.
 "Since it is not yet know what the UN resolution would be, how Saddam Hussein would react to that and if and when inspectors go in, it would have been very unwise for any government of any state to have a final position at this point," said Professor William Wallace, professor at the London School of Economics' European Institute.
 Putin, Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush are playing a "very delicate game," Wallace said, with Putin trying to leave as many options open as possible while making sure Russia will have a say in the new Iraq if Washington and London decide to go for a forceful regime change in Baghdad without the Security Council's authorization. Clearly, Putin wants to protect Russia's economic interests in Iraq, which include future oil exploration and repayment of Iraq's Soviet-era debt of $7 billion to $9 billion.
 Blair and Putin denied they were bargaining over Iraq. At their press conference Friday, Putin joked that he had not invited Blair and his wife to some kind of "oriental bazaar."
 Ahead of his visit, Blair told the BBC that Russia was not setting a price for its support. "Obviously there are interests that Russia has in this issue, but I don't think it's a question of price tags," Blair said.
 But, at the news conference, he said Russia has legitimate economic interests in Iraq "and of course we must, and will, be sensitive to those."
 
The British press disagreed on the outcome of the visit. The Daily Mail said Putin's refusal to back Blair was "humiliating."
 
Blair himself was upbeat on his flight home, the Sunday Times reported. "My best guess is that we will get the resolution we need," Blair was quoted as saying.
 Given the White House's determination to oust Hussein, the Kremlin might outline its final position on Iraq for what could prove to be the last round of bargaining next month, according to Igor Bunin of the Moscow-based Center for Political Technologies. Bush plans to come to St. Petersburg at the end of November to help mark the city's upcoming 300th anniversary, a senior U.S. official was quoted by The Associated Press as saying Thursday.
 Russian and U.S. officials have reportedly negotiated behind closed doors on whether Russian oil companies, which export Iraqi oil within the UN-authorized oil-for-food program, will continue to enjoy access to Iraqi oil in case of a regime change. While there is no publicly available information on whether they have struck an agreement, LUKoil president Vagit Alekperov hinted as much. He told the Financial Times in an interview earlier this month that Putin has assured his company that its valuable assets in Iraq will be protected regardless of whether Hussein is driven from power.
 In addition to trying to ensure access to Iraq's oil fields, the Kremlin also is trying to use the negotiations with the United States and Britain to advance its interests in Europe, Bunin said. 
 In his BBC interview, Blair said "there is no truth" to reports that London and Washington have turned a blind eye to Russia's actions in Chechnya in return for Moscow's support for the campaigns in Afghanistan and the policy toward Iraq. Blair called for human rights abuses to be "dealt with" in Chechnya, but then asserted that "it is important at the same time to recognize that Russia has a legitimate interest to protect itself from terrorism and to make sure that these issues of extremism are dealt with."

TITLE: Census Work Gets the Goat
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: As census-takers went into overdrive over the weekend, they added three Russian space voyageurs to the population count and fought off attacks by dogs and even a goat.
 
To encourage wary Russians to participate in the census, three cosmonauts aboard the international space station were shown on television answering questions from census officials, who contacted them Friday from Mission Control, outside Moscow.
 In Adygeya, a southern republic, three census-takers were attacked and bitten by dogs when they went door-to-door.
 In the Samara region village of Shigony, a student hired as a census-taker sustained injuries to his back when he was butted by a he-goat called Borka, as he was trying to get into a house to interview the goat's owners, the lenta.ru Web site reported Saturday. Fearing he would be held responsible for his animal's behavior, the owner hid in his garage.

TITLE: 25 Dead In Grozny Explosion
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: VLADIKAVKAZ, North Ossetia - Police said they defused a powerful car bomb in front of the main police headquarters in Grozny on Monday, less than a week after an explosion gutted a precinct house and killed 25 people.
 
Grozny police found a car rigged with 20 kilograms of explosives in front of the Interior Ministry department building in Grozny, Interfax quoted the chief of police in Chechnya's Moscow-backed government, Said-Selim Peshkhoyev, as saying. The car was towed to a safe place and blown up by a bomb squad, he said.
 Meanwhile, authorities said they have arrested several suspects in Thursday's bombing, which killed 25 police at the precinct house in Grozny's Zavodskoi district.
 Deputy Mayor Supyan Makhchayev said three suspects were detained and two others remained at large. He repeated other officials' statements that the blast appeared to have been staged by police officers who faced dismissal. "The explosion inside the office of the district police chief ... was their revenge," Makhchayev said, according to Itar-Tass. 
 Interfax quoted Peshkhoyev as saying that two suspects had been detained - not three - on suspicion of being linked to the bombing, both of them police officers who worked in the precinct.
 The explosion destroyed most of the precinct house in the Zavodskoi region of Grozny. Speaking by telephone, Chechen Emergency Situations Minister Ruslan Avtayev said it occurred on the second floor of the four-story building while police were meeting on the third floor, and as many as 41 people may have been inside the building.
 Chechnya's chief prosecutor, Nikolai Kostyuchenko, said investigators at the scene found fragments of an explosive device in the rubble. He said the device, which had explosive power equivalent to 30 kilograms of TNT, may have been planted by a "former or current police officer" who had access to the precinct building, Itar-Tass reported.
 Chechnya's fledgling police force has been at the center of a fierce debate between the Moscow-backed administration in Grozny and federal forces.
 Administration officials say that the republic's police force - composed mostly of ethnic Chechens - is capable of providing the necessary security in Chechnya and that federal forces should cede authority to them.
 At the same time, Chechen rebels consider the Chechen police as traitors and have increased their attacks on them.
 In Moscow, President Vladimir Putin questioned Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov on Monday about the investigation into the explosion and urged officials to make sure that the victims' relatives receive compensation. 
 "We must fully provide assistance to the victims relatives in the amount not less that in any other Russian region," Putin said during a Kremlin meeting in brief televised remarks. The statement appeared to be aimed at boosting morale of other pro-Moscow Chechen police officers.
 Meanwhile, a Chechen peace activist said Monday that he has been on a hunger strike since last month to urge Moscow to launch peace talks with rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov, and another four Chechens joined him last week.
 Sulumbek Tashtamirov said that he stopped eating three weeks ago at a refugee camp in Ingushetia but was forced to travel to Moscow because the local authorities tried to stop his action. 
 "It would sound pathetic if I say that we shall continue our action until we die, but we feel resolute and aren't going to stop it," Tashtamirov told reporters at an office of a Russian human-rights group that sheltered him and his friends.

TITLE: Region's Nuclear Waste Running Out of Room
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: While plans for a new local facility for the storage of nuclear waste lie unrealized due partially to a lack of funding, local representatives of Russia's State Nuclear Inspectorate, or Gosatomnadzor, say that the capacity of the existing site in Russia's northwest has already been reached.
 
The Gosatomnadzor chief for Russia's Northern European Region, Vagiz Mindubayev, made the announcement on Oct. 4 at a monthly meeting of the ecology commission of the Leningrad Oblast Legislative Assembly, according to documents released by the commission last week.
 The storage facilities at Radon, a state-run company that provides long-term storage for nuclear waste, presently hold 60,000 cubic meters of solid waste, as well as another 1,200 cubic meters of nuclear waste in liquid form.
 "At the moment, Radon has already been forced to start using its 900-cubic-meter reserve capacity - a reservoir that was established as a back up in the event of a nuclear emergency at [the Leningrad Nuclear Power Station] or in St. Petersburg," said Mikhail Yakushev, the deputy head of Radon, at the ecology commission session.
 Yakushev added that the space in the back-up reservoir is not itself sufficient to hold the overflow, and that a number of entities generating nuclear waste in the Northwest Region may be forced to store the excess at their own facilities, which were not built to provide a long-term-storage solution. Most of these sites, because they have less comprehensive facilities and are not as strictly regulated as the Radon site, are licensed to store radioactive waste materials for no longer that six months.
 "It's a serious problem for the region," said Sergei Lukovnikov, the head of the radiation-safety inspectorate at the Northern European branch of Gosatomnadzor. "Potentially, it means that we may have to order those organizations that generate radioactive waste to suspend their activities."
 "There's no question that we urgently need new storage facilities," Alexander Ignatov, the director of the Radon facility, said on Friday. "About 20 percent of our reserve facility is already filled, while we receive deliveries of about 200 cubic meters of solid radioactive waste every year."
 According to statistics from Gosatomnadzor, 96 percent of all radioactive waste generated in the Northwest Region comes from St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast.
 The local Radon facility, located in Sosnovy Bor, about 80 kilometers west of St. Petersburg, in the Leningrad Oblast, is one of 15 operating in different regions in the country.
 Oleg Bodrov, director of the Green World environmental organization, in Sosnovy Bor, said the problem at Radon is also that new coverings must be built for the existing facilities.
 "When it rains, water can penetrate the old concrete containers for solid radioactive waste and then seep into the surrounding soil and water table," he said on Monday.
 Lidia Blinova, from the regional ecological-monitoring laboratory in Sosnovy Bor, said Monday that some radioactive substances have already seeped into underground waters, adding that measures to ensure that these substances do not seep into the neighboring Gulf of Finland should be taken quickly.
 "Unfortunately, local and regional authorities underestimate the problem and aren't in any hurry to find money to solve the problem," Bodrov said on Monday. "It usually takes an emergency to spur quick and effective action."
 According to Ignatov, plans for the construction of a new storage facility already exist, but getting the necessary approval from a myriad of different federal agencies is a lengthy process and it is unclear where they will find the necessary financing. He said that the price tag for a facility able to hold 5,000 cubic meters of solid waste, which should cover the region's needs for another 25 years, would be about $80 million.
 The Legislative Assembly of the Leningrad Oblast is planning to consider the problem at its meeting on Oct. 22. Yelena Navolotskaya, a consultant with the assembly's ecological commission says that they plan to appeal to the presidential administration and the federal government for funding.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Rebels in Pankisi
 </b>

TBILISI, Georgia (AP) - Georgian Interior Minister Koba Narchemashvili said Monday that Chechen militants could still be hiding in the Pankisi Gorge and that troops would continue their operation in the valley "for a few more months." 
 "They have no weapons or uniforms, so it will take a few more months completely to bring order to Pankisi," he said. 
 However, he denied that there were large rebel units in the valley. 
 Narchemashvili said representatives of the Federal Security Service and Russian border guards recently visited Pankisi and could have seen for themselves that there are no major groups of fighters there. 
 
 
<b>Vatican Fumes
 </b>

VATICAN CITY (AP) - In the latest in an increasingly bitter battle with Moscow, the Vatican denounced Monday what it called a "despicable operation" to discredit the Roman Catholic Church in Russia.
 The statement by Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls followed an appeal to human rights groups last month by the head of the church in Russia against what he called a "large-scale anti-Catholic campaign."
 As examples, the Vatican statement cited the transformation of an apartment rented out for charitable purposes by the Fransican Order into a house of prostitution and Russian news reports depicting people in religious dress in "immoral poses."
 The newspaper and TV reports were "deceitfully constructed" and clearly aimed at "damaging the reputation of the Catholic community," the statement said.
 Tensions have increased following Pope John Paul II's visits to former Soviet republics and the Vatican's decision to upgrade its presence in Russia. The Orthodox Church has accused the Vatican of poaching on traditional Orthodox territory. 
 
 
<b>Japanese Minister Visits
 </b>

MOSCOW (AP) - President Vladimir Putin told Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi on Monday that Moscow hopes to strengthen ties with Tokyo.
 The talks were expected to lay the groundwork for a January visit by Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said Monday that Koizumi would arrive Jan. 10. 
 Kawaguchi and Ivanov agreed on Saturday to a six-point plan for developing relations, including intensifying efforts to sign a peace treaty, cooperation in the international arena and boosting economic ties. That plan is to be approved by Putin and Koizumi during the January summit.
 
 
<b>Vacation Collision
 </b>

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Five Russian tourists and two Egyptian drivers were killed Monday when a tourist bus collided with a trailer on the Red Sea highway, police said.
 The driver of the bus lost control of the vehicle and collided with a trailer coming from the opposite direction, police said. Both drivers were killed.
 The bus was taking the tourists from the Red Sea resort of Hurghada to Ras Gharib, south of the Suez Canal. The accident took place near Ras Gharib.
 Ten other Russian tourists and their Egyptian guide were injured. Three of the injured were hospitalized in Hurghada in critical condition, police said. 



TITLE: Forced Forex Sales To Be Eased
AUTHOR: By Victoria Lavrentieva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin on Monday urged the government to seize initiative and ease restrictions on hard-currency transactions now that Russia has been removed from an international blacklist of &quot;hot money&quot; facilitators.
 
Putin praised the joint work by the government and lawmakers that led to Russia being stricken from the Financial Action Task Force's financial blacklist Friday, but said that creating more stringent foreign-currency rules would be a step backward and would hurt honest businesses and citizens.
 &quot;A comprehensive package of laws has been adopted and a financial monitoring committee established ... but this does not mean that we should tighten the screws,&quot; Putin was quoted by Itar-Tass as saying. &quot;On the contrary, we should move toward currency liberalization,&quot; he said.
 &quot;Russians should have equal rights with citizens of any developed country. But, at the same time, we should achieve more transparency in the activities of both individuals and legal entities,&quot; Putin added.
 The president's remarks echoed those made Friday by Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov after he rejected a draft proposal on changes to the hard-currency regime submitted jointly by the Central Bank and the Finance Ministry, which was supposed to be presented to the cabinet for debate on Thursday.
 The proposal would have lowered the amount of foreign-currency earnings exporters must convert into rubles to 30 percent from 50 percent, which Kasyanov supports. But it did not commit to a deadline for abolishing the mandatory sales altogether. It also would have imposed new controls by giving additional powers to the Central Bank, such as being able to reimpose mandatory sales in certain situations, Kasyanov said. 
 Instead, Kasyanov said that he favored an alternative plan suggested by the Economic Development and Trade Ministry, which he called more liberal and concrete. Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref wants the mandatory sales requirement lowered to 25 percent next year and scrapped completely in 2004.
 In the wake of the 1998 economic meltdown, the Central Bank, to support the ruble, introduced mandatory foreign-currency sales of 75 percent of all export proceeds, which was cut to 50 percent last year. The requirement has helped the Central Bank steadily build its foreign-currency reserves, which now stand at an all-time high of more than $46 billion.
 But the requirement also puts inflationary pressures on the domestic currency, as the Central Bank must spend more rubles in order for it and other buyers to soak up incoming dollars. 
 In the first half of the year, for example, exporters earned $48 billion in hard currency, according to Central Bank statistics. That would suggest that exporters bought $24 billion worth of rublesduring that period.
 Economists are nearly unanimous in support of currency liberalization, but they are divided on how far - and how fast - the Central Bank should proceed. 
 &quot;It isn't an issue of whether or not obligatory currency sales should be lowered and eventually dismantled altogether,&quot; said Marcin Wiszniewski, an emerging-markets analysts with Morgan Stanley in London. 
 &quot;But it is crucial that ... a balance is struck between the government's goal of ensuring cautious, smooth and orderly liberalization and the ability of businesses to conduct all legitimate, business-related currency transactions with minimum bureaucratic hassle and restrictions,&quot; he said.
 Christof Ruhl, the World Bank's chief economist for Russia, said that the goal of scrapping mandatory sales is justified under current conditions. &quot;For exporters, it will mean that they will be free to use their export earnings the way they want - that's the normal state of affairs,&quot; he said.
 Other economists, however, were more cautious. 
 Cutting the requirement to 50 percent last year had no real effect on the economy, because many exporters found ways around the 75-percent requirement in the first place, said Peter Westin, chief economist at investment bank Aton. 
 &quot;So this will be the first time that we will see a real change, and it is hard to tell what the consequences will be,&quot; he said. &quot;Of course, a fast move toward full liberalization would be nice, but it makes sense to cut to 30 percent and wait and see the result.&quot;
 Oksana Dynnikova, an economist at the Economic Expert Group think tank, agreed that the price of full liberalization could be steep, since the economy has never experienced such a dramatic easing of currency regulations. 
 &quot;Of course, it is in the interest of big exporters to have the freedom to use their export earnings as they want,&quot; she said. &quot;But if, one day, they decide to leave it all abroad, it will inevitably result in a rise in the dollar rate and have a negative effect on the whole economy.&quot;
 Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said that a new proposal would be submitted to the government by Thursday.

TITLE: AvtoVAZ Confirms Two-Week Shutdown
AUTHOR: By Simon Ostrovsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - With foreign automakers eroding its market share, AvtoVAZ on Friday announced plans to stop production to cope with growing stockpiles of its best-selling Lada and Niva models.
 
&quot;Of the 75,000 to 77,000 automobiles that are ready for sale - about 28 days' worth of production - there is a risk that 25,000 to 30,000 cannot be sold,&quot; the country's flagship automaker said on its Web site, www.vaz.ru.
 AvtoVAZ could not be reached for comment Sunday, but Kommersant reported in its Saturday edition that the company's production chief, Anatoly Melnikov, said that the factory would shut down for two weeks, starting on Oct. 26. The paper said company president Vitaly Vilchik would officially give the order on Sunday.
 Dealers have become increasingly alarmed as AvtoVAZ's unsold inventory has been steadily growing since the end of the summer. Last month, dealers asked the auto giant to cut production because warehouses around the country were nearing capacity, with 50,000 units already in storage.
 AvtoVAZ produces 68 percent of all the cars on Russia's roads. It sold 517,000 of the 570,000 cars it produced in the first nine months of 2001 and has produced nearly 575,000 units this year.
 Melnikov told Kommersant that most of AvtoVAZ's tens of thousands of employees would be sent on a two-week &quot;holiday.&quot;
 Production of the new Chevy Niva, which AvtoVAZ produces together with U.S. giant General Motors at AvtoVAZ's complex in Tolyatti, will not be affected by the shutdown.
 In the statement posted on its Web site, AvtoVAZ blamed its problems on a variety of factors, including the record flooding that plagued southern Russia and Europe for several weeks this summer, and government foot-dragging on implementing a restrictive import tariff on used foreign cars, AvtoVAZ's main competition.
 Earlier this month, a 35-percent import-tariff hike was introduced on cars more than seven years old in an effort to bolster prices and demand on increasingly unwanted Russian cars.
 Industry watchers say that consumers are more often finding post-purchase services, such as warranties and maintenance, offered by foreign brands, more attractive than what domestic producers - especially AvtoVAZ - can offer. This, together with rising incomes and the emergence of more financing options, is encouraging Russians to opt for more expensive foreign cars, whose share of the market has risen to 36 percent from 26 percent last year.
 Investment-bank analysts, however, have widely divergent views on AvtoVAZ's fiscal health.
 Brunswick UBS Warburg last week downgraded the company's stock to sell. &quot;[The company's] cash generation will decline, and therefore ... the company will be unable to finance its massive [capital-expenditure] program internally, giving rise to mounting debt,&quot; the brokerage said in a research note. &quot;Our valuation suggests a significant potential downside, despite the value we expect GM-AvtoVAZ to add.&quot;
 Earlier in the week, Aton, another prominent investment bank, told investors to buy AvtoVAZ shares, saying it had &quot;transformed into a financially stable, profitable producer, whose product line will soon be filled by new models.&quot; It added that the company's &quot;corporate governance has improved significantly.&quot;
 Aton's target share price for AvtoVAZ is $46.5 compared to Brunswick's $20.9. The company's stock traded at around $29 on the RTS on Friday.

TITLE: Agriculture Gets Credit To Tune of $286M
AUTHOR: By Victoria Lavrentieva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - After a decade of stagnation and a dearth of financing, foreign investors are increasingly seeing the agricultural industry as a land of opportunity.
 
On Thursday, Rabobank, one of the world's largest agricultural banks, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development announced that they will provide up to $286 million in short-term working capital for companies during the 2002 to 2003 agribusiness season.
 The Dutch bank will provide $186 million of the total, with the EBRD providing the rest, doubling its commitment to Rabobank's existing agrifinance program, which was $50 million last year.
 The major beneficiaries of the financing will be &quot;Russian soft-commodity traders, food processors, sugar refineries, oilseed crushers and grain millers in the main agricultural centers of Russia,&quot; the banks said in a joint statement. &quot;The shortage of such capital is a major constraint on the growth of the Russian agricultural sector.&quot;
 They said that the facility will encourage the development of agribusinesses.
 Agronomists agreed.
 &quot;The sector is gradually becoming more attractive for both Russian and foreign investors, and we see a lot of short-term financing of working capital, trade and partial production of agricultural goods,&quot; said Dmitry Rylko, general director of the Institute for Agricultural Market Studies.
 Andrei Sizov, of research agency SovEcon, said that Thursday's announcement is a sign that the sector is finally starting to develop, but he pointed out that, so far, no one is willing to provide financing for more than a single season.
 &quot;I would not say that there is a stable positive trend in the sector, so any investment for more than two years is questionable,&quot; Sizov said.
 Russia is one of the world's largest producers of grain, harvesting 85 million metric tons in the 2001 to 2002 season, which ran from July to June.
 Despite the progress, the one thing that cannot be changed - the weather - will always create an element of risk in the industry, Rylko said.
 Another problem is that many of the state-owned companies that dominate the sector carry a huge debt load.
 Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev said Thursday that Russian agribusinesses have a total debt of 280 billion rubles ($8.8 billion).
 Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov said that the government is looking for ways to help these companies restructure their debts, most of which is owed to the State Pension Fund, Gazprom and Unified Energy Systems.
 Another hurdle to development, Rylko said, is the uncertainty surrounding what kind of concessions, if any, regarding protections and subsidies for agriculture, Russia is willing to make to enter the World Trade Organization.
 Russia's tough stance on agriculture is one of the major sticking points in membership negotiations with the global trade body.
 Andrew Somers, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia, said Thursday that Washington, a WTO heavyweight, and Moscow are closer to reaching agreement on the agriculture issue than Russia is with the European Union.

TITLE: Russia Taken Off Blacklist of Money-Laundering States
AUTHOR: Victoria Lavrentieva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - After more than two years of legal scrambling, Russia on Friday was erased from the Financial Action Task Force's international blacklist of non-cooperative countries in the global fight against terrorism and money laundering.
 
&quot;This is a great success for Russia,&quot; FATF President Jochen Sanio said in a statement announcing the decision, which was made after three days of talks in Paris. &quot;The FATF looks forward to close collaboration with Russia in the ongoing fight against money laundering and terrorist financing.&quot;
 Sanio also invited Russia to become an observer of the global body, comprised of 31 wealthy countries, as a prelude to full membership, which he said could come as early as next year. Current observers include more than 20 international associations and organizations, such as the European Central Bank, the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Egmont Group, a group of 69 countries with financial intelligence units that Russia joined in early June.
 &quot;We will continue to cooperate with this organization and, I hope, in the foreseeable future we will become members,&quot; Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov was quoted by Interfax as saying.
 Analysts called the decision by the FATF more of a political victory than an economic one, although the embarrassment of being considered a facilitator of tax cheats and terrorists did spur the government to push through tough new legislation and to empower a new financial monitoring body that has made the country more attractive to investors.
 Some analysts suggested that the decision was tied to Russia's growing importance as an energy supplier to the West and as an incentive to back the United States in its war on terror. The decision came on the same day British Prime Minister Tony Blair was in Moscow to discuss possible military strikes against Iraq with President Vladimir Putin. Both Britain and America are FATF members.
 The FATF said that it decided to delist Russia after being assured by Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin and other officials actively involved in negotiating with the global body that the government will complete the reform process that kicked into high gear after Russia was blacklisted in June 2000.
 As late as last week, it was widely thought that Russia would remain on the blacklist until at least next year. At its last plenary session in June, the FATF praised Russia's progress, but did not change its status.
 &quot;This is a good present for my birthday,&quot; an elated Kudrin, who spearheaded the government's removal effort, told a meeting with the editors of leading Russian wire agencies and newspapers on Friday, a day before his birthday.
 &quot;As a result of titanic efforts made by the president, the government and the State Duma, a working mechanism has been established in Russia in the fight against money laundering,&quot; Interfax quoted Kudrin as saying later in the day.
 &quot;This is an answer to the campaigns that are from time to time conducted [overseas] against our banks out of habit or inertia,&quot; he said.
 State Duma Speaker Gennady Seleznyov said that the decision should have come long ago. &quot;It's about time,&quot; he told reporters Friday. &quot;All the necessary laws have been adopted and all the international conventions have been ratified.&quot;
 Officials and experts said that the decision should boost the country's image among its foreign partners and investors, possibly lifting credit ratings and lowering the cost of financing.
 &quot;We expect this decision to positively influence the general investment image of our country,&quot; said cabinet spokesperson Alexei Gorshkov.
 &quot;Clearly, [the decision] underpins and supports the local investment climate,&quot; said Stephen O'Sullivan, head of research at United Financial Group.
 Banking experts said that the decision should also make business easier.
 &quot;It will make it easier for us to talk to our foreign partners, because they will no longer point at the fact that Russia is still on the blacklist,&quot; said Andrei Bugrov, deputy chairperson with Interros holding and head of the board of directors of RosBank. &quot;It all depends on the banks themselves, on whether they follow the well-known standard 'know your customer.'&quot;
 
 <i>
Staff Writer Alex Nicholson contributed to this report. </i>

TITLE: A Hotel That Thrives in the Back of Beyond
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: NOGLIKI, Far East - President Vladimir Putin likes to talk about how important the development of small business is for the country. So the astonishing success of a small bed-and-breakfast hotel in a dead-end town on Sakhalin Island may well be the type of thing to make him prick up his ears.
 
Called Kuban and located in the outskirts of Nogliki, an unsightly oil and fishing town 550 kilometers north of the island's capital, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the hotel is surrounded by muddy roads and huge piles of timber that have lain there since Soviet times. Even the town's name seems designed to keep visitors away: Nogliki takes its name from the word <i>noglvo</i>, meaning &quot;stinking settlement&quot; in the local Nivkh language.
 And yet the 36-bed family hotel has thrived since it opened seven years ago - mainly thanks to owner Irina Rud's hard work and hospitality.
 For 180 rubles (just under $6) per night, visitors get a bed in a cozy room, shared toilets and sinks, a kitchen where they can cook and a canteen where they can eat prepared meals. Most of the time, the homey hotel is packed and, every so often, guests are even willing to sleep on the floor in two lovingly decorated lounges.
 &quot;It's pretty unbelievable, but occasionally we run out of spare mattresses,&quot; says Rud, 43.
 Carpets and wooden panels cover the walls of the lounges, Christmas decorations hang from the ceilings and artificial plants and flowers complete the eclectic decor.
 &quot;Almost everything here is designed and done by me,&quot; Rud says, as she chops vegetables to put in the day's borshch.
 The hotel is filled with the squawks of six parrots - part of Rud's extensive, and growing, animal and bird collection. As one visitor pointed out, the place looks like a weird mix of a Buddhist temple and a kindergarten.
 Rud's life is an unlikely tale of a strong woman who managed to overcome grinding poverty, an alcoholic husband and a near total lack of opportunities to build up her own business, become a mother of three and a grandmother and happily remarried, to a man called Vladimir who walked into her life about four years ago as one of the hotel's many visitors.
 Born in a small village in the southern Stavropol region, Rud got married in 1979 and moved to Nogliki with her first husband. Her days dragged by like those of many Russian women - stuck in a small apartment in a shabby residential block, with three kids and an uncaring husband - until 1995, when her life virtually ground to a halt.
 &quot;At some point around that time I had nothing to feed my kids with, for about six months, but pasta,&quot; says Rud. &quot;I remember my little daughter sitting in the kitchen and consoling me. She said that she loved pasta and didn't want anything else. It felt horrible.&quot;
 In the same year, an earthquake practically leveled the nearby town of Neftegorsk, leaving Rud wondering whether her own home and family would be next. It was then that she decided to turn her life around.
 The family moved to a rented house with a leaky roof on the edge of the 10,000-person town. Along with her teenage son Anatoly, Rud started work repairing the roof with the intention of turning the house into a small hotel.
 &quot;[We] were working on it at night, after we had finished whatever jobs we had during the day,&quot; she says.
 Soon enough a few rooms were ready for guests and people began coming in. The first 30 rubles Rud earned from a guest left her family with a tough choice.
 &quot;I remember the kids asking if we could buy some apples,&quot; Rud says. &quot;We hadn't seen apples for a long time by then. But, instead, I tried to talk them into buying wallpaper to have another room ready for guests.&quot;
 About four years ago, Rud's former husband, who barely participated in her struggle to build up the business, left for good. He took everything he could with him, forcing Rud to look for new beds and other furniture. She solved the problem by buying second-hand items and painting over them and by welding metal beds herself from scrap.
 Rud says that she had never advertised her hotel.
 &quot;Our clients just tell their friends and colleagues, and the word spreads further and further,&quot; she says. Although the town has two other hotels, Rud said that she never seems to run out of customers.
 In an area where the main industry is oil production, Rud's hotel attracts a wide range of clients, from engineers and construction workers to scientists, ecologists and the occasional visiting journalist.
 Rud has such a close relationship with some of her more frequent customers that their visits entail a lengthy chat about mutual acquaintances who have also stayed in the hotel or about the guest's family life.
 &quot;We don't have any relatives around here,&quot; Rud says. &quot;My husband is also from southern Russia. So our clients are the closest friends we have.&quot;
 Some of the visitors have grown so fond of the place that they voluntarily help Rud make further improvements.
 A couple of years ago, a group of Canadians who were building some nearby oil-production units brought over their equipment and laid a wide, sturdy mud road to the hotel. Other clients drilled a well that now ensures a round-the-clock water supply to the building - the rest of Nogliki gets its water rationed.
 For her part, Rud tries her best to make sure customers keep coming back. She employs three maids at the hotel and a sales assistant in the small grocery store she opened at the hotel earlier this year. The staff are paid 2,000 rubles ($63) for two weeks' work with additional premiums if they do their jobs well, although this doesn't happen too often, Rud says.
 Rud, who seems a tough boss, says her rules are simple.
 &quot;Clients are always right, even if they are absolutely wrong,&quot; she says with a smile, adding that she always tries to handle customers herself. &quot;Men are not good for this kind of work, they lose patience way too quickly. I don't even let my husband deal with customers.&quot;

TITLE: Legal System that Makes Sense
AUTHOR: By John Balzar
TEXT: WHAT if ... what if these corporate buccaneers are right, or half-right, when they say that they never meant wrong? What if prosecutors cannot prove otherwise, beyond reasonable doubt?
 
&quot;These are some of the most intricate, complex facts I've ever run into,&quot; said Republican Billy Tauzin. He was speaking of the fraud-plus case against silver-haired corporate wonder boy Andrew Fastow, ex-CFO at Enron. But he could just as well have been speaking of the whole mess left over from the boom of the 1990s.
 I'll pick a number out of the air and dare you to prove me wrong: Our public securities laws and regulations are a hundred times too complex. Unfathomably so. And, in the vast terrain of this &quot;gray area,&quot; sewer rats feed.
 As business scandals continue to unfold, how many times have we heard an expert say something like this: Well, it may have been immoral, but it may not have been illegal.
 I've taken a dozen stabs myself at trying to plow through the layers of laws and regulations that are supposed to ensure investors a fair shake in the free-market investment system. The result? Pity the poor souls who are going to be yanked out of their jobs or called back from vacations to sit on juries in these free-market malfeasance cases. Is someone like Martha Stewart an inside trader of stocks? Well, it depends. Some of those in the know say that if her brokerage tipped her to the fact that some ImClone insiders were dumping their holdings or trying to, she may be nothing but a conscientious investor. But if she was also tipped as to why other insiders were selling off, that may be different.
 I think that what the experts mean is that you can try to turn a profit on gossip so long as the gossip isn't too good. Then it becomes insider dope.
 What to do? In the hullabaloo to restore confidence in the system, regulators, Congress and the president have overlooked the one thing that might succeed. How about a wholesale and very public simplification of business law?
 Naturally, it is beyond the capacity of Congress or the White House to undertake such a daunting reform. Lobbyists exert too much control in Washington, and politicians are too beholden for campaign contributions. But, from time to time in our history, we have entrusted important matters to study by appointed blue-ribbon commissions. You know the kind I mean: a panel of experts with unimpeachable reputations and a willingness to serve the larger interests of their country, a diminishing breed of American, perhaps, but not yet extinct.
 Let them go back and affirm the original purpose of laws that govern business in the public interest. Investors are supposed to be able to understand the basic finances, the bottom line, of companies that offer stock for sale, period. Those people who advise and conclude these sales should be straightforward in their loyalties and motives. Entrepreneurial creativity should not include accounting or offshore post office boxes.
 Give this appointed commission time to devise new codes to govern corporations and Wall Street and then have Congress vote the package up or down without tinkering by lobbyists.
 The result would be good for business and good for the country. Vast thickets of regulation would be mowed down. Perhaps even Wall Street could gain some lost respect under a more logical and comprehensible framework of rules. 
 
 <i>John Balzar is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, to which he contributed this comment. </i>

TITLE: Counting the Cost of the State's Backroom Budget
TEXT: RUSSIA is one of the few countries in the world that has an unofficial budget alongside its official budget. 
 
Just like the legitimate budget, it contains revenue and expenditures sections. The first expenditure item of the black budget is elections, beginning with State Duma elections. Political analysts reckon that each vote costs $1. Bankrolling a single Duma deputy's campaign therefore requires an outlay of $100,000 to $300,000, based on the size of the district. On average, backing 100 pro-government deputies costs the Kremlin $20 million. The party-list vote costs $30 million to $50 million on top. Then you've got the presidential election. Spending on a single campaign comes in at about $100 million. And lastly, the Kremlin must ensure that the right governors prevail at the polls. A single campaign rarely costs more than $10 million, and usually varies between $1.5 million and $2 million.
 The total for a four-year election cycle comes to no more than $200 million, or $50 million per year.
 Next, factor in about $50 million for pro-government PR - all of those who are &quot;Moving Together&quot; on the Kremlin gravy train.
 Last but not least, you have to throw in something for the intelligence services. Let's set aside the same amount as we did for the elections - $50 million. Total expenditures, therefore, amount to $150 million per year, tops.
 Now, the revenue portion of the unofficial budget. It begins with the oligarchs. Their tax payments fill the official coffers, but their gifts keep the black budget afloat. 
 The Kremlin can always rely on people with problems - an entrepreneur who wants a case opened against a competitor, for example. The petitioner is instructed to make his donation &quot;by orders&quot; of President Vladimir Putin. 
 What's striking is the enormous discrepancy between what the Kremlin collects to fund the black budget and what the government loses as a result.
 An oligarch who contributes a million to the Kremlin slush fund receives by way of compensation a presidential decree that brings him hundreds of millions. The Gazprom exec, whose job is to watch over the interests of the state, puts a kopeck into the unofficial budget, steals a ruble and lets a thousand go missing while he's looking the other way. Every ruble paid into the black budget ends up costing a thousand rubles in lost revenue to the official budget.
 But that's not all. For the Kremlin's slush fund to exist at all, the economy must be structured in a very specific way. To ensure Rosoboronexport's exclusive right to conclude non-transparent contracts, practically all high-tech firms are denied the right to export independently. As a result, for every ruble paid into the unofficial budget you can deduct a million rubles from GDP.
 The entire Russian economy is built around the black budget. The Russian elite is composed of those who have access to it. The people are the ones who receive crumbs from the official budget. The oligarchs contribute thousands to the black budget in exchange for millions in public money. The &quot;new Petersburgers&quot; collect thousands from the oligarchs and put a ruble or two into the Kremlin's slush fund.
 If you ask me, it would be better just to let the Kremlin print enough money to cover its unofficial expenses. We're only talking about a couple of hundred million dollars a year. The Central Bank spends $2 billion in rubles a year on itself; it prints all that money, and nobody complains. So why shouldn't the president be able to pick up the phone and order a truckload of cash when he needs it?
 All of this could be done in a transparent fashion. The president would no longer be dependent on anyone. And the official budget would swell.
 
 <i>Yulia Latynina is the host of &quot;Yest Mneniye&quot; (&quot;Some Believe&quot;) on TVS. </i>

TITLE: If the Magic Goes, There's No Good News
TEXT: HARD times continue on the world's financial markets. Every time share prices make a modest gain, analysts breathe a sigh of relief and inform us that the crisis is past. And before long prices start to fall again. After riding that roller coaster for a while, even the professional optimists have become guarded in their forecasts.
 
So, what's going on? When U.S. markets tanked after a lengthy period of unprecedented growth (accompanied by equally unrestrained optimism on the part of investors and stock-watchers), it was confidently written off as a &quot;correction.&quot; But stock prices can't increase indefinitely. Following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, market woes were blamed on terrorism, then on revelations of corruption in major American corporations. The explanations change, but depressed stock prices remain.
 It bears repeating that the state of financial markets is rather more distressing than the state of Western economies on the whole. Sure, times are tough, but the bottom hasn't fallen out. We have seen no sharp declines in production - only stagnation or weak growth. We've seen crises a lot worse than this.
 But, clearly, our troubles cannot be explained simply by the financial bubble irresponsibly pumped up during the 1990s. We're dealing with a much more serious structural crisis. Speculation on financial markets in recent years has had almost nothing to do with the real worth of the companies involved. In the past, people bought stock for the dividends. But, over the past decade, stocks have become a sort of fetish, a mystical symbol that has taken on its own significance independent of financial reality. People bought shares in order to resell them. 
 Then the magic wore off. What's a magic wand worth if it no longer casts spells? Who knows. Perhaps the wand is made of some rare wood? Or encrusted with jewels? Maybe. But our magicians don't know what to make of all that.
 Market speculators didn't just live parasitically off the real sector over the course of a decade - they systematically bled it dry. The financial market created by today's economic gurus proved to be nothing more than a redistribution mechanism serving the interests of the rich, of those who produce nothing except for new parasitic structures. As the financial markets ballooned to unimaginable dimensions they became a problem, a brake on development. As the proverb goes, &quot;the one with the plow,&quot; who works the land, ends up feeding &quot;the seven with spoons,&quot; who do nothing but eat.
 The financial speculators are far from happy with the current state of affairs, yet they can't admit that they are at least partially to blame for bringing it about. If they were to admit that, they'd have to think about how to reform or outlaw their own activities. Financial markets continue to await a deus ex machina - some good news that will send share prices soaring. Meanwhile, business activity is slowing and people are losing their jobs. Corporate execs are reluctant to pump money into expensive new projects during the market slump. So who, if anyone, will deliver the good news?
 
 <i>Boris Kagarlitsky is a Moscow-based sociologist. </i>

TITLE: U.S. Needs To Create Goodwill Everywhere
AUTHOR: By Bill Keller
TEXT: THE prime opinion-slinging show on Russian TV these days is called &quot;Svoboda Slova&quot; (&quot;Freedom of Speech&quot;). It's like &quot;Crossfire&quot; on steroids, with antagonists exchanging muscular polemics while a fever chart of audience opinion tells you who's winning the argument. Recently, the subject was Iraq, and it was a depressing glimpse of how America looks these days from outside its sanctuary of self-absorption.
 
One guest disputant on the Iraq side was Baghdad's ambassador to Moscow. He studied journalism in the Soviet Union, and it shows: he tried to change the subject to Hiroshima. Another was a leader of a sleazy, quasi-Fascist party in the Russian Parliament, who warned that, after the power-drunk Americans devoured Iraq, they would soon be nibbling at Russia's entrails. This was not a pair that radiated credibility.
 The pro-American side was represented by a sober duet of Dmitri Simes, a conservative, Russian-born American scholar, who defended the current U.S. administration's case by remote feed from Washington, and the genial former foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev, who argued that Iraq had made this mess for itself by continually defying the United Nations.
 The studio audience started out 75 percent opposed to &quot;tough measures&quot; against Iraq, and by the time the show was over, the opposition had grown to 85 percent. You could fairly sum up the Russian consensus this way:
 . In threatening Iraq, U.S. President George W. Bush is mainly after cheap oil, and probably some cheap votes in the next election.
 . America may pretend to be promoting lofty democratic ideals, just as the Soviet Union pretended to be exporting Socialist ideals. But America likes the tyrants who serve its interests. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein - like Osama bin Laden's compatriots in Afghanistan - was once a beneficiary of American largess, back when he was fighting Iran, and he might have still been on the American's pay list if he hadn't tried to kill President Bush Sr.
 . The Bush overtures to the UN are laughably insincere, a belated effort to dress up an attack that is foreordained.
 . Whatever happens, it will be bad for Russia - self-pity is the Russian default position - and terrible for ordinary Iraqis.
 . America could care less about that.
 
From Russians with whom I've talked, that indictment seems to be pretty much the mainstream view. Many Russians now see the United States the way Americans once saw them - expansionist bullies, disguising their appetite as humanitarian vision. The fact that much of this attitude stems from a post-Soviet inferiority complex doesn't make it any prettier to hear.
 
To what extent the inscrutable Vladimir Putin shares his compatriots' cynicism is hard to know. The Russian president has played the situation like the judo black belt he is. He has already invoked the new Bush Doctrine of defensive pre-emption against neighboring Georgia, where the Pankisi Gorge has been a highway for separatists bedeviling Russia in the province of Chechnya. This strategy has already accomplished three things: It got Washington's attention; it delighted the Russian military, which still loathes Georgia's president, Eduard Shevardnadze, for humiliations he inflicted as Mikhail Gorbachev's foreign minister; and it seems to have prodded Shevardnadze into cracking down harder on the rebels.
 Putin has also rushed to shore up his commercial ties with Iran, Iraq and North Korea, the countries the White House insists on calling &quot;the axis of evil.&quot; Hardly anyone seriously believes Putin feels any ideological kinship with those three regimes; they just happen to be among the few countries that buy Russian manufactured goods.
 If you believe (as I do) that Saddam Hussein represents an insufferable menace, and that a convincing preparation for war is a prerequisite for any serious reckoning with him, it is tempting to dismiss the mutterings of the Russian elite. We can be sure that President Putin - the calculating pragmatist - will swallow our Iraq venture, as he has swallowed our intervention in the Balkans, the expansion of NATO, the discarding of the ABM treaty, the basing of American troops in nearby Central Asia and various other take-it-or-leave-it Bush administration initiatives. Astute Putin-watchers, like Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Moscow Center, say that, although Putin may still have the democratic instincts of a former KGB spymaster, he knows he has no real choice but to cast Russia's lot with the West.
 But just because Americans can is no reason to treat Russia as little more than a speed bump. This is not just about Saddam Hussein, or just about Russia. It is about what kind of superpower America wants to be - one that wins over potential friends, or one that simply bulldozes them. The view from Russia, shared in many other places around the globe, is that Americans are wearing their might with more than a little childish arrogance.
 A few days after that TV debate, I visited Kozyrev, the former foreign minister, in the McMansionland suburb where he now lives the life of a prosperous businessperson. One of his ventures is public relations, and so I had the odd experience of being gently lectured on the basics of effective sales technique by a former official of the former anti-capitalist empire. &quot;You're like a big business that decided it doesn't need a PR department,&quot; he told me. &quot;But every business needs PR. Even a monopoly needs PR.&quot;
 That's an argument our marketing-minded White House understands when it comes to domestic public opinion. It should consider applying it to the rest of the world. Our imperial bluster feeds our enemies and isolates our friends. We've just seen that resentment of America wins elections in Germany, and it would be a shame if it cost us the good will of a Russia that, most of the time, wants to be with us.
 To be fair, the Bush administration has handled Russia with more skill than anyone had a right to expect. The relationship shows signs of a maturity that the tempestuous love affair between Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin rarely achieved, and that is not just because Putin shows up sober. But even discounting for the excesses of Russian pride, it still often feels we're taking the place for granted.
 If we wanted Russia to be a willing partner rather than just a grudging partner, there are several things we could do. We could treat the United Nations as more than a distraction. The place may be an infuriating tunnel of winds, but for a lot of countries it is the closest thing to feeling enfranchised in world affairs. First, we refused to accept that the UN had a part to play, and now, after it dawned on us that the organization can be useful, we are treating it with undisguised petulance.
 We could acknowledge that other counties have legitimate interests. In Russia, trade with countries that America doesn't like is not just a luxury; it sustains a slow progress toward economic normalcy. It would not kill us to offer some public assurances that Russia's genuine economic stake in Iraq will be protected if Hussein is overthrown. We could also make clear that we will not use a conquered Iraq to drive down the price of oil in a way that would threaten other suppliers, including Russia. (This month's Russian-American oil conference in Houston, little noticed in the United States, was a good first step and has made a large and favorable impression in Moscow.)
 Elsewhere along the axis, we could stop scolding Russia for the sale of nuclear-power plants to Iran, and look harder for a collaborative way to make sure that these deals do not end up delivering nuclear weaponry to the ayatollahs. Russia is no more eager than we are to give Iran the ingredients of a nuclear weapon, but the Russian nuclear-power industry is a very large and hungry constituency. We co-opted Russia's space industry by cooking up joint launch ventures; we could at least try to co-opt its nuclear industry.
 An easier way to win a bit of good will in Russia and many other countries is to streamline the new post-Sept. 11 rules for visas. There is now a backlog of 25,000 visitor applications stalled, not because they are at all suspicious, but because the vetting operations are overwhelmed. Among the applicants are hundreds of Russian scientists and graduate students in sensitive subjects like biological and nuclear technology, whom we invited to the U.S. because we'd rather they not go to, say, Syria.
 And then, down at the level of pure, pointless insult, there is a durable relic of the cold war, the Jackson-Vanik law. This is American legislation that denies Russia the normal courtesies of international commerce because, many years ago, the Soviets prevented Jews from emigrating. Emigration is now so relaxed that much of Israel speaks with a Russian accent, and everyone from the White House on down agrees the law should have been repealed years ago - except for a small-minded poultry-state member of congress who is blocking the repeal because the Russians limited the import of American chicken parts.
 A decent regard for the opinion of places like Russia would make it easier for leaders like Putin to be with us. Arrogance and pettiness isolate our friends, build resentment and ultimately undermine our campaign against terror. It is possible to get Iraq right and get the rest of the world wrong.
 
 <i>Bill Keller is a senior columnist and former Moscow bureau chief of The New York Times, where this comment first appeared. </i>

TITLE: Russia's Georgia Policy Is Just Brinkmanship
AUTHOR: By Pavel Felgengauer
TEXT: THE Russian military, fighting a protracted, seemingly unwinnable anti-guerrilla campaign in Chechnya, has repeatedly accused the Georgian authorities of supporting the rebels. Moscow claims that Chechen fighters recuperate in Georgia after raids in Russia, that Georgia is the main conduit for weapons and supplies into Chechnya and that the Georgian authorities have direct links with warlords accused by Moscow of involvement in terrorist activities.
 
Independent observers believe that the supply line from Georgia is not, in fact, the main conduit providing the separatist resistance in Chechnya with weapons and munitions. From late October until late May, the high mountain passes across the Caucasus used by the rebels are covered in three-meter-deep snow and are, thus, impassable.
 Apparently, the main source of weapons for the rebels is the Russian troops themselves. Low-paid, corrupt officers steal and sell weapons and military equipment, more or less, to any bidder, including terrorists and rebels.
 Still, Georgia has undeniably been used by the Chechen rebels as an operational and supply base. Last week in Tbilisi, Georgian officials - including the deputy speaker of parliament, Eldar Shengelaya, the former speaker, Zurab Zhvania, and the chief of the border guards, Valery Chkheidze - not only acknowledged that Georgia had allowed Chechen rebels to establish camps on its territory, but also told me that the authorities had established close contacts with them and that this was &quot;a grave mistake.&quot;
 Corrupt Georgian officials from the Interior Ministry and the intelligence services deliberately handed over control of the Pankisi Gorge, northeast of Tbilisi, to organized crime groups.
 Now things have changed for the better, say Georgian politicians. The rebels have virtually all moved back north to continue the guerrilla war in Russia, while criminals in Pankisi are being rounded up by a newly reformed Interior Ministry. But Moscow has not been impressed.
 Only last week, reliable sources in Moscow told me that a &quot;preventive&quot; military operation, involving bombing raids and the landing of up to two battalions of paratroopers, could begin within days if Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze did not make serious concessions during the summit recently in Chisinau, Moldova. But the root cause of the Russia-Georgia rift - Moscow's open support of separatist movements in breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia - has not been resolved, so the Chisinau understanding may not last long.
 Tbilisi insists that all Chechen rebels have left Georgian territory, while Russia claims that more fighters are preparing to cross the border once again. Georgia has handed over five alleged Chechen terrorists that it arrested last August. Moscow demands the immediate extradition of at least eight more men, but Shevardnadze is reported to have once again postponed the extradition, citing possible human-rights violations.
 A Georgian colonel told me in Tbilisi, &quot;we never took seriously Moscow's threats of a massive pre-emptive military strike, involving paratroopers, since Russia today doesn't have such capabilities.&quot;
 Moscow is playing a game in Georgia, applying pressure to get the Chechen rebels out, and to force Tbilisi to go back on its decision to close Russian military bases. Georgia in turn is balancing on the verge of open confrontation, hoping Russia will change its stand on Abkhazia. One can only hope the whole thing will not come tumbling down, causing a senseless war that no one is prepared to fight or capable of winning.
 
 <i>Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst. </i>

TITLE: Global Eye
TEXT: <b>The Base</b><i>NSA Echelon, CentComm: E-mail monitored 22/10/04. Dispatched DC.
 </i>

 
Yo, Ed! I'm looking out the window of Watchtower 19 in Force Zone Seven. They're loading up the dead wagon. Three friendlies, two uncardeds, the usual collateral - and one bug. We zapped the market before the bug got his hard-on - another one of those Czech AK-47 knock-offs that our friendly neighborhood warlord keeps bringing in. He says he doesn't know how the bugs get hold of them - they drop down from heaven, I guess.
 
Last night, Chrome and Dietrich got clipped by two bugged-up pseudo-friendlies outside the Halliburton whorehouse. They'd just finished three weeks on kryptonite duty, guarding the perimeter where those baby-nuke bunkerbusters went in. It's still space-suit city over there, your wang wired up to the piss-bag for 10 hours while you watch the Pentagon geek squad calibrating the kill ratio and the Guatanamorons in their plastic chains, suitless and bootless, bagging up body parts.
 Chrome was telling us how some bug hacker got into the helmet frequency one day and flooded their gourds with Donny Osmond songs. Four hours of it. What could you do? You couldn't take the helmet off or you'd over-geiger like the morons. Nearly drove them crazy. &quot;And they call it puppy love.&quot; Chrome was crooning, laughing, riding high. He'd just bagged Laila, the one who used to be on TV here - half a week's pay, but they said get her now because some wheel at CentComm was about to privatize her. Then he stepped outside with Dietrich and was gone.
 Four more guys got shipped out this week for going burqa. Bent their knee to the bug god. It's the damnedest thing. Officially, it's not happening and there's no punishment for it, either. The press office gave us sound-bite cards on it for media days: &quot;Faith and freedom go together; each makes the other stronger. The Forces of Liberation welcome all faiths within our ranks.&quot; Non-denial denial. But everybody knows it's spreading like the clap, and they'll rotate you back to Homeland or Eurodisney the first time you step inside a mosque.
 I guess I can understand it. I mean, personally, I don't see the point of trading one load of lies and fairy tales for another. But we're all wading through a cesspit here, you feel it on your skin all the time. You can't wash it off, you can't buy it off, you can't drink it away. For some guys, the bug-god bull looks new, pure. However hokey it is, it's not the same thing that led them into this stinking mire. So they snap, they turn - they shut off their brains and submit. Hell, isn't that what they teach us to do in basic training? But I feel sorry for the suckers. It's gonna go hard for them when they realize the bug god is just like all the others: one big rotting empty skull, staring down at you with those black holes, those no-eyes that see nothing and give back nothing.
 I tried talking about it with Captain Davis the other night; he's about the only officer who doesn't strut around here like a Wal-Mart floor manager among the peons. I'd just come off night patrol in Deep-City Zone, hardcore bugland, backing up some Special Ops doing a Guantanamo run on terrorperp suspects. Banging down doors, barrel in the face of some shrieking bug-woman in her black bag, children scuttling in the dark like rats, the perp calling down an airstrike from Allah on our heads. You know the drill. You know the jangle. Not even the new meds can keep you blanked out completely.
 So there's always the overstep somewhere. Woman's cheekbone cracking from a backhand, some kid stomped or booted out of the way. Some perp putting his hand in one of those damned dresses they wear, going for who knows what - Koran? Mosquito bite? Scimitar? Czech special? - and you open up. More shrieking, more screaming - and then the splatter on the wall.
 Is this what we're here for? I said to Davis. These bulging eyeballs, these reeking guts, this splatter? And the deals, the grease: the trade in whores, the pipeline siphons, the warlord bribes, CentComm and DefSec and BigVeep cutting their buddies a slice of the pie? Mr. Homeland Headboy talks about Jesus and Jefferson all the time - is this what Jesus really wants us to do? Is this what Jefferson had in mind?
 Davis shook his head. Don't go all Gandhi on us, Jim, he says. Ideals are fine, but you've got to make an accomodation with reality. You can't have civilization without power. Nothing will hold together if you can't back it up with force. That splatter - those guts - that dead girl in the ditch over there, with the flies and the dogs - that's what power is. That's the foundation, the base, of civilization. It ain't pretty, but I just have to believe that we're a special nation, and now that we hold this dreadful power, we'll use it wisely, so that one day we'll make those ideals real. I've <i>got </i>to believe that - because otherwise, Jim, it's just nothing but crap. Crap, chaos, murder and noise. And what the hell can you build on that?
 So that's the answer then. We're special. Our grease is special. Our bunker busters are special. Our pissbags are special. Our splatter is the most special thing in the world.
 May No-Eyes have mercy on us all.
 
 <i>
For annotational references, please see the &quot;Opinion&quot; section at www.sptimesrussia.com </i>

TITLE: Washington Sniper Has Area Police Baffled
AUTHOR: By Deborah Hastings
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BALTIMORE, Maryland - The Washington-area sniper took the weekend off again, adding a tiny trait to the personality profile of an assassin who has killed eight people in 12 days. 
 
&quot;He's a weekday warrior. Even snipers have jobs,&quot; said criminologist Jack Fox of Northeastern University in Boston. &quot;They have to make time to kill, and obviously he doesn't have time on the weekends.&quot; 
 &quot;Everything that helps a little helps a lot, in terms of finding someone,&quot; Fox said Sunday. Other criminologists have suggested the shooter lives in the area and may have a job and work schedule that accounts for the timing and location of the attacks. 
 Investigators hunting the increasingly brazen killer have logged some consistencies: the killer favors suburban gas stations; fires a single round; has not let two days pass without opening fire and, judging from a tarot card left at one of the shootings, appears to enjoy taunting the police. 
 Authorities have refused to release investigative details, saying they don't want the killer to know what they know. 
 &quot;We don't want to release anything that may cause ... anyone to think they're a suspect,&quot; said Mike Bouchard, an agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. 
 Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose, meanwhile, has cut back on his news briefings while saying he wishes there was more he could reveal. 
 &quot;I wish we could give you a name, a mug shot and an address, but we're not at that point,&quot; he said in one of four appearances he made Sunday on national TV talk shows. 
 Moose has become the public face of a massive task force investigating a random shooter who has fired a single shot into each of 10 victims, killing eight, since Oct. 2. 
 On Oct. 7, after a weekend without striking, the killer opened fire just after 8 a.m., seriously wounding a 13-year-old boy. 
 &quot;Frustration comes from not knowing where he'll strike next,&quot; said Montgomery County police officer Derek J. Baliles. 
 The last killing occurred Friday morning, when a 53-year-old father of six was shot while fueling his sedan in a gas station just south of Fredericksburg, Virginia. At the time, a state trooper stood just 50 meters away, investigating a traffic accident. 
 Authorities described the serial sniper as not just a local threat, but an attempt to terrorize already anxious Americans. 
 &quot;This reminds us that people in our past have tried to intimidate and put fear into Americans,&quot; Moose said. &quot;This a strong nation ... and we will not be intimidated.&quot; 
 The victims, in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, were shot as they carried out daily errands. Four were killed at service stations. 
 Moose and federal officers refused to comment on published reports that the FBI asked the Pentagon to search records for recently discharged soldiers who had undergone sniper training. 
 Investigators also would not discuss a yellow piece of paper found at Friday's killing site, which reportedly contained scribbled directions from northern Maryland to the Capital Beltway.

TITLE: Finnish Police Identify Bomber
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: HELSINKI, Finland - A quiet chemistry student who lived with his parents and visited an Internet chat room dealing with explosives was identified Monday as the suspect in a deadly bombing at a shopping mall in a suburb of Helsinki. 
 
Petri Gerdt, 19, assembled the bomb with shotgun pellets and bits of metal shrapnel that exploded Friday, killing the suspect and six others and injuring 80 people, police said. 
 As 30 people remained hospitalized, investigators questioned Gerdt's parents and searched his home, allegedly finding materials that linked him to the bombing. 
 Gerdt had no criminal record or apparent political leanings and the motive for the bombing remained unknown, Haapala said. 
 Investigators planned to reconstruct the scene 16 kilometers north of the capital and distribute photos of the suspect, hoping that someone may have seen him shortly before the incident. 
 The government declared Tuesday a day of mourning and Parliament planned to hold a moment of silence. Schools in Vantaa, where the bombing occurred, offered crisis counseling 
 Gerdt lived with his parents and studied chemistry at a technical college near the mall. He was an avid Internet surfer and used the alias &quot;rc&quot; in a chat group that discussed explosives, said Jari Liukku, deputy chief of the National Bureau of Investigation.

TITLE: Annan Challenges China To Act on AIDS
AUTHOR: By Christopher Bodeen
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIJING - Sounding a health alarm for the world's most populous country, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan warned Monday that China has &quot;no time to lose&quot; in preventing a massive outbreak of AIDS and must take decisive action to prevent it from hurting the country's economy. 
 
Annan made the remarks in a speech in the eastern city of Hangzhou, kicking off two days of consultations with Chinese leaders. He flew to Beijing immediately afterward for talks with President Jiang Zemin and Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan. 
 Those meetings were expected to touch on Iraq and other urgent issues under discussion in the United Nations, where China's permanent Security Council seat gives it veto power - and a pivotal role in any vote on the use of force against Baghdad and its leader, Saddam Hussein. 
 However, Annan focused his first appearance in China firmly on AIDS, an issue UN officials have pushed Beijing's leaders to heed. The UN warned in a lengthy report this summer that 10 million Chinese could be infected by the end of the decade unless more is done. 
 &quot;The truth is that, today, China stands on brink of an explosive AIDS epidemic,&quot; Annan told 500 students at Zhejiang University's student activities center. A nearby banner - in the traditional Chinese celebratory color, red - welcomed him to the school. 
 &quot;There is no time to lose if China is to prevent a massive further spread of HIV/AIDS,&quot; Annan said. &quot;China is facing a decisive moment.&quot; 
 Failure to tackle the problem would saddle China with burdens ranging from an exponential growth in numbers of AIDS orphans to development-sapping loss of efficiency, he warned. 
 The speech - and the awarding of an honorary doctorate to Annan from Zhejiang University - began his China trip. He then goes on to Mongolia and five central Asian republics. 
 China says about 1 million Chinese are infected with HIV, but claims the rate of new infections seems to be falling. 
 The Health Ministry says government efforts are helping reduce new infections, citing the supply of low-cost treatment and the cleanup of an unsanitary blood-buying industry blamed for infecting thousands of rural villagers. 
 China has begun manufacturing generic versions of AIDS drugs such as AZT that cost one-tenth of imported versions. On Monday, the Beijing Youth Daily reported that HIV-positive patients will be able to obtain the AIDS-treatment &quot;cocktail&quot; needed for treatment in an inexpensive domestic version by the end of the year. 
 However, China's communist government only recently became willing even to discuss the issue after denying for years that AIDS was a problem. Public awareness about AIDS is still low and top leaders still do not discuss the issue publicly. 
 Private AIDS activists have also been locked up, and officials in areas where the disease spread through blood transfusions have harassed journalists and others attempting to publicize the issue.

TITLE: Palestinian Killed by Exploding Telephone
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIT JALLA, West Bank - A Palestinian militant, whose clan had been targeted previously by Israeli security forces, was killed Sunday when a public telephone exploded in his hand - one of six Palestinians to die in a day of violence, Palestinians said.
 
Mohammed Shtewie Abayat was speaking on the phone just outside the Beit Jalla Hospital near the West Bank city of Bethlehem, when it blew up, killing him instantly, according to doctors. Relatives said he belonged to a militia linked to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement.
 Palestinians blamed Israel, as they have when two other members of the Abayat clan were killed over the past two years. The Israeli military declined to comment. There were concerns that the killing of Abayat could lead some Palestinians to seek retaliation.
 In other violence Sunday, Palestinians said a 4-year-old boy was fatally shot during what the Israeli army described as a firefight when troops entered the Rafah refugee camp to search for weapons-smuggling tunnels in the southern Gaza Strip.
 Israel's cabinet on Sunday discussed the possibility of removing some military blockades in and around Palestinian areas and handing over tax money. Cabinet Secretary Gideon Saar said no decision was made, and Israel's response would depend on cessation of Palestinian attacks.
 In Beit Jalla, Abayat's brother Moussa said the two had brought their mother to the hospital and 28-year-old Mohammed went outside to use the public telephone. He &quot;started to speak on it and it suddenly blew up. Parts of his body were everywhere,&quot; Moussa Abayat said.
 Israel has carried out dozens of targeted killings against militants suspected of violence against Israelis. Israel has acknowledged carrying out many attacks, though in some cases, it has refused to confirm or deny involvement.
 Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers on Sunday killed two armed men who crossed into southern Israel from Egypt, said the commander of Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip, Brigadier General Israel Ziv. Three soldiers were wounded in the gunfight that broke out, he added. The Ahmed Abu al-Rish Brigades, an offshoot of the Fatah movement, claimed responsibility for the infiltration.
 Not far away, in southern Gaza Strip, army troops entered the Rafah refugee camp to search for tunnels. Clashes broke out that left two Palestinians dead and 28 wounded.

TITLE: WORLD WATCH
TEXT: <b>India Death Toll
 </b>

GUWAHATI, India (Reuters) - The death toll from attacks by suspected Muslim militants on devotees celebrating a Hindu festival in troubled northeastern India rose to four on Monday, police said.
 Twenty-two people were wounded when the attackers hurled grenades late on Sunday at two Durga Puja festivals honoring the Hindu goddess, Durga, in Bongaigaon town in Assam state near India's border with Bangladesh, police said.
 Bongaigaon is 210 kilometers west of Guwahati, the main city in tea and oil-rich Assam, where tension between local people, most of them Hindus, and Muslims, the majority illegal Bangladeshi settlers, has been simmering for decades.
 One person was initially reported killed and 10 wounded in the attacks but the death toll later rose to four and the number of people listed as injured climbed to 22, police said.
 Police have been deployed at festival sites in the wake of the attacks.
 "We have increased security arrangements across the state," police Inspector General Khagen Sharma said.
 Another police officer, who declined to be identified, said worshippers caught a suspect close to the site of one of the attacks. The suspect was in the hospital with blast injuries.
 "We'll start questioning him later today," he said.
 
 
<b>Poisoner Killed
 </b>

BEIJING (Reuters) - China executed a man on Monday for killing at least 42 people and making more than 300 sick by spiking a business rival's breakfast snacks with rat poison, state television said.
 A court in the eastern city of Nanjing sentenced Chen Zhengping to death two weeks ago for poisoning food last month at the Heshengyuan Soy Milk chain store in the nearby town of Tangshan.
 State television said a Jiangsu provincial court rejected his appeal and he had been executed. It provided no details.
 Tangshan residents described seeing customers at the tiny restaurant collapse, some bleeding from the mouth and ears, after eating fried dough sticks, sesame cakes and sticky rice balls on the morning of Sept. 14.
 Official media previously gave a death toll of 38, but local reporters and residents have said more than 100 may have died.
 Chen, 32, confessed to the crime after police seized him the next day in the central city of Zhengzhou, hundreds of kilometers from Tangshan, state media said.
 "He acknowledged the crime without regrets," state television reported.
 It said Chen had opened a rival but less successful shop in Tangshan and plotted revenge out of hatred toward Heshengyuan's owner, after a dispute.
 
 
<b>Kenya Walkout
 </b>

NAIROBI, Kenya (Reuters) - A Kenyan cabinet minister said on Monday he had quit in protest at President Daniel arap Moi's attempts to handpick a successor in the latest in a rash of resignations in the past two days.
 Tourism and Information Minister Kalonzo Musyoka said he had resigned from the government because of Moi's attempts to force the ruling party KANU to endorse his preferred choice as its candidate for elections due in December.
 "I have resigned," Musyoka said. "The [nomination] process has been heavily manipulated in favor of one candidate." 



TITLE: Angels Soar Into First-Ever World Series
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ANAHEIM, California - With the help of Adam Kennedy's newfound power, Anaheim on Sunday finally made it to the World Series, where no Angels' team had gone before. 
 
Anaheim had just wasted a 3-2 lead in the sixth when Kennedy's three-run drive off Johan Santana erased a 5-3 deficit and made him just the fifth player to homer three times in a postseason game. 
 &quot;Oh, man. This is tremendous,&quot; said Kennedy, the series MVP. &quot;We worked hard the last few years to bring it all together and we finally got it done.&quot; 
 The Angels, who joined the major leagues in 1961, blew past the New York Yankees to win their first-round series 3-1, then humiliated the Twins in a seventh inning that saw 15 batters come to the plate against Santana, J.C. Romero, LaTroy Hawkins and Bob Wells. 
 &quot;It's the biggest game of my life,&quot; said Kennedy, who has 23 regular-season homers in four major league seasons and four in this year's playoffs. &quot;I'm going to enjoy this for a while and then get back to work.&quot; 
 The Twins took a 2-0 lead on David Ortiz's RBI double in the first and A.J. Pierzynski's run-scoring single in the second. 
 Kennedy, 1-for-10 in the first four games, started the comeback with a third-inning homer off Game 1 winner Joe Mays, and Spiezio's homer tied it leading off the fifth. One out later, Kennedy put the Angels ahead with a drive into the right-field bleachers. 
 Francisco Rodriguez, Anaheim's 20-year-old rookie sensation, brought back memories of past failures. He walked pinch-hitter Bobby Kielty in the sixth, forcing home the tying run, then threw a wild pitch that put Minnesota ahead and gave up Jacque Jones' sacrifice fly. 
 But the lead didn't last long, and Rodriguez wound up with yet another win. He's now 4-0 in this year's playoffs - the first four victories of his major league career. 
 <strong>
San Francisco 4, St. Louis 3. </strong>Barry Bonds strolled to the plate and St. Louis manager Tony La Russa never hesitated, putting four fingers in the air for an intentional walk. It seemed like a good idea - until Benito Santiago connected. 
 
Santiago followed the walk with a tie-breaking two-run homer with two outs in the eighth inning, leading the San Francisco Giants to victory over the St. Louis Cardinals on Sunday night in Game 4 of the NL championship series. 
 &quot;I was looking for that type of pitch. He got me out with that pitch. I guessed right this time,&quot; Santiago said. 
 Bonds, who scored the tying and go-ahead runs, is now one win away from his first trip to the World Series. 
 Robb Nen nearly blew it in the ninth, throwing a third-strike wild pitch to the leadoff hitter and allowing a one-out RBI single by Jim Edmonds. 
 But with runners on first and third, Nen recovered to strike out Albert Pujols and J.D. Drew for his third save in the series. 
 With two outs and nobody on in the eighth, Bonds stepped to the plate. Left-handed specialist Steve Kline was ready in the bullpen, but La Russa decided to stay with righty Rick White and walk Bonds intentionally. 
 That brought up Santiago, who was nearly out of baseball after a car accident in 1998. He worked the count full, before driving a pitch into the left-field seats.
 Tim Worrell got the final two outs of the eighth for the win. 
 Giants starter Livan Hernandez, who brought a 6-0 career postseason record and boasts of his perfection into the game, gave up two runs in the first but held the Cardinals at bay after that.

TITLE: How To Find Your Way in the Dark
AUTHOR: By Christopher Hamilton
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Flashlights beam through the woods and a team of four people, slightly out of breath, comes rushing by through the slush in search of a nearby checkpoint. &quot;There it is!&quot; calls out one teammate. &quot;Thank God, my feet are already wet,&quot; an out-of-breath voice answers. &quot;Yeah, my feet are getting wet, too. It's worse than last year,&quot; laughs another woman. They punch a card, quickly scan their map, take a bearing and run off.
 
Orienteering - a sport in which participants use an accurate, detailed map and a compass to navigate around a course with designated control points drawn on the map - has often been described as &quot;cunning running&quot; or &quot;running while playing chess.&quot; On Saturday night, over 2,000 people travelled to Orekhovo, 60 kilometers north of St. Petersburg, to take part in Russia's largest event, the annual Anatoly Okinchts memorial night-orienteering championship.
 Competitors must punch cards at each control point. The winner of the competition is the participant who takes the shortest time to visit the points in order. Speed alone is just one factor in winning. Choosing the best route and accurate compass work are also important.
 The Orekhovo event attracted participants from Finland and Moscow, although the majority were local amateurs.
 &quot;The winners are always atheletes. When you add up the time and the distance, they'd have to be semi-professional runners,&quot; said Maxim Stepanov, who was preparing for his post-midnight start time by sitting around a campfire rehashing stories of past competitions and mountaineering trips. Stepanov, who has participated in the event for the last nine years, said that most people just come to have a good time and meet up with friends. 
 &quot;Certainly, people come for the competition, but companionship is probably the main thing,&quot; said organizer and St. Petersburg Hiking Club Director Alexei Muraviyev. 
 &quot;We've got over 1,100 teams this year. There are teams of four, pairs, and individuals, which we all regard as teams. The first groups start at 9 p.m. and groups will be starting after 1 a.m.,&quot; Muraviyev explained. &quot;Men and woman run on different courses with different distances.&quot;
 This year, the early snowfall made the competition particularly interesting. &quot;In my 31 years as head referee, I can say that we've never had snow like this year,&quot; said Muraviyev's older brother, Anatoly. &quot;Often, there is frost, sometimes rain, but snow is very rare. The last time was in 1992, but it was a dusting. Nothing like the amount here now.&quot;
 While the organizers didn't expect any additional injuries due to the slippery conditions, they did say that they were prepared with paramedics and first-aid stations.
 &quot;There are a number of referees in the woods with walk-talkies ready to responded to anything,&quot; said Alexei Muraviyev.&quot; We usually get a few people with scrapes, usually due to tripping on roots and other obstacles, but we haven't had anything serious.&quot;
 In the elite categories, Igor Gorbatenkov in 1:41:41 won the men's 12-kilometer race; his fellow St. Petersburger Yekaterina Sharapova took the women's 10-kilometer event in 1:31:54.

TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: <b>Brazil Claims Crown
 </b>

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) - Brazil beat Russia 3-2 to win its first-ever World Volleyball Championship on Sunday. 
 In a match that swung back and forth, Brazil outlasted Russia 23-25, 27-25, 25-20, 23-25, 15-13. 
 Captain Nalbert Bitencourt scored 23 points during the 2:13 match for the Brazilians, who lost their only other finals appearance to the Soviet Union in 1982. 
 They advanced to the title match this time by beating world-champion Italy in the quarterfinals and favorite Yugoslavia in the semifinals. 
 Russia, which as the Soviet Union won the title six times, advanced to the final by beating Greece and France in the previous two rounds. 
 
 
<b>SKA Still Sinking
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ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The arrivial of former national team coach Boris Mikhailov at SKA does not seem to have had the desired effect. The team has taken just two points from five games, and the losing trend continued Sunday night at the Ice Palace with a 3-1 loss to CSKA Moscow in a clash of two Professional Hockey League midgets.
 "My job depends on results. I'm unhappy and you're unhappy," Mikhailov said after the game. "I am worried about the team but I can't do everything in a week. You can't blame the players - they don't have the skill, talent, or physical conditioning."
 Mikhailov also unveiled a plan to look at about 10 players during the break on Oct. 23. They include a Swede, a few Latvians, and one Ukrainian who is in North America without a contract. New players can join the team between Nov. 4 and Nov. 11, when the PHL organized a window to add players to team rosters. 
 "I don't want to mention names," said Mikhailov. "I have a very limited budget to work with; most likely, for every new player we sign, we'll have to cut someone. I also have to figure out what the team really needs. Some of these players might not even meet out needs." 
 The team has already reached an agreement with former SKA left wing Ilya Gorbushin who will return to SKA from Avangard Omsk where he has spent the last three seasons. The club is also working to return Ukrainian national team defenseman Artem Ostroushko, who also left Petersburg in 1999. 
 
 
<b>Favre Reaches 300
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FOXBORO, Massachusetts (Reuters) - Green Bay's Brett Favre connected three times for touchdowns, including the 300th TD toss of his career, to lead the Packers to a 28-10 win over the New England Patriots in a game played in steady drizzle on Sunday.
 Quarterback Favre hooked up with William Henderson, Ahman Green and Bubba Franks for touchdowns. Green, who rushed for 136 yards, picked up the other TD on a one-yard plunge.
 Only three other quarterbacks have thrown for 300 touchdowns - Dan Marino (420), Fran Tarkenton (342) and John Elway (300).
 Pats passer Tom Brady was picked off three times, killing several New England drives, although he did find David Givens for a late score. It was the defending Super Bowl champion New England's third successive loss, leaving them at 3-3. The Packers improved to 5-1.
 In St. Louis, the winless Rams, double-digit underdogs for the first time in recent memory, shocked the undefeated Oakland Raiders 28-13.
 Unknown Marc Bulger, a free agent making his first NFL start in relief of injured quarterbacks Kurt Warner and Jamie Martin, had a hand in all four St. Louis touchdowns, throwing for three and running a yard for the other.
 Oakland's Jerry Rice celebrated his 40th birthday by catching seven passes for 133 yards.