SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #815 (80), Friday, October 25, 2002
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TITLE: Theater Siege Enters Second Day
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina, Oksana Yablokova and Andrei Zolotov Jr.
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Eight hostages, including three children, were released and one woman was found dead in the theater where about 50 Chechen separatists kept several hundred people hostage for a second day Thursday in one of the most dramatic crises the country has ever seen.
 
Federal Security Service (FSB) spokesperson Sergei Ignatchenko said Thursday afternoon that the 20-year-old woman was the only confirmed victim of the crisis and she appeared to have been killed Wednesday night.
 Television footage showed the body of the unidentified woman being carried out of the theater by Jordanian doctors, who were admitted after the Chechens said only non-Russian doctors would be allowed in. Negotiators had asked to send in doctors.
 Ignatchenko said the woman had been shot in the chest. He said her fingers were burned by gunpowder and broken.
 One of the Jordanian doctors, Zake Ahmad, said there were about 800 hostages, including many children, inside.
 "There are too many children there. The hostages are in need of medicine, food and medical assistance," he told Interfax. Ahmad returned to the theater after bringing out the body, and spent several hours inside assisting the hostages. "People's condition is almost calm. Their attitude is almost normal."
 At about 5 p.m., the hostage takers lobbed grenades at two women who managed to escape. Two explosions were heard outside the theater, a former House of Culture near the Proletarskaya metro station in southeast Moscow.
 Ignatchenko identified the two women as Svetlana Kononova and Yelena Zinovyeva. He said a solider was slightly wounded during the escape. 
 The authorities established contact with the Chechens early Thursday, and their main demand remained vague but unchanged throughout the day - for federal troops to be withdrawn from Chechnya. Smaller demands over releasing hostages changed almost every hour.
 By late Thursday night it appeared that the crisis could drag on for days.
 "The country's leadership and the special services have been thrust in a situation in which any outcome would be dramatic," former Interior Minister Anatoly Kulikov said on TVS television.
 President Vladimir Putin made his first public comments at 2 p.m. He cancelled a trip abroad and described the hostage-taking as an unprecedented act of international terrorism. He said the safety of the hostages was of utmost importance and suggested that the operation might have been planned by "one of the foreign terrorist centers."
 "The main goal of our law-enforcement agencies and special services in planning and conducting any operations should be the release of the hostages with maximum care taken to ensure their safety," Putin said during a televised meeting with Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov and police officials.
 "For now, all of the forces must be focused on providing security to the adjacent territory, helping those who found themselves hostages and supporting their relatives," he said. "Caring for the people is the most important thing."
 Russian television channels, some of which provided live coverage of the crisis throughout the day, also showed footage of Putin meeting with top security officials and Muslim leaders. 
 Foreign leaders condemned the hostage-taking and offered their support. Putin spoke over the telephone with U.S. President George Bush and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, the Kremlin said. U.S. Ambassador Alexander Vershbow said U.S. security services were cooperating with their Russian counterparts, The Associated Press reported.
 As the drama unfolded, curious onlookers gathered near the blocked-off site to discuss among themselves the crisis and possible ways to release the hostages. Armored personnel carriers and about a dozen empty buses were parked along the nearby 1-aya Dubrovskaya Ulitsa, which leads to the theater. 
 At 1:15 p.m., State Duma Deputy Iosif Kobzon and two representatives of the International Red Cross waving a white flag entered the theater to talk with the Chechens. One hostage said that about half of the attackers were women.
 Five hostages were released following the negotiations. The Red Cross representatives led an elderly British citizen out of the building at 1:30 p.m. Six minutes later, Kobzon emerged with four others: a woman with a 2-year-old daughter in her arms and two 7-year-old girls.
 Later in the afternoon, liberal lawmakers Irina Khakamada and Boris Nemtsov joined Kobzon in a second attempt to negotiate but failed to agree on the release of more hostages. 
 "Judging by the chaotic way that they were changing the names [of people with whom they wanted to negotiate] and demands, it seems they are acting independently," Khakamada told reporters as she left the theater for the Kremlin. 
 Earlier reports said the Chechens belong to a radical rebel group led by Movsar Barayev, a nephew of slain Chechen commander Arbi Barayev. The reports were not confirmed Thursday.
 Khakamada said that her appeal to release children reportedly being kept on the theater's balcony was turned down. "They said they had already released all the children, but 12 and 13-year-olds were not children," she said.
 Officials and negotiators cautiously refrained from calling the hostage takers "terrorists" or "Chechens." They referred to them instead as "gunmen" and "these people."
 In a statement read by one of the released hostages, Maria Shkolnikova, the hostages appealed to Putin not to storm the theater and to comply with the Chechens' demands. Earlier in the day, relatives of the hostages made a similar plea on television.
 Much of the drama Thursday unfolded over the air waves - with cellphones being used by hostages and television and radio stations attempting to mediate a way out of the crisis.
 "Our demands are very simple - to stop the war and withdraw the troops. That's all. Nothing complicated," one of the hostage takers, who identified himself as Hasmamat, said on Ekho Moskvy radio at 5:20 p.m.
 When asked how such a huge task could be implemented, Hasmamat said: "Let Putin himself think about how to withdraw the troops that he sent there. There is enough time to pull out the troops, or at least half of them."
 One demand reported several times Thursday was for a rally outside the theater demanding the withdrawal of the troops from Chechnya and its independence.
 "The government should make a statement that it is ready to begin negotiations [with Chechen leaders] and at least one military unit should be withdrawn," hostage Anna Adrianova said on Ekho Moskvy after consulting with one of the hostage takers.
 Former FSB spokesperson Alexander Zdanovich said that talking to the outside world through hostages is a hostage-taker tactic. "We know that there is a certain hostage mentality that forms," Zdanovich told Interfax. "Some of them manage to keep a cool head, while others' nerves give out. That is absolutely normal."
 The hostages said they had water and chocolate, but all attempts to deliver food inside the theater failed. 
 "We repeatedly offered to deliver food and water, but they refused saying, 'Let the hostages suffer as we do,'" said Russian Red Cross spokesperson Marina Tarasenko.
 Qatar-based television station al-Jazeera aired a pre-recorded tape of the hostage takers saying they were ready to die for their cause. "I swear by God we are more keen on dying than you are keen on living," a man wearing black said on the recording, AP reported. 
 "Even if we are killed, thousands of brothers and sisters will come after us, ready to sacrifice themselves," said a woman in a black robe that covered everything but her eyes.
 Three Chechen women came to the site in the afternoon to express their sympathy for the hostages. "We feel pain, shock, bitterness, and we are ashamed that Chechens did this," said one woman who only gave her name as Luiza. "We fear the consequences. Tomorrow, the police can knock on my door. People will consider every other Chechen a terrorist."

TITLE: Current Crisis Echoes 1995 Hostage Taking
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Cornered in the rugged mountains, Chechen separatists lose hope of winning the war by conventional means and seize hundreds of hostages to force Moscow to suspend its military campaign in Chechnya.
 
This is what happened in June 1995 when Chechen warlords plotted and executed the hostage-taking raid in the southern city of Budyonnovsk. And this is what Russian authorities should have seen coming.
 Like in 1995, Chechen separatists have been cornered for months. Their efforts to force federal troops out of the republic with daily guerilla attacks have fallen flat. Like in 1995, Chechen separatists have repeatedly vowed to take the war to Russian cities outside the breakaway republic. Yet law-enforcement and security agencies failed this week to keep some 50 armed rebels from seizing hundreds of hostages in a Moscow theater.
 Foreseeing such terror attacks is a tough challenge for any country. But experts point to a number of problems that make the work of Russian agencies especially difficult - among them, corruption, lack of discipline and a disproportionate focus on investigation rather than prevention.
 "It is an evident failure," Sergei Karaganov, head of the Foreign and Defense Policy Council, said in a phone interview Thursday. 
 The Interior Ministry and Federal Security Service, or FSB, should have discerned that radical Chechen separatists have been losing ground in Chechnya and their motivation to stage a large-scale terrorist attack in a Russian city has been growing, said Alexander Gurov, a retired police general who heads the State Duma's security committee.
 "The rebels have repeatedly stated that they would take the war to Russian cities. These statements should have been taken seriously," Gurov said in a telephone interview.
 Perhaps the most evident sign of radicialization among Chechen warlords - even those once considered moderate - was a videotape that surfaced in September showing rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov. Instead of his customary combat fatigues, Maskhadov appeared wearing the paraphernalia of a militant Islamist, including epaulets with verses from the Koran in Arabic script.
 Since the beginning of the second campaign in Chechnya, both the FSB and the Interior Ministry should have boosted efforts to nip terrorist threats in the bud by penetrating separatist groups, said Gurov and Nikolai Leonov, a retired general and former head of the KGB's analytical department.
 Both experts acknowledged that it is extremely difficult to plant informers inside tight-knit groups, like Chechen separatists, and that tapping their vaguely worded communications might have failed to provide crucial details of when and where they could strike. 
 However, even if they were unable to learn about the attack during the planning stage, law-enforcers could have netted some of the terrorists during their deployment, Gurov and Leonov said. This would have been possible if Moscow police had had an adequate network of agents in local Chechen gangs and cells of Islamist extremists, some of whose members have reportedly maintained close contacts with the separatists and have even fought on their side, the experts said. It would have been extremely difficult for the terrorists to sneak into the city, select and case out the target and carry out the attack without logistical support from such individuals or groups based in the Russian capital, they said.
 Perhaps the most glaring failure was that as many as 50 terrorists managed to travel around Moscow in cars with arms and explosives, Karaganov said. 
 Shamil Beno, a former representative of Chechnya's Moscow-appointed leader Akhmad Kadyrov, agreed.
 "Considering the corruption and lack of discipline among the Moscow police, carrying out such a hijacking operation doesn't require much effort," Beno said in a telephone interview.
 "The Budyonnovsk lesson has not been learned and I don't think this one will be learned either," Leonov said, referring to allegations by Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev that he got his convoy of fighters from Chechnya to the Budyonnovsk area in June 1995 by bribing officials along the way. 
 Both Leonov and Karaganov said President Vladimir Putin should personally lead an effort to rid Russia's law-enforcement agencies of corruption and revitalize their activities.
 "We know there is a certain number of people with guns and epaulets, but they are not working efficiently. It is the president's responsibility to change that," Karaganov concluded.
 Karaganov noted, however, that Russian security services have prevented terrorist attacks in the past and said it would be wrong to put the blame entirely on the FSB and Interior Ministry. Even if they operated efficiently and focused entirely on prevention, law-enforcement and security agencies would not be able to intercept all terrorists, Karaganov and Leonov said.
 "It is like intelligence and counterintelligence," said Leonov, who worked in the KGB's intelligence unit. "The latter will always be at an advantage, because it picks where to act, while the former physically cannot protect everything."

TITLE: Up to 65 Foreigners Still Held in Theater
AUTHOR: By Kevin O'Flynn
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Up to 65 foreigners were being held hostage Thursday inside the theater, including three Germans, two Britons and two Americans. Representatives from foreign embassies flocked to the theater Thursday morning to try to secure the release of their citizens.
 
As the hostage crisis went into a second day, hopes that the foreign hostages would be released were raised, dampened and raised again as the armed Chechens wavered over their fate.
 An elderly British man was released Thursday and taken to the Botkinskoye hospital. Two other Britons remain inside, one woman and one man. All three are from the same family, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told British media. After the release, the Chechens said they were ready to release all foreign hostages after talks with Russian politicians.
 "The terrorists explained that they did not want to keep hostages from countries they're not fighting," an unidentified source was quoted by Interfax as saying.
 The proposal came only a few hours after a previous offer by the Chechens to release foreign hostages had seemingly ended in failure. 
 Law-enforcement officials asked foreign diplomats by mid-morning to come to the theater to represent their country's citizens in negotiations. Although a number of embassies already had representatives on the scene, negotiations never took place, diplomatic sources said.
 Alexander Machevsky, a spokesperson for the Russian crisis team, said the diplomats had lost an opportunity to free the hostages.
 "We had an arrangement that the foreigners would be released after embassy representatives got involved [in negotiations]. All the conditions had been met," Machevsky told Reuters. "The representatives arrived at the operations center but, unfortunately, they didn't get there on time and the agreement was broken."
 A diplomatic source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said embassy representatives started arriving at the theater early Thursday morning. Those not already at the theater were only told after 9 a.m. by Russian authorities that they should come, the source said.
 It was unclear exactly how many foreigners were in the theater. When the Chechens asked how many foreigners there were in the audience, 35 people lifted up their hands, said a diplomatic source, citing a released hostage. Maria Shkolnikova, a hostage released Thursday, told Russian media that there were 62 foreign hostages from 17 countries. Embassies put the number at up to 65.
 The wide discrepancy in numbers may be because citizens of former Soviet republics did not raise their hands when asked by the hostage-takers, the diplomatic source said.
 U.S. Ambassador Alexander Vershbow said Thursday that there was at least one U.S. citizen among hostages. "I know that he called the embassy late at night or early morning," he said. "Since then we did not hear anything from him because he switched off the phone."
 A U.S. Embassy official later updated the number to two, a man and a woman.
 Western European embassies said there were two Dutch citizens and three Germans - two men and a woman. Three French citizens - a woman and her two children - were released Wednesday, The Associated Press reported.
 The Austrian Embassy said it there was at least one Austrian being held and that it was trying to confirm reports that there were two more in the theater.
 Interfax said one Canadian, two Swiss and two Yugoslavs were also inside. One Bulgarian and three Latvians were being held, according to their respective embassies. Ekho Moskvy reported that two Australians, one of whom is a scientist, were being held.
 The largest number of foreigners - 23 - are from Ukraine, while four others were from Armenia and Azerbaijan. Interfax said one was Turkmen.
 Only two foreigners were named. Interfax identified them as Ukrainian Vladimir Dzhumuk, the head of a marketing department at a Crimea factory, and Azeri Eldar Gadzhiyev, a representative of the Azeri airline Azal.
 
 <i>
Staff Writer Victoria Lavrentieva contributed to this report. </i>

TITLE: Hostage Taking Prompts Hike in Security
AUTHOR: By Alla Startseva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Security was boosted Thursday on all points of entry to Moscow, and the almost empty streets in the capital suggested that many drivers had decided to stay off the road.
 
Security officials in St. Petersburg, meanwhile, said on Thursday that they were also bolstering security efforts in the city following Wednesday night's takeover of the Moscow theater by terrorists.
 Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov ordered extra police and Interior Ministry Troops to be on duty at airports, train stations, metro stations, government buildings and power plants accross the country.
 Additional traffic-police checkpoints were also set up on roads leading to Moscow and within the city limits. Officers were ordered to be diligent in checking the passports and baggage of drivers, especially those in cars with non-Moscow license plates, said traffic police spokesperson Irina Tsukanova.
 One driver said that he hed beenstopped 15 times within the space of two hours so that police could perform document checks. But most drivers were nowhere to be seen on Moscow's usually clogged streets.
 &quot;There was no traffic in Moscow on Thursday,&quot; Tsukanova said. &quot;That's so unusual. Even the Garden Ring was empty, and that has never happened before.&quot;
 Police were ordered to detain any suspicious-looking people - especially those who appeared to be from the Caucasus region - until their identifies were confirmed, according to news reports oon Russian media.
 Red Square was closed. 
 Pavel Rayevsky, the head of the St. Petersburg police press service, said that additional security measures had been ordered on Thursday here as well.
 Rayevsky said that the police and the FSB were focusing their efforts onthe same vital targets - power stations, water-supply systems, bridges, airports, railway stations, large commercial and cultural centers and schools. 
 He also said that all police officers in the city had been ordered to work 12-hour shifts.
 Rayevsky said that military personel were also being used to suplement police efforts and that they were helping carry out a check of all abandoned vehicles located within the city limits.
 Transport Minister Sergei Frank, speaking after an emergency ministry meeting on Wednesday night, said that security presence would be boosted at sea and river ports and &quot;most important, at oil terminals, roads, bridges and airports&quot; across the country, Interfax reported. 
 The ministry's emergency team was working with law-enforcement agencies, Interfax said.
 About 100,000 officers from law-enforcement agencies and special security agencies were guarding the railroad accross the country, the Railways Ministry said. Twenty-five percent more police officers were on duty at Moscow train stations. 
 The ministry also said that travelers from Chechnya and other regions in the Caucasus were being double-checked on arrival.
 Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow introduced tougher checks of baggage, cargo and passports and restricted access to parts of the airport, Sheremetyevo officials said. Domodedovo, also in Moscow, followed suit.
 Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov's spokesperson, Sergei Tsoi, said that the city had also ordered additional security to be in place at hospitals, kindergartens and grade schools, Interfax reported.
 The Energy Ministry said it was preparing to hike security in the country's energy sector.
 Extra guards were dispatched to nuclear-power facilities in Moscow and the surrounding region, power utility Mosenergo's power stations and hydropower plants on the Volga River, the ministry said.
 Security has also been boosted in the Kapotnya district, where the Moscow Refinery is located.
 Fire and ambulance services were on a heightened state of alert. Leonid Korotchik, the head of the Emergency Situation's fire department, said that extra fire trucks and machinery had been pulled out of reserve, Interfax reported on Thursday.
 The city's ambulance services also has extra vehicles and personnel standing by.
 Tsoi said a number of beds have been reserved in city hospitals.
 Despite the precautions, a top security official said there was no need to order an alert.
 &quot;Additional measures would significantly limit people's freedom and rights and aren't reasonable at this time,&quot; Valentin Sobolev, the deputy head of the Security Council, told Mayak radio. &quot;There is no national threat against the safety of people and the state.&quot;
 The 500 patients in the World War II Veteran Hospital, located near the theater, were relocated to 10 other Moscow hospitals, news reports said.
 Residents in nearby buildings have put in hotels. All entrances to their buildings have been sealed, and the police were checking the premises, Interfax cited police sources as saying.
 Moscow City Hall ordered the closure of schools near the theater.
 But Moscow theaters decided not to cancel their shows Thursday night.
 &quot;We are at one with our friends from 'Nord Ost,' and we live through their tragedy as if it was our own,&quot; said Boris Krasnov, the producer of the &quot;42nd Street&quot; musical, Interfax reported.
 &quot;We will perform, and we will perform every night just like the Broadway shows did after Sept. 11,&quot; he said.
 &quot;Notre Dame de Paris&quot; musical producer Alexander Vainstein said producers got together Thursday to discuss the hostage crisis and decided to go ahead with their shows.
 However, the &quot;Chicago&quot; musical was canceled. &quot;One can not perform a joyful play when such a tragedy is happening,&quot; Filipp Kirkorov, on of the musical's stars, told Rossiya television.
 Security was tightened at all Moscow theaters, Interfax reported. However, ticket sales dropped by almost 70 percent.
 
 <i>
Staff writer Irina Titova Contributed to this report </i>

TITLE: Chechen Leader Is a Favorite of Khattab
AUTHOR: By Nabi Abdullaev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Movsar Barayev, the Chechen warlord said to be commanding armed rebels holding hundreds of hostages in a Moscow theater, has been reported dead at least twice - most recently, less than two weeks ago.
 
No conclusive evidence was available Thursday confirming that Barayev was in charge of the hostage-taking, although his name had surfaced the night before.
 In an interview with the BBC, the rebels' chief ideologist, Movladi Udugov, said Barayev and his men were leading the raid together with 40 widows of Chechen rebels. In an interview posted on the Udugov-controlled web site Kavkaz.org, Barayev said his gunmen had come to Moscow &quot;to die, not survive.&quot;
 Sergei Ignatchenko, a spokesperson for the Federal Security Service (FSB), cited released hostages as saying that the leader had called himself Abu Sayid.
 According to Russian media and Chechen insiders, Movsar Barayev, a nephew of the slain warlord Arbi Barayev, belongs to one of the most unscrupulous Chechen clans, whose men gained notoriety for kidnapping, torturing and executing hostages.
 The 1998 execution of four kidnapped telecom engineers from Britain and New Zealand has been attributed to the Barayevs.
 NTV television showed footage identified as a video sent by the Barayevs to the relatives of one of their hostages. Movsar, stocky and unshaven, was shown smiling, twirling a knife and then lowering the blade toward the neck of an unidentified woman, who was bent forward, her hair flipped over her face.
 &quot;They are Wahhabis [followers of a radical Islamic trend] and non-Muslims are not human beings for them,&quot; a Dagestani man held hostage by the Barayevs in 1999 said in an interview this summer. &quot;For them, killing Russians is like killing sheep.&quot;
 Arbi Barayev, the head of the clan and commander of a rebel formation called the Islamic Regiment, was killed in a bombing raid in June 2001, after which his nephew Movsar took over. Two months later, he was reported killed in a shootout with federal troops.
 Russian media, citing intelligence sources, said that Movsar was a favorite of Khattab, the Arab warlord through whom international Islamic terrorists are believed to be funding Chechen rebels.
 Federal troops blame Barayev for several deadly attacks on pro-Moscow municipal-government officials and police officers in Chechnya.
 Barayev's Islamic Regiment did not recognize the authority of rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov and has acted independently, former parliament speaker Ruslan Khasbulatov told NTV Thursday.
 However, Shamil Beno, a foreign minister under the late Chechen President Djokhar Dudayev, disagreed. Beno said that Barayev, a native of Alkhan-Kala, where the military has been accused of cruel abuses in the current conflict, could easily recruit enough people for such an operation.
 &quot;Women also,&quot; Beno said by phone. &quot;So many of them have lost relatives, were raped and humiliated by Russian troops. Seeing no justice over their offenders, they are desperate for revenge.&quot;

TITLE: Fire Cuts Off Vasilievsky Island
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Four hundred and eighty buildings on Vasilievsky Island were left without electricity on Wednesday, after a five-alarm fire swept through an obsolete electricity substation there on Tuesday evening.
 
While no one was injured in the fire at unlucky substation No. 13, which took six hours for 30 fire brigades to extinguish, a neighboring apartment building caught fire, and its 250 residents were evacuated.
 &quot;It was the first five-alarm fire that the city has seen this year,&quot; said Tatyana Striganyuk, a spokesperson for the St. Petersburg Fire Department.
 About 130 residents were left at least temporarily homeless, and will be housed at the Pribaltiiskaya Hotel or at a dormitory run by Lenenergo, the utility that provides heat and electricity to St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast.
 While the exact cause of the fire has yet to be determined, Lenenergo officials say that the incident is just a symptom of the dangerous situation created by the extreme age of the equipment used to provide power for the city.
 &quot;Unfortunately, this fire is just the latest argument supporting the urgent necessity for a massive overhaul of the city's electricity grid and other engineering systems,&quot; Andrei Likhachyov, the general director of Lenenergo, said on Wednesday. &quot;We need at least 28 billion rubles [$880 million] for the reconstruction of the region's power systems.
 Likhachyov said that over 70 percent of Lenenergo's installations in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast are in serious need either of repairs or replacement, noting that the substation involved was built in 1926.
 &quot;The youngest transformer of the six that were in operation there was built in 1958, while the rest date to between 1932 and 1938,&quot; Likhachyov said.
 The fire at the electricity substation, located on 13-aya Liniya, in one of the city's oldest residential areas, broke out at around 5 p.m. on Tuesday, and, as well as cutting power to the buildings in the area, cut street and traffic lights and stranded streetcars and trolleybuses, further snarling the already heavy rush-hour traffic.
 By Wednesday morning, Lenenergo had restored the electricity to 120 apartment buildings in the area and work continued until the last 18 buildings affected were switched back on at 2 p.m. on Thursday. Lenenergo restored service by restarting the one transformer - out of an original six - that it was able to salvage from the scene and transferring another from a different substation.
 The break in electricity brought the work of most firms in the area to a halt as computers and other equipment stood idle. &quot;We are just cleaning up the rooms in the office instead,&quot; said a representative of one firm, who asked not to be identified, on Wednesday.
 Likhachyov said Wednesday that there are ten other substations in essentially the same condition as No. 13 was, and that most of these are located in the city center.
 &quot;Something should be done about those 10 stations very quickly,&quot; Likhachyov said, adding that the cost of building each new station would be between 200 million and 300 million rubles ($6.3 million and $9.5 million). He added that the Regional Energy Commission, the city administration and Lenenergo need to work together to come up with the funding to solve the problem.
 &quot;We have to take an honest look with each other at the condition of the city's energy infrastructure. These systems have been neglected for years,&quot; he said.
 According to Valentin Shumovsky, the head of Lenenergo's information department, the utility will spend 860 million rubles ($27 million) on repairs to its equipment here this year, focusing on the city's heating systems, which caused them the greatest difficulties last year.
 &quot;I think that now we will see an increase in the level of investment in the repair process, focusing particularly on the electricity grid,&quot; Shumovsky said.
 Likhachyov said that an estimate of the total damages from the fire would take two or three days more, and that it was also still too early to determine whence the compensation for the damages would come. He said the substation was insured, but that the level of damages and the cost of replacing the substation would almost certainly outstrip the level of coverage.
 He added that Lenenergo would foot the bill for the temporary accommodation of those left homeless by the fire as well as for the repairs to the most seriously damaged apartments.

TITLE: City Duma Gives Draft Budget Second Reading
AUTHOR: By Claire Bigg
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Despite continued grumbling over two of its contents, a solid majority of Legislative Assembly deputies voted for the city's 2003 draft budget on the all important second reading on Wednesday.
 
The fact that the budget will carry a deficit for the first time since 1997 and includes an amendment introducing a fund for the individual deputies to use at their discretion, which has been the basis of a lot of wrangling, wasn't enough to stop the budget from sailing through the chamber. Thirty eight of the deputies voted for the reserve amendment alone.
 The third reading, usually a formality, is scheduled for Oct. 30.
 But a number of the members say that this vote won't necessarily mean the end of the arguments over the two questions.
 The deputies' reserve fund, which allows each to supervise an equal share of two percent of the budget's total spending in their district, a figure which amounted to $1.7 million each in 2001, has come under attack by the City Audit Chamber for fostering corruption and the misuse of funds.
 The majority of deputies, however, argue that such a fund allows them to carry out repairs and support health care and social programs in their districts, which would otherwise receive very little money from the budget.
 Due to a stipulation in the budget code that all spending in the budget should be explicitly targeted in the first reading, the inclusion of the reserve fund drew complaints from the audit chamber, leading to the amendment on the second reading removing the section and replacing it with a new item covering road repairs, health care and social services, totaling the same two percent of budget funds.
 &quot;The deputies' fund is, of course, not an ideal method, but the money is badly needed in the districts,&quot; said lawmaker Boris Kiselyov, a member of the St. Petersburg Tercentenary faction and of the Legislative Assembly's Budget and Finance Committee (BFK). &quot;Without the fund, many schools and hospitals would receive no budget moneys.&quot;
 But the manner in which the whole question was dealt with and, in particular, Governor Vladimir Yakovlev's inclusion of the measure in the first draft, has left a sour taste in some mouths.
 &quot;The whole conflict around the budget comes from the fact that the governor presented a budget that included the reserve fund, since the two percent of funds had no defined recipient,&quot; said Union of Right Forces (SPS) lawmaker Mikhail Tolstoi in an interview on Thursday. &quot;The deputies should never have passed the budget in its first reading.&quot;
 The fact that the budget calls for a deficit of $40 million - on projected revenues of $2.37 billion and expenditures of $2.41 billion has also been a point of contention.
 Despite arguments from economists that the deficit would allow the city to increase to $120 million the sum it is authorized take in foreign loans before the end of 2002, the deficit figure was criticized by a number of politicians as a political maneuver on the part of the administration.
 &quot;The deficit is politically convenient for the executive branch,&quot; the leader of the SPS faction in the Legislative Assembly, Mikhail Brodsky, said after the bill passed on first reading. &quot;When there is a surplus, the Legislative Assembly is responsible for deciding where that extra money goes. A deficit contributes to the level of corruption.&quot;
 Together with statements Yakovlev made last week that he would not sign the budget if it included the reserve fund, the budget submitted by the governor has led to speculation on the part of the legislators with regard to Yakovlev's motives.
 While some say that the governor's grasp of the legal issues involved is relatively weak, and led to the controversy, others say that he is keen to keep the reserve fund, despite his statements that he is opposed to it, because he also has a reserve fund under the budget allowing him to spend a part of the budget as he sees fit.
 A number of politicians also see Yakovlev's actions as a political ploy ahead of elections for the assembly, scheduled for Dec. 8.
 &quot;In my opinion, it's all just a game ahead of the December elections, and this game is called 'all of the deputies are bad, and the governor is good,'&quot; said Tolstoi. &quot;The governor keeps saying that he is against the reserve fund, but it is a way for him to influence the deputies. Only people who don't know a thing about politics can believe what Yakovlev says on television.&quot;
 Ruslan Linkov, the head of the Democratic Russia party's local branch, says that he thinks that the budget proposed by the administration is part of a scheme by the governor to discredit and pressure deputies before the legislative elections.
 &quot;I think the governor and the prosecutor, who are on friendly terms, are planning to protest the budget after its third reading and say it is invalid,&quot; Linkov said. &quot;I think this will happen in mid-November. They will blame the deputies for being unable to pass a proper budget. It is simply a pre-election move.&quot;
 &quot;What the deputies should do is take preventive measures. They should file an open protest against [city administration Finance Committee Chief Viktor] Krotov,&quot; Linkov added. &quot;They should come out now and say that they have done all that they could with the budget that was submitted to them.&quot;

TITLE: Finally, People Can Sing the City's Praises
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Local poet Oleg Chuprov got a big surprise and a little bit of advice on Thursday, when a panel of nine St. Petersburg luminaries chose his submission as the winner of a contest held to provide words for the city's anthem.
 
But the voting was close, said members of the panel, and none of the entries was what they would have described as perfect.
 &quot;Honestly, none of the three offered texts satisfied us 100 percent, but Chuprov's words were rather fresh and not banal,&quot; said Kirill Lavrov, a well-known actor with the Bolshoi Drama Theater.
 &quot;I liked the second couplet of his text best of all,&quot; said Igor Spassky, the head of Rubin - the Central Design Bureau for Marine Engineering, which designs, among other things, submarines
 &quot;I think the rest needs a bit of a rewrite,&quot; Spassky said, adding that he himself wrote a new version of the first and last couplets and submitted them for Chuprov's consideration.
 The jury listened to three versions of the St. Petersburg anthem sung by the St. Petersburg Radio and Television Children's Choir - one written by Alexander Gorodnitsky, a popular Russian bard; one by Chuprov; and a third by Natalya Bogachyova.
 Four members of the jury voted for Gorodnitsky's entry, with the other five backing Chuprov.
 &quot;I'm really surprised, I didn't expect it,&quot; said Chuprov, when his victory was announced.
 Chuprov said he had worked for about three months on the text, going through about ten versions and stacks of paper. He said that he tried to avoid what he described as &quot;negative&quot; words in his text, avoiding concepts like fight or struggle.
 &quot;For me, an anthem is something that should unite people,&quot; Chupov said. &quot;It is like a confession of love.&quot;
 &quot;Leningrad and, later, St. Petersburg, has been through many hard times, but I wanted to make the anthem lyrical,&quot; Chuprov added.
 Chuprov's text includes all of the standard St. Petersburg references, including the Summer Garden, which he describes as &quot;speaking with the Neva,&quot; and the Bronze Horseman, that he says &quot;keeps the memory of time.&quot;
 The second verse describes St. Petersburg as a city with a &quot;sea soul&quot; - &quot;the frigate&quot; that sails under the seal of Peter the Great.
 Chuprov agreed to consider some of the remarks the jury made about changes to the text, thanking the members for their advice.
 Vadim Tulpanov, the vice speaker of the Legislative Assembly, said that final approval of the text will not be given by the assembly until April or May next year, just ahead of the city's 300th-birthday celebrations.
 &quot;Today, we picked the winner of the contest for the text, and the work will be recommended to the city's legislators,&quot; Tulpanov said. &quot;However, the Legislative Assembly will make the final decision.&quot;
 The decision to hold a contest to provide a text for the anthem's music, which is taken from a movement from the ballet &quot;The Bronze Horseman,&quot; which was written by Belgian-born Russian composer Reinhold Gliere in 1949 and adopted as the anthem in 1991, was announced at the Legislative Assembly on June 26. In all, 341 different texts written by, among others, poets, teachers, pensioners, and homemakers, were submitted for consideration.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Radioactive Scare
 </b>

NEW YORK (NYT) - Acting on a tip from Russia that a New York-bound jetliner might have radioactive material aboard, U.S. authorities on Wednesday met the plane from Moscow on the tarmac at Kennedy International Airport, but nothing harmful was found, officials said.
 The tip, received by the U.S. Customs Service, prompted Customs and FBI agents and Port Authority police officers to hold Aeroflot Flight 317, a Boeing 767, in a remote area of the airport while the plane, its passengers and its cargo were screened, said Steve Coleman, a Port Authority spokesperson.
 Officials said the information provided to Customs was based on observations someone made in Moscow. The person said he saw a passenger pay off a Russian customs official for permission to board the plane, the officials said.
 But the passenger, a U.S. citizen who was detained Wednesday night, was apparently a furrier who did not have proper documentation for 27 fur coats he was bringing to New York, the officials said. He said he paid a bribe to get the furs out of the country, the officials said.
 
 
<b>Beating Rap
 </b>

MOSCOW (SPT) - A military commander has admitted beating his soldiers with a dildo, Gazeta reported.
 Captain Damir Ilyasov received a two-year suspended sentence and was stripped of his rank for battering his subordinates with a "black latex baton shaped like a male sex organ," the newspaper said Friday. The soldiers, however, told the military court hearing that the captain "only hit them lightly."
 The story came to light when private Ruslan Machnev fled the unit's base in Verkhnyaya Pyshma, just north of Yekaterinburg. He was caught and, facing desertion charges, told prosecutors he ran away to escape Ilaysov's taunting, Gazeta said.
 An investigation found that Ilaysov frequently woke the soldiers at night and lined them up to check their uniforms, the report said. Those who were not looking after their uniforms properly were beaten with the dildo, which Ilyasov had bought in a sex shop.
 Ilyasov pleaded guilty and apologized in court.
 
 
<b>Kidnapping Sentence
 </b>

NALCHIK, Southern Russia (AP) - A court sentenced a man to 15 years in prison and another to two years in the 1999 kidnapping of a New Zealand nurse working for the International Red Cross in the northern Caucasus. The nurse, Geraldo Cruz Ribeiro, was freed after more than two months as a hostage.
 The court in Nalchik, the capital of the Karbardino-Balkariya republic, found Aslan Batyrov guilty in the kidnapping. Valery Bagov, the middleman to whom ransom was supposed to be paid, was sentenced to two years' imprisonment.
 
 
<b>Estonian Citizenship 
 </b>

TALLINN, Estonia (AP) - Estonia will take legal steps to ensure that more than 1,000 mainly Russian-speaking residents won't lose the citizenship granted to them 10 years ago on the basis of faulty papers, officials said Thursday.
 Migration authorities had said earlier that they would cancel the passports issued after Estonia regained independence from Moscow in 1991 - angering Russian speakers, who make up a third of the Baltic state's 1.4 million people.
 Without citizenship, they would lose the right to stand for public office or vote in national elections. Non-citizens must apply for permanent residence status or become naturalized citizens, which requires Estonian-language tests. 



TITLE: Lenenergo Ranked Second for Behavior
AUTHOR: By Torrey Clark
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Twenty-two of 25 top companies by market capitalization violated either the law or shareholders' rights at their annual meeting this year, the Institute of Corporate Governance and Law said Tuesday.
 
Despite the violations, however, companies committed to corporate governance continue to improve, the ICGL concluded in its quarterly report on governance, released Tuesday.
 The best-behaved of the 25 companies studied is Vimpelcom, which held on to the top position by scoring 83.71 out of a possible 100 points. Lenenergo was No. 2 with 66.6 points.
 The most eye-catching rating was that of Unified Energy Systems, which came in a close third, despite vocal and growing concerns of minority investors, who say that company CEO Anatoly Chubais is orchestrating under-the-table asset giveaways.
 New ICLG director Tatyana Ivanova defended the score, saying that, although her team found restructuring and asset-stripping risks at UES, improvements in other areas tipped the balance.
 &quot;A very strong corporate-governance team works at UES, and they're taking giant steps to improve the company's transparency,&quot; she said. &quot;It's enough just to look at its web site. Shareholders don't even need to request documents.&quot;
 Ivanova's predecessor, ICLG founder and former Federal Securities Commissioner Dmitry Vasilyev, left the institute last month to become first deputy CEO of UES-subsidiary Mosenergo. Ivanova said that Mosenergo was removed from the list of companies rated by the ICLG to avoid conflicts of interest.
 The ratings are based on transparency, capital structure, shareholder rights, governance history, directors, executive bodies and corporate risk.
 &quot;Ratings are good because they allow companies to compare themselves against each other on a more or less objective basis,&quot; said William Browder, head of Hermitage Capital Management, a minority-UES shareholder and Chubais critic. &quot;But we couldn't possibly agree with any kind of positive rating on UES, because of their horrible asset-stripping plans,&quot; he added.
 Troika Dialog, the only major investment bank in Moscow with a dedicated corporate-governance analyst, rates UES in the lower range of the &quot;fair to vulnerable risk&quot; category shared by Aeroflot, MGTS, Severstal and Sibneft.
 The ICLG has winnowed its list from 40 companies to the 25 with the highest capitalization - minus Mosenergo and MTS - accounting for almost 95 percent of the stock market's value. The institute did not provide comparative ratings for the previous quarter.
 Leading mobile operator MTS was removed from the list because the ICLG, which owns a small stake in all companies it rates, did not receive company information from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in time.
 Overall, six companies faired worse, mainly for providing less information about their operations. Oil major TNK lost 7.3 points, although it promised changes after fully changing over to a new data-base system. Rosneft subsidiary Purneftegaz came in last, scoring a lowly 33.61 for offering information only to those willing to travel to the city of Gubkinsky, in the Yamal-Nenetsk autonomous region.
 Of the violations that occurred at annual-shareholder meetings in the first and second quarters, Surgutneftegaz was the worst offender, asking shareholders to approve related-party transactions without providing many details.
 The most typical violations of shareholders' rights were posing a single question regarding the approval of both privileged and common shares, and not giving &quot;against&quot; or &quot;abstain&quot; options in the board election.

TITLE: Business Leaders Positive on WTO Entry Following Talks
AUTHOR: By Torrey Clark
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia's business leaders hold high hopes for Russia's quick accesssion to the World Trade Organization after meeting with European Union Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy Thursday morning. 
 
Alexei Mordashov, chairperson of steel giant Severstal and head of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs', or RSPP's, WTO working group said that the RSPP and the EU had a similar basic understanding of the issues. &quot;I am firmly convinced that the countries' positions are not as far apart as they seem at first glance.&quot;
 Lamy, in Moscow for meetings with Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and Economics and Trade Minister German Gref, met with members of the RSPP, the country's most powerful business lobby.
 The purpose of Lamy's meetings is &quot;to take the political temperature of where Russia is in its wish to accede to the WTO,&quot; news agencies reported Lamy's spokesperson Arancha Gonzales as saying. 
 Talks seemed headed toward a standstill last week as negotiators on both sides dug in their heels over issues including demands that Russia increase domestic energy prices to match export prices, and open the country's service sectors to foreign companies. 
 While these issues remain the biggest stumbling block, &quot;there is reason for optimism,&quot; Mordashov said. &quot;The problems are not irresolvable.&quot;
 On the energy issue, the RSPP suggested to Lamy that the EU accept from Russia a commitment to move from administrative regulation of energy prices to a market-based system.
 &quot;Russian business recognizes that [price] regulation is not market-based. No one understands that like Russian business,&quot; Mordashov said. &quot;We're against ... preserving administrative regulation while exchanging one level of prices for another.&quot;
 RSPP vice-president Igor Yurgens sees signs of Russia softening its stance on opening its insurance market to foreign companies, perhaps in return for a compromise from the EU on the energy issue.
 A recent RSPP resolution states the lobby's belief that Russia should accede to the WTO while the country carries out reforms, rather than wait.
 &quot;Development of policies, industrial, economic, financial, should run parallel to accession or we risk freezing accession for 10 to 15 years,&quot; Yurgens said.
 He said that Russia should strive for membership before the next round of trade talks, or risk wasting billions of dollars as it would have to start negotiations from scratch.
 Support for WTO among the business elite is far from unanimous, however.
 &quot;First, we need to prepare the economy for WTO accession, and only then should we accede,&quot; aluminum tycoon and RSPP member Oleg Deripaska, the leading voice for slowing down accession talks, has said. &quot;We need to determine what it gives us, what result and who is responsible.&quot;
 Yurgens and Mordashov said as long as the terms are beneficial, Russia could and should still push for quick accession.
 &quot;The RSPP would benefit if Lamy's visit ends on an optimistic note. We feel a definite slowdown in many processes in the country's economy,&quot; Yurgens said.

TITLE: Sportswear Giant Ends Deal With Northwest Distributor
AUTHOR: By Angelina Davydova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The sports-clothing giant Adidas has broken its contract with T.A.K.T., its exclusive dealer in St. Petersburg and the Northwest region. Adidas claims that T.A.K.T. violated the terms of its contract with Adidas. T.A.K.T., in turn, claims that the breaking of the contract is part of Adidas policy - relationships with dealers are ended after the dealers have established the brand in the marketplace. 
 
Adidas and T.A.K.T. have been working together for ten years, with the local dealer's turnover for that period amounting to $80 million. Adidas will now take over the operation of the city's two Adidas shops, on Malaya Sadovaya Ulitsa and Bolshoi Prospect on the Petrograd Side, said Yelena Voronina, spokesperson for the company. Adidas is currently planning to open another Adidas shop on Vasilievsky Island at the end of October and another shop at the end December that will sell older collections of goods, Voronina said.
 Voronina said that Adidas had ended its relationship with T.A.K.T. as a result of certain contractual conditions not being met, such as incomplete payment of commission fees. 
 &quot;We are keen on developing our chain of dealers, and our experience has been that it's more effective to work with several dealers in the region, as it increases competitiveness and, as a result, customers are better satisfied,&quot; said Martin Schenkland, Adidas general director, in an official company statement issued last week. 
 Nadezhda Nikolayeva, T.A.K.T. General Director, however, believes that the contract's termination by Adidas is part of Adidas' general policy. &quot;In Hungary, Finland, Belorussia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine, Adidas has broken its contracts with dealers after they have prepared the market,&quot; she said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.
 T.A.K.T. also operates a sport and entertainment center in Toksovo, 20 kilometers to the north of St. Petersburg, and is planning to open a new chain of stores that will sell sports goods.
 Currently, Adidas has 11 stores in Russia and plans to increase the number to 30 by the end of the year. In June, the company opened a branch office in St. Petersburg, and market analysts estimate that the company has a turnover of around $60 million in Russia.

TITLE: Dispute Over NWSC Remains Unresolved
AUTHOR: By Angelina Davydova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The armed takeover of the Northwest Shipping Company (NWSC) on Monday has led to rivals for control at the company claiming that the affair will be settled in court. There are now two general directors and two boards of directors, all of them claiming that they are legitimate and attempting to convince a third party - the Property Ministry - that they have the right to control the company. 
 
NWSC owns 17 companies involved in the transportation of cargo and passengers, as well as the construction and repair of vessels. Together, the companies have an annual turnover of $100 million. In the first half of this year, however, the company managed to record losses of $2 million. 
 Major shareholders in the company include the New Programs and Conceptions holding, which owns a 54.86-percent stake through its subsidiary, the National Aviation Company, and the State Property Ministry, which holds a 25.5-percent stake. 
 In August, an extraordinary shareholders meeting elected a new board of directors, with minority shareholders, united around the Soti company, which owns a 6-percent stake in NWSC, gaining the majority of seats. At the same meeting, a new general director, Andrei Guskov, was elected. Guskov is also the general director of Soti. 
 Soon after the meeting, the St. Petersburg Arbitration Court ruled that New Programs and Conceptions could only cast votes representing a 19.98-percent stake. 
 On Monday, New Programs and Conceptions representatives, with armed guards, appeared at the NWSC building bearing a decree of the board of directors issued on Oct. 18. 
 The document decreed that a new general director, Andrei Antonov, had been appointed. The guards at NWSC were changed and Antonov declared Monday to be a day off for the staff, ordering that Guskov and his team not be allowed to reenter the building. 
 At a press conference given on Tuesday, Antonov said that the Novgorod Arbitration Court overruled the decisions of the shareholders meeting held in August, the court having deemed a miscount of votes to have taken place. 
 On the same day, Guskov issued an official statement saying that the court ruling was a fabrication and that the New Programs and Conceptions holding did not have the legal right to carry out its takeover.
 The State Property Ministry decided to call for another meeting of the board of directors, which was due to be held on Thursday. The Property Ministry then issued an official statement saying that the meeting had been postponed. 
 &quot;We see this as a positive signal - the Property Ministry, as one of the major shareholders, has taken note of the situation,&quot; said Filipp Ilin-Adayev, the deputy general director in Antonov's team, in a telephone interview on Thursday. 
 In another official statement, Guskov accused Antonov of planning to sell off the shipping company's assets. &quot;He's preparing a deal to sell the Cherepovets Shipbuilding Plant [part of NWSC] to the Nord-Veg company,&quot; Guskov said in the statement. 
 Ilin-Adaev said that &quot;We are preparing for a shareholders meeting, which will be held on Nov. 16, when a new board of directors will be elected.&quot;
 Despite the armed takeover of NWSC, it seems that the battle will also be fought on a second front - in the courts. &quot;We are not being allowed into NWSC, but we are carrying on our work with the law-enforcement agencies, the courts and the prosecutor's office. We will solve the problem through legal action, not by a takeover,&quot; said Sergei Ippolitov, deputy general director under Guskov, in a telephone interview on Thursday.
 A source in the Property Ministry, who wished to remain nameless, said that they were surprised at the takeover of NWSC, although the state is against any new issue of shares.
 The confusion was only enhanced by claims from the various parties with regard to the work of NWSC.
 &quot;The shipping company is continuing to work at its regular pace,&quot; Ilin-Adayev said. Guskov said, meanwhile, that &quot;On Monday, the armed guards didn't even let the dispatchers - the people who control the movement of the craft - in to work.&quot;

TITLE: Berezovsky Indicted for Massive Fraud in LogoVAZ Case
AUTHOR: By Alla Startseva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Prosecutors turned up the heat on exiled magnate Boris Berezovsky on Wednesday, indicting the former Kremlin insider and two of his business associates for &quot;large-scale fraud&quot; at flagship automaker AvtoVAZ.
 
Deputy Prosecutor General Vladimir Kolesnikov said that Berezovsky, together with Badri Patarkatsishvili and Yuly Dubov, used Berezovsky's LogoVAZ dealership in a complicated scheme to defraud AvtoVAZ out of more than 2,000 cars worth $13 million in 1994 and 1995.
 Berezovsky, who has lived in London since fleeing the country two years ago, and Patarkatsishvili, who reportedly lives in Georgia, have already been charged with car theft as part of a sweeping investigation of criminal activity at Tolyatti-based AvtoVAZ. But the new, more serious charge allows prosecutors to seize Berezovsky's property and formally seek his extradition.
 &quot;We have no doubts that British law-enforcement bodies will [comply with] our request for extradition, in line with legislation and international accords,&quot; news agencies quoted Kolesnikov as saying. &quot;All the extradition documents have been prepared.&quot;
 Last month, Georgia said that it would not extradite Patarkatsishvili. Dubov, who wrote a book on Berezovsky's life upon which the hit movie &quot;The Oligarch&quot; is based, is reportedly in Moscow.
 Kolesnikov said that arrest warrants would be officially issued this week.
 In a telephone interview from London, Berezovsky laughed off the charge.
 &quot;The Prosecutor General's Office doesn't impress me anymore,&quot; he said. &quot;I have lost count - is this the fifth or sixth crime I am charged with?&quot;
 &quot;There is absolutely no chance [that Britain will extradite me],&quot; he said, adding that it would be impossible to seize all of his holdings in Russia.
 &quot;They already took all I had - ORT, Ogonyok,&quot; he said. &quot;My daughter owns a house [in Moscow]; if they take it, no problem.&quot;
 &quot;I share my Russian business with partners,&quot; he said Wednesday. &quot;To arrest it, they will have to arrest all the businesses in Russia.&quot;
 In an interview published in business daily Vedomosti last month, Berezovsky claimed to have personal assets worth $3 billion - including $1.5 billion in Russia, through stakes in Russian Aluminum, Sibneft and various media interests.
 Kolesnikov said that investigators are taking every measure possible to confiscate Berezovsky's property.
 When Kolesnikov announced the car-theft charge last month, he said that prosecutors were targeting three mansions in the Moscow region that Berezovsky paid for with money he made from the car scam. He also said that Berezovsky and Patarkatsishvili paid $260,000 for a dacha in the Moscow region for Nikolai Tikhonov, a former head of the Soviet Union's Council of Ministers, where one of Berezovsky's daughters now lives. In addition, the two men used ill-gotten funds to buy more than $1 million worth of real estate in St. Petersburg, he said.
 Berezovsky made his first million, however, through LogoVAZ, which he established in 1989 with Patarkatsishvili and senior managers of AvtoVAZ, including current CEO Vladimir Kadannikov. Ostensibly, the company was created to provide the aging AvtoVAZ factory with automation software. Instead, it quickly began selling cars and became the auto giant's official dealer.
 Berezovsky said that he did not understand why prosecutors are making such a fuss about the 1994-1995 deal.
 &quot;I don't want to say that Kadannikov or Titov have somehow been involved in illegal activities ... Everyone understood what was going on and everything was done legally,&quot; Berezovsky said.
 Konstantin Titov has been the governor of the Samara region, where Tolyatti is located, since 1991.
 In announcing the car-theft charge, Kolesnikov said that Titov needed to answer some &quot;very serious questions&quot; about the case. On Wednesday, he said that Titov had been questioned and that he gave &quot;extensive evidence.&quot;
 Kolesnikov did not elaborate, but his spokesperson, Lyudmila Takayeva, said by telephone from Samara that investigators had examined all the documents on AvtoVAZ and LogoVAZ kept by the regional administration and admitted that there were &quot;some violations in the payment schemes between the two,&quot; but she declined to elaborate.
 Despite Berezovsky's confidence that Britain would not extradite him, legal experts say prosecutors may have a chance.
 &quot;To convince Britain to extradite Berezovsky, Russian prosecutors need enough evidence to prove that it is not a political prosecution, but a criminal one,&quot; said Mara Polyakova, head of the Council of Independent Legal Experts.
 Russia has never officially submitted an extradition request to Britain.
 However, two years ago, Russia requested that Britain allow its prosecutors to question Alexander Litvinenko, a former Federal Security Service officer who announced in 1998 that his superiors had ordered Berezovsky's assassination.
 The request was denied because Litvinenko had already been granted political asylum, which was granted when he fled to London after several criminal cases were opened against him.

TITLE: Korea Exposes Pakistan
AUTHOR: By Jim Hoagland
TEXT: THE discovery that North Korea has been secretly enriching uranium for the nuclear-weapons program it promised to freeze in 1994 demonstrates the dangers of putting faith in a confirmed and practiced liar. So does the news that Pakistan provided the nuclear technology, and perhaps uranium, to Kim Jong Il's regime.
 
Pakistan's role as a clandestine supplier shatters the efforts by the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush to paint that country as a flawed, but well-meaning, member of the coalition against terror. Pakistan today is the most dangerous place on Earth, in large part because the administration does not understand the forces it is dealing with there, and has no policy to contain them.
 Pervez Musharraf's Pakistan is a base from which nuclear technology, fundamentalist terrorism and life-destroying heroin are spread around the globe. American and French citizens and Christians of any nationality, including Pakistani, are indiscriminately slaughtered by fanatics as occasion arises. This nuclear-armed country is in part ungoverned, in part ungovernable.
 The Bush administration's response is to protect both the life and reputation of President-for-life Musharraf and pretend that he is moving toward democracy. Huge amounts of American aid pour into Pakistan - even as Washington's ability to monitor how that money is spent or stolen declines sharply.
 This response pushes toward a disaster that Bush officials - and a Congress that has been negligent to cowardly in exercising oversight on Pakistan - will one day protest that they could not have seen coming. The truth will be that they ignored warnings that were in plain sight, as the first Bush administration did with Iraq's Saddam Hussein.
 The second Bush administration sees the dangers that &quot;axis of evil&quot; members Iraq and North Korea pose. It is fashioning realistic responses to those dangers, but it seems paralyzed by the perceived need to secure Musharraf's help in fighting al-Qaida and stabilizing Afghanistan. Official Washington will not even tell the truth to or about Musharraf, much less hold him accountable for his lies and subterfuge.
 U.S. policy today amounts to giving money to Pakistan, which agrees to take it. This is a country where American diplomats are limited to one-year tours and not allowed to bring dependents. Nongovernmental organizations that normally would help the U.S. Agency for International Development gauge how aid money is being spent have closed down out of fear. The remaining AID personnel would take their lives in their hands by insisting on effective monitoring.
 Elections rigged by Musharraf in his favor this month were praised extravagantly by U.S. State Department spokesperson Richard Boucher as &quot;an important milestone in the ongoing transition to democracy.&quot; That praise cannot be applied to the process or to the outcome, which gave new prominence to a fundamentalist Islamic coalition that promptly said it would seek to ban coeducation.
 Rewards rule in all areas: The sanctions on U.S.-Pakistani military-to-military cooperation imposed in 1998 after Pakistan's nuclear tests were personally lifted last week by Central Command's General Tommy Franks, who attended a joint exercise involving a grand total of 330 troops.
 This came on Oct. 17, as David Sanger of The New York Times led the way in identifying Pakistan as the source of North Korea's uranium-enrichment process.
 A secret barter arrangement was suspected during the Clinton administration. It continued after Musharraf came to power in 1999 and was confirmed last summer, U.S. officials report.
 Pyongyang sent missiles and missile technology to Islamabad in return for nuclear technology. There are strong indications that both nations have helped Iran develop nuclear and missile programs as well.
 Asked about Pakistan's supplier role, Secretary of State Colin Powell said on television last Sunday that Musharraf had promised him that Pakistan was not engaged in this trade now. Powell then refused to talk about Pakistan's past role and would not even explain his silence on it.
 Talking about the past would have exposed Musharraf's pattern of lies and evasions, which Powell has increasingly tolerated and covered for as they have become more flagrant. The secretary knows Musharraf lied publicly when giving pledges last spring to end cross-border terrorism - pledges he has broken. Musharraf even lied about whether Bush had talked to him about that subject in a September meeting in New York.
 The past provides no reason to hope that Musharraf is telling the truth about not helping North Korea now, either. He has paid no price for lying to Powell about ending terrorism in Kashmir or about cooperating fully in crushing al-Qaida. The only consequences for duplicity have been rewards and protection. Why in the world would he suddenly change an approach that is working on every level for him?
 
 <i>Jim Hoagland is a columnist for The Washington Post, where this comment first appeared. </i>

TITLE: Hope Against All Hope in The Darkness
TEXT: PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin faces perhaps the most crucial test of his presidency as the hostage crisis unfolds in Moscow. Would it be too much to hope that the way he handles the crisis could improve the prospects for finding peace in Chechnya?
 
Putin's political career got a big boost from his tough stance on Chechnya. Aside from his stint as head of the Federal Security Service, Putin was unknown until President Boris Yeltsin appointed him prime minister in 1999. His fight against separatism in Chechnya helped propel him to the presidency in 2000.
 Putin blamed Chechen rebels for the apartment bombings in September 1999 that killed more than 300 people and vowed to deal with them. He oversaw the dispatch of the army to Chechnya at the end of that month. Public support for the tough-talking Putin swelled, paving the way to his easy victory in the 2000 presidential election.
 The seizure of the theater Wednesday is a stinging reminder that, despite all of the president's talk, nothing really has been resolved. Most of the people who the Kremlin accuses of participating in the apartment bombings remain at large. The Chechnya campaign entered its fourth year last month. And, aside from a half-hearted attempt by a Putin envoy and a Chechen rebel representative to discuss possible peace talks last year, the Kremlin has done little to find a way out of the impasse over Chechnya. Putin has said repeatedly that the rebels must lay down their arms and surrender before any peace talks can be held.
 Now, 40 to 60 guerillas are using automatic weapons and grenades to hold hundreds hostage. They are calling for federal troops to withdraw from Chechnya immediately.
 Clearly, Putin cannot comply with their demands. For one thing, terror and blackmail cannot shape national policy. Moreover, even the hostage takers acknowledge that a troop pullout is a long and complicated process.
 But what Putin and Chechen rebels can do is use the crisis to finally start peace talks. Both sides could meet at the negotiating table without losing face.
 If rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov were to distance himself from the more radical guerillas by condemning the seizure and renewing his offer for peace talks, he would effectively position himself as a moderate with whom the Kremlin could negotiate.
 The Kremlin could create a secret channel for talks, as Israelis and Palestinians did in Oslo. This would isolate the extremist rebels, such as those blamed for the theater attack.
 Perhaps Maskhadov, or some other rebel leader, could become to the separatists what Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams is to the Irish Republican Army.
 The Kremlin and the rebels must remember that there is no simple solution. Look at what happened to the peace found in Oslo.

TITLE: Missile Regime From Cold War Is Dead
AUTHOR: By Pavel Felgenhauer
TEXT: WHILE Washington is insisting that Pyongyang unconditionally and completely halt its nuclear program before any new negotiations can begin, North and South Korea issued a joint statement that they will resolve all outstanding problems, including the nuclear one, through dialogue.
 
Japan is the only country in the world that has actually been hit by nuclear bombs (in 1945) and South Korea was ravished by invading North Korean armies in 1950. These countries are highly susceptible to nuclear blackmail, and Pyongyang clearly understands this.
 In 1985, under strong pressure from Moscow, North Korea signed a treaty on nonproliferation of nuclear weapons in exchange for an extended nuclear cooperation program. The Soviet Union pledged to build a nuclear-power station in North Korea, equipped with four light-water VVER-440 reactors. But, after signing the treaty, the North Koreans never allowed international inspectors to visit their nuclear-research centers and, in 1993, officially announced their intention to withdraw from the treaty. Moscow responded by stopping all nuclear cooperation.
 Today, Russia rightfully denies it is providing Pyongyang with nuclear or ballistic missile know-how. But it was the U.S.S.R. that, in 1965, exported a 2-megawatt IRT-2000 research reactor and trained nuclear specialists to North Korea, kick-starting Pyongyang's homemade nuclear program. The North Koreans used the training to increase the capacity of the reactor fourfold and to build a uranium-reactor fuel-enrichment facility. In 1986, they managed to put into operation their own 25-megawatt reactor capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium.
 In 1994, an agreed framework was put together for a program under which the United States, Japan, South Korea and the European Union would provide fuel oil and also pay some $4.6 billion to build two 1,000-megawatt light-water nuclear reactors in North Korea. In return, North Korea promised to stop plutonium production.
 Since 1994, North Korea has been receiving half a million tons of oil a year for free. But the construction of the nuclear power stations has not begun: Washington has demanded that Pyongyang first open the country to international arms and nuclear inspectors. Apparently, North Korea deliberately disclosed its attempts to produce weapons-grade uranium in order to break the deadlock and force the donor nations to pay up more promptly.
 The North Korean ballistic-missile program was also kick-started by Moscow. In the early 1980s, the Soviet Union provided North Koreans with R-11 Scud missiles. The North Koreans first managed to copy the Scud and then began to modify it to increase range. Using very limited resources and capabilities, specialists ingeniously managed to merge several Soviet-designed Scud engines to make a primitive missile with almost intercontinental range.
 The relative ease with which impoverished, isolated North Korea came close to having ICBM and nuclear capabilities is alarming. Even more alarming is the pattern of exchange of sensitive technologies between &quot;states of concern.&quot;
 The United States seems ready to occupy Iraq to make sure it is not a threat to its neighbors any more. But occupying North Korea or, say, Israel is out of the question. The Cold War nonproliferation regime is virtually dead today. The new U.S. doctrine of preventive nonproliferation has yet to prove its effectiveness, while the nightmare of a multipolar nuclear world is materializing.
 
 <i>Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst. </i>

TITLE: Campanology Can Ring One Man's Bells
TEXT: &quot;My collection isn't something I hide in boxes and carefully keep dust-free. I make use of it almost every day. It is my life's passion,&quot; says Mariinsky Theater percussionist Mikhail Peskov of his treasures.
 
Peskov is the proud owner of one of Russia's largest collections of bells. His 90-item collection, which includes church bells, sleigh bells and handbells is also historically important, with the oldest item dating back to 1802.
 Peskov has been collecting bells for 30 years, and has been a member of the Mariinsky orchestra for over 20. He notes with some pride that, in addition to looking after the theater's century-old carillon, he occasionally uses his own bells if the theater's are insufficient.
 Last week, Peskov spoke with Staff Writer </i><i><strong>Galina Stolyarova</strong></i><i> about life as the city's top campanologist.</i>
 
 <i><strong>
Q: </strong></i><i>How did you get into bell-ringing and collecting?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>As a child, I was fascinated by the sound of the bells of the Nikolayevsky Cathedral. I would stop on the street to listen to their magnificent, pure tones.
 
I started collecting when I was 15 years old; I bought my first bell in an antique shop on Sadovaya Ulitsa. I remember the day very well - it was the day I received my first salary as a trainee of the Military Engineering School's brass band, and the bell cost 3 rubles.
 While in the army, I joined a brass orchestra that had a set of bells. I tried ringing them, and the addiction hit me hard.
 When I joined the Mariinsky orchestra, I started looking after the theater's two sets of bells, and began ringing them during productions.
 
 <i><strong>
Q: </strong></i><i>How often are the Mariinsky's bells used?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>Quite often. All of Rimsky-Korsakov's operas have bell parts, as do some by Verdi and Puccini. Other examples are Mussorgsky's &quot;Khovanshchina,&quot; Tchaikovsky's &quot;The Queen of Spades&quot; and Borodin's &quot;Prince Igor.&quot; Bells are also used in ballets like Prokofiev's &quot;Romeo and Juliet&quot; and Tchaikovsky's &quot;Giselle.&quot;
 
When we go on tour, the bells travel separately, in special containers.
 
 <i><strong>
Q: </strong></i><i>Is there a bell-collectors' society in Russia?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>Yes, and it is growing. The Russian Association of Campanology is an umbrella group for anyone interested in bells, including musicologists, campanologists, church bell-ringers, musicians and bell collectors like myself.
 
The association was set up in 1989, and now has several hundred members, about 50 of whom are bell collectors.
 One of our members works in a hospice as a psychotherapist. He uses recordings of bells as part of his therapy.
 There's also a very interesting bell museum that opened in the 1980s in Valdai, near Novgorod. I recommend a visit.
 
 <i><strong>
Q: </strong></i><i>A lot of church bells were destroyed during the Soviet era, as they were seen as part of a religious cult. How difficult is it now to find good items for your collection?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>All the major collections have already been assembled. One can only inherit such a collection these days - anyone who tried to create one would fail.
 
Traveling around provincial towns and villages would produce results, but antique shops usually only have bells of little value. Very, very rarely, a truly valuable bell may appear at a flea market, but this is an exception.
 All serious collectors know each other; you get good bells either through trading or just by chance. I'm happy that more and more people are becoming interested in bells. More and more churches are restoring their belfries, and more and more people are attending bell-ringing concerts. It's very encouraging that Russia is waking up to this part of its spiritual culture.
 
 <i><strong>
Q: </strong></i><i>How is bell ringing a spiritual experience for you personally?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>Church-bell ringing, in particular, gives me a better understanding, a deeper feeling of what Christianity means as a religion. Being in church and taking part in a service is an all-embracing experience, where everything is important - what you see around you, and also what you hear. The ideas and major principles of Christianity come more easily and naturally to me. You can find them in the sounds of [church] bell ringing. I can learn Christian values, like forgiving enemies and being humble and tolerant, from the sound of bells.
 

 <i><strong>
Q: </strong></i><i>How expensive are bells?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>Prices vary, from $50 to several thousand dollars per item, but sometimes the price doesn't reflect the value. I have seen ordinary shaft bells offered for $1,500, just because they have vulgar and obscene phrases inscibed on them - something like &quot;Sweeties got married, and rushed to bed.&quot;
 

 <i><strong>
Q: </strong></i><i>How do you choose your bells?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>As a musician, the bell's sound is the main thing for me - it has to be beautiful. The perfect alloy for bells is a mixture of 77 percent copper, 22 percent tin, and a bit of zinc. On top of that, the history of the bell and its inscriptions are important.
 
Bellsmiths only began putting inscriptions and dates on their small handbells after 1802. Usually, they were sayings, or lines from popular songs. For example, &quot;Drive, hurry up, ring the bell, console yourself&quot; or &quot;Look, don't yawn, drive faster.&quot; In fact, coach bells served many purposes. They announced the arrival of the coach, and stopped the coach driver from falling asleep. Previously, Russian coach drivers had to whistle.
 In general, bells in Russia were widely believed to ward off evil spirits. In the old days, mentally disabled people were brought to churches to listen to the bells, which were supposed to expel evil spirits from the body. During epidemics, bells were rung to rid the air of the disease.
 
 <i><strong>
Q: </strong></i><i>Throughout Russian history, there have been instances of bells being &quot;punished,&quot; like human beings, when they offended the tsar. Why do you think this happened?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>Because of the enormous energetic potential of bell ringing. It can mesmerize, it can scare and send shivers down your spine; it could bring moments of enlightenment.
 
Both religious and civil traditions played an important role. Bells in Russia were used to warn about invasions, fires, or announce military victories. During wars, bells were removed, along with human prisoners of war.
 The bell was seen as a symbol of the unity of Russia during both happy and unhappy times. That's why tsars sent bells into exile, destroyed them, or had their clappers [<i>yazyk, </i>or &quot;tongue,&quot; in Russian] removed.
 One of the most famous stories is about the Uglich bell. This bell was housed in the Spassky Cathedral in [the Volga River town of] Uglich, and was used to bring the people together to tell them about the murder of Tsarevich Dmitry in 1591. The citizens of the town then killed the alleged murderers. Boris Godunov [who subsequently became tsar and is now widely assumed to have been the real murderer] punished not only the townspeople, but also the bell, which had its tongue removed - a punishment widely used against human criminals back then. It was then publicly whipped and sent to Siberia.
 Even much lesser &quot;crimes&quot; were enough to anger the tsars. For instance, in 1681, a Moscow bell was exiled to a monastery for frightening Tsar Fyodor Alexeyevich during a midnight service.
 
 <i><strong>
Q: </strong></i><i>What are your favorite compositions for the bell?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>I simply adore the coronation scene in [Mussorgsky's opera] &quot;Boris Godunov.&quot; It is also very inspiring to ring bells in church with fellow bell-ringers.

TITLE: Che Goes Industrial With Second Exhibition
AUTHOR: By Katerina Fedorova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Following its success as the official cafe of the recent festival Earlymusic, and its first experience as an exhibition space (&quot;Looking at Five Years of Life in Petersburg,&quot; Oct. 4), cafe-club Che is continuing to make waves on the cultural front.
 
The venue's latest project is another exhibition, this time entitled &quot;Superprints,&quot; by local printmaking pioneer Peter Belyi. Belyi recently returned from studying in London to revive the art of printmaking in St. Petersburg by opening the St. Petersburg Print Studio.
 About 15 works will be shown at the exhibition, some of which are new and some of which were shown in London. According to Belyi, the exhibition in London was due to open on Sept. 11 last year, but was inevitably postponed after the terrorist attacks in the United States.
 The main subjects of Belyi's latest works are industrial - smoke, ruins, grinding metal, destruction, and the military. Railroads play an important role in the prints, and Belyi pays attention to the relationships between different types of transport.
 There are a number of reasons why these themes interest Belyi. In his statement, &quot;Chaos and Geometry,&quot; he explains that &quot;probably the most important [reason] is that our times seem sterile ... deprived of great events and romance.&quot;
 His prints observe the past from a distance. &quot;This distance makes it possible for me to look at tragic events from an aesthetic point of view. War, for me, is just one of many interesting events in the past,&quot; he says.
 Belyi also continues the artistic tradition of fascination with ruins, and how the ugly can be beautiful. &quot;Chaos with elements of former regularity, with traces of life that has disappeared, and with destroyed objects, make one thing about the effects of time,&quot; he says.
 It seems that the management of Che - named for legendary guerrilla fighter Che Guevara - is trying to bring some revolutionary elements to the venue. According to Mikhail Dolgopolov, Che's director, the exhibition fits with the club's philosophy of culture, style and internationalism. The prints, he says, will look striking in their stylish surroundings.
 Nearly all the prints are, in one way or another, panoramas. They are all large-scale - for printmaking, extremely large, the smallest being 1.5 meters across. In this regard, Belyi faced two challenges: First, to change the traditional understanding of printmaking as small-scale, confined to the size of the printing press or paper; Second, to produce something more conceptual than just a print in a frame.
 The big, black-and-white prints are full of the spirit of the Soviet era, and seem only to be lacking one essential Russian ingredient - vodka. This problem was solved at the opening by the presence of representatives of the exhibition's sponsor, Russky Shtandart, which provided the guests with small collector's bottles of the spirit.
 The exhibition's organizers, however, hoped that no one would sample too much of its sponsor's product and compare the impression created by Belyi's prints with reality.

TITLE: Zazerkalye's Success the Stuff of Fairy Tales
TEXT: Among St. Petersburg's many musical theaters, the Zazerkalye Theater is unique. Its name is a tip-off: &quot;zazerkalye&quot; means &quot;through the looking glass&quot; - an obvious reference to Lewis Carroll's novel.
 
The Zazerkalye was founded in 1987 as a children's theater, although the original concept has now been stretched in imaginative directions. Whereas many new theatrical ventures founded during the ferment of Perestroika have since folded, the Zazerkalye has gained in popularity, repertoire, and artistic finesse.
 The theater's beginnings were modest, comprising a small orchestra - mostly students at the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory - a smaller group of singers, and no permanent production space. There were, however, plenty of ideas and talent and, eventually, the theater acquired its own building on Ulitsa Rubinshteina.
 Ten years ago, the Zazerkalye created a studio for children aged between six and 17 that is now an important training ground for the theater's future soloists.
 Today, the Zazerkalye's repertoire includes 35 productions. The theater also regularly takes part in festivals, both in Russia and abroad. Its troupe is still small - 25 soloists, 40 orchestral musicians, and a chorus of just 16 - but it manages a rich, varied repertoire.
 From the start, the theater was a joint project between Pavel Bubelnikov, who had conducted at the Mussorgsky Theater for 25 years before founding the Zazerkalye, and stage director Alexander Petrov. Both are still very much in charge.
 This week, Bubelnikov talked to </i><i><strong>Larisa Doctorow</strong></i><i> about how it all works. </i>
 
 <i><strong>
Q: </strong></i><i>When you started the theater, did you anticipate the problems you would face? And are you satisfied with the results?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>We have achieved even more than we had hoped. Our theater is different from Moscow's Natalya Sats Children's Theater, which was a role model, because we embrace both drama and music. We are a family theater, and our shows are interesting for different generations.
 

 <i><strong>
Q: </strong></i><i>Did you plan that from the beginning, or did it happen along the way?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>We altered our concepts and become more daring. Of course, from the beginning, we hoped that we could stage operas like [Mozart's] &quot;The Magic Flute.&quot; But we never dreamed of putting on Donizetti's &quot;L'elisir d'amore,&quot; or Puccini's &quot;La boheme.&quot;
 
We want to do more, but the modest size of our orchestra restricts us. With time, our artistic problems have been resolved and we've found our public. At first, parents brought their children. Now, we have a second generation of spectators, and those former children bring their children. Our shows are created both for adults and for children.
 
 <i><strong>
Q: </strong></i><i>Do you have any priority or preference in your mix of repertoire?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>Most of our performances are based on classics, as seen from the point of view of music or literature. We try to produce and let people hear great music. For example, we were the first theater in St. Petersburg to stage Offenbach's &quot;Les contes d'Hoffmann.&quot; The Mariinsky Theater's production came after ours. Children should be introduced to such music.
 

 <i><strong>
Q: </strong></i><i>What are you working on now?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>Gershwin's &quot;Porgy and Bess.&quot; The last time it was staged here was in 1971, at the Mussorgsky, and I participated. Now, we have a different aesthetic, and we'll approach it differently. Alexander Petrov's class from the Academy of Theatrical Arts will be taking part.
 

 <i><strong>
Q: </strong></i><i>What are you planning for the city's 300th-anniversary celebrations?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>We've commissioned an opera from local composer Gennady Banshchikov, about the times of Catherine the Great.
 

 <i><strong>
Q: </strong></i><i>Don't you feel sorry or disappointed when your soloists leave after you trained and introduced them to the repertoire?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>I am realistic. People leave every theater, to try different things or to make more money. It's normal.
 
One of our students was Yelena Prokina, who is now a famous soloist living and working in the West. I am proud of her. One of our conductors also left - he has since won prizes in Spain.
 On the other hand, we have people who stay and work with us for years, because they like the atmosphere and feel comfortable here.
 
 <i><strong>
Q: </strong></i><i>Do some of those who have left perform with you when you need them? For example, at the Mariinsky, former singers often perform when the theater needs them for some important production.
 </i><strong>A:</strong> Yevgeny Akimov fits that description. He was our soloist until we staged &quot;L'elisir d'amore.&quot; The Mariinsky heard him as Nemorino, and liked his lyrical tenor very much. So they made him an offer that he could not refuse. But he still performs with us regularly.
 

 <i><strong>
Q: </strong></i><i>Do you go on tours? Surely, there is no equivalent of the Zazerkalye in Western Europe.
 </i><strong>A: </strong>That's right. I have been to children's theaters abroad. They usually produce amateur performances at minimal expense. Since tours are difficult to organize, we normally travel to festivals when we go abroad. That's how we went to Germany. Now, there's talk about performing in Moscow, where we went ten years ago and were successful.
 
 
 <i><strong>
Q: </strong></i><i>When you put on an opera like Strauss's &quot;Die Fledermaus,&quot; do you think that young audiences really understand it?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>Where is the border line on what is for them and what is not? I think they should be influenced by good music and good literature. Children understand the world differently from us, but they should still see shows about love.
 

 <i><strong>
Q: </strong></i><i>How do you hire musicians?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>Normally, we invite Conservatory graduates to audition for us. But St. Petersburg has a lot of orchestras, and good musicians are in high demand. 
 
Our orchestra is not on the level of the Mariinsky - we don't have their means, our salaries are small. But we try to keep good musicians motivated by keeping them interested in what we are doing, by offering them work which is creative.
 Concerts help. Our orchestra frequently works independently, with three conductors. Last year, we gave two successful concerts in the Shostakovich Philharmonic.
 <i><strong>
Q: </strong></i><i>What about the building? What are you going to do with it?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>It's a huge challenge to get it into shape. In the 19th century, it was a merchant's house; 20 years ago, it was turned into an amateur theater. It has very good acoustics. We need money to turn the whole complex into a cultural center. For that, we need to clean and restore the courtyard and annexes. We don't have a proper entrance or facade. The city pays our wages but, otherwise, we have to find funding. We get very little help from sponsors.
 

 <i><strong>
Q: </strong></i><i>Do you sometimes regret that you left the Mussorgsky?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>It was a shot in the dark, but no. It was time to try something different.
 

 <i><strong>
Q: </strong></i><i>Do you also work abroad?
 </i><strong>A: </strong>Yes, I work with Oleg Vinogradov, a former choreographer from the Mariinsky, who is now artistic director in Seoul. Last summer, we staged Prokofiev's &quot;Romeo and Juliet&quot; and, before that, [Prokofiev's] &quot;Cinderella&quot; in Greece.
 

 <i><strong>
Q: </strong></i><i>You won a Golden Mask for &quot;La Boheme.&quot; What has that brought you? 
 </i><strong>A: </strong>Nothing, except a small feeling of satisfaction that at least I have been noticed and my work is appreciated.

TITLE: Forty Eight Hours of Film - It's No Mirage
AUTHOR: By Tatiana Andreeva
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Hot on the heels of last weekend's BLICK festival (&quot;Video-Art Party-Fest Breaks the Mold,&quot; Oct. 18), this weekend, Mirage cinema hosts another unusual event. The Kinokaif festival is a 48-hour, non-stop showing of some of the best recent films from round the world.
 
The event is being promoted as a &quot;parade of premieres,&quot; although this is not strictly true, as some of the films have already played in local cinemas or are on sale on video. Still, all 26 films - with one exception - were shot in 2001 or 2002, and some have already won recognition at international competitions.
 Sixteen films come from the United States, and represent a range of genres, from comedies to thrillers, and from love stories to historical panoramas. Mostly, though, they seem to be mainstream cinema, aimed at a mass audience. The most high-profile of the U.S. participants is Steven Soderbergh's 2002 film &quot;Full Frontal,&quot; starring Julia Roberts and David Duchovny, which plays at 2 a.m. on Sunday. The film is a sequel to &quot;Sex, Lies and Videotape,&quot; Soderbergh's debut, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1989. 
 Kinokaif's European section combines sweet and easy watching with more bitter selections. In the latter category is French director Gaspard Noe's 2002 film &quot;Irreversible,&quot; which shows at midnight on Friday. The film, which stars Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassell, shocked this year's Cannes festival with its brutality, and tells the story of a woman seeking revenge for the death of a close friend. Noe says that his film is about the impossibility of changing many things in life, &quot;because some acts are irreparable ... . Because the loss of a loved one destroys like lightning ... . Because time reveals everything - the best and the worst!&quot;
 The sweeter part is highlighted by Claude LeLouche's &quot;And Now ... Ladies and Gentlemen,&quot; a joint French-British production from this year that tells the love story of a thief and a cafe jazz singer (Jeremy Irons and Patricia Kaas). The film shows at 7:10 p.m. on Saturday.
 The mixture is given some spice with an Asian touch, which includes Kim Ki-Duk's &quot;Napoon namja&quot; (&quot;Bad Guy,&quot; South Korea, 2001) and Hayao Miyazaki's &quot;Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi&quot; (&quot;Spirited Away,&quot; Japan, 2001). Kim's dramas are already well known, but Miyazaki deserves some closer attention. His film, which won the Golden Bear award at this year's Berlinale film festival, is an animation about the adventures of a 10-year-old girl in a mysterious parallel world, full of gods and goblins. The movie, which has been called a Japanese version of &quot;Alice in Wonderland,&quot; is an example of the currently hugely popular Japanese manga style. Non-initiates should head to see &quot;Sen to chihiro no kamikakushi&quot; at 10:45 a.m. on Saturday.
 Kinokaif also includes four Russian films, of which &quot;Serp i Molot&quot; (&quot;Hammer and Sickle&quot;), by Sergei Livnev, who wrote the cult Perestroika film &quot;Assa,&quot; stands out. The film won the Kinoshock festival prize in 1994, but was badly promoted due to organizational difficulties, so Kinokaif gives local audiences another chance to see the dramatic story of Stalinist sex-change experiments. &quot;If the fatherland needs soldiers, we'll make soldiers. If it needs mothers, we'll make mothers,&quot; says a party boss in the film. The film shows at 9 a.m. on Saturday.
 
 <i>
Kinokaif runs over the weekend at Mirage cinema. Tickets cost between 70 and 200 rubles ($2.20 and $6.30). Links: www.mirage.ru/kinokaif </i>

TITLE: alive and kicking once again
AUTHOR: by Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Chufella Marzufella, probably the best live rock-and-roll band in St. Petersburg, has resumed its performances after a car crash late last year that sent two of its members to the hospital.
 
Heavily influenced by early Rolling Stones and The Who, the band, which now plays with a slightly different lineup to its pre-crash days, recorded a new album earlier this month and is now increasing the number of concerts it gives at local clubs. 
 With its rough, hard-edged sound, Chufella Marzufella is ignored by radio stations, but always gets its fans dancing.
 &quot;Chicks like our music. I don't know why. It's hard-edged music, but chicks, rather than guys, like it,&quot; says the band's frontman Pavel Ryabukhin, who sings and plays guitar.
 The four-piece band - which stopped playing last December, when bassist Alexander Nikolayev and guitarist Boris Yakovlev were injured in a car crash - only reappeared again in August, when it played a pair of concerts at Orlandina and Moloko.
 Ryabukhin admits that the hiatus was also caused by the departure of Ivan Malikov, the band's original drummer, last October.
 &quot;He left without saying a word,&quot; says Ryabukhin. &quot;I don't know why.&quot;
 Malikov has been replaced by Andrei Doroshenko, who previously played with reggae band Ackee Wa-Wa.
 &quot;He fit with us perfectly, [he plays] mad music, with unleashed energy,&quot; says Ryabukhin. 
 Chufella Marzufella has been pumping out its high-energy garage rock since January 1994, when it made a major stage debut at the now-legendary TaMtAm Club. Over the years, it released two albums, &quot;I Wanna Be Your Man&quot; (1998) and &quot;Ozma and the Garage Days&quot; (2000).
 Though Ryabukhin admits he is not entirely happy with the past albums, he sounds enthusiastic about the new one - tentatively called &quot;5,000 Fantaziy,&quot; or &quot;5,000 Fantasies&quot; - which was recorded live at the band's rehearsal room, with the help of a mobile studio, in early October.
 &quot;It sounds exactly how we've always wanted to have it on record - a totally foolish sound, with everything off balance,&quot; says Ryabukhin about the album, which was recorded in one five-hour session, and which will be released without overdubbing.
 &quot;It's emotional and really honest music - it has the same shot of energy that you get at our concerts,&quot; he says. &quot;I think that, if you're a rocker and play live gigs, you should record live as well - to make it clear who you really are.&quot;
 Although Chufella Marzufella started out with a set that included covers of songs such as &quot;(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction&quot; or &quot;I Can't Explain,&quot; over the years it almost excluded covers from its set.
 &quot;The last cover we played with real pleasure was Frank Zappa's 'Trouble Every Day' [from the Mothers of Invention's 1965 album 'Freak Out'] - but now we don't feel like doing it anymore. Our own new songs excite us now,&quot; says Ryabukhin.
 After the crazy early days, Ryabukhin, who now makes his living as a stockbroker, has an unlikely preference for traditional jazz, and admires Louis Armstrong.
 &quot;I also listen to the old Status Quo from the 1960s, with pleasure, the Beach Boys, [...] early James Brown and later Elvis Presley - when he didn't need to care about popularity anymore, but just wanted to demonstrate how great he was,&quot; he says, adding that, &quot;I don't like to watch MTV.&quot;
 Shunning the contemporary rock mainstream, Ryabukhin claims the band doesn't want to polish its sound to fit into the Russian music-media's format. 
 &quot;[Guitarist Yakovlev] said to me that it would be good to get on the radio, but I replied, 'How do you imagine we should sound to get there? To dress flashy and have a popular sound? No? Then forget about that garbage.&quot;
 &quot;You should do it so that you'd like it yourself,&quot; he says. &quot;That's how we did it. We do what we want to do.&quot;
 
 <i>
Chufella Marzufella plays at Griboyedov on Wednesday, and at Moloko on Nov. 7. </i>

TITLE: finnish pop finally travels abroad
AUTHOR: by Sami Hyrskylahti
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Although it has, traditionally, lived in the musical shadow of its neighbor, Sweden, Finland has, recently, started to generate its own international success stories, with rock acts, such as HIM and Nightwish, and dance-floor fillers, such as Bomfunk MC's and Darude - all of which have toured in Russia recently.
 
Less well known, however, is Finland's flourishing pop-music scene. On Saturday, this will change, when St. Petersburg audiences will get the opportunity to hear the clear Nordic melodies of Finland's top pop group, Kemopetrol, at Red Club.
 A fresh group of twentysomethings, Kemopetrol released its first album, &quot;Slowed Down,&quot; in April 2000. The album was an immediate success, and garnered the group the prize for best new pop/rock act at the Emma awards - Finland's equivalent of the U.S. Grammy awards - that year. The band's second album, &quot;Everything's fine,&quot; was released in April this year, and went straight to the top of the Finnish album chart.
 Even after this success, the Finns couldn't escape their Scandinavian &quot;big brother,&quot; as critics have often compared Kemopetrol to Sweden's Cardigans and, especially, the recognizable, smooth voices of the bands' respective female vocalists. Unlike the Cardigans, however, Kemopetrol songwriter Kalle Koivisto cites his influences in such monsters of electronic music as Massive Attack and Depeche Mode.
 So far, Kemopetrol has found most of its popularity in Finland - naturally - and - more bizarrely - in Spain, the first foreign country in which its first album was released. The group has frequently performed in Spain, and the band's music was used on the soundtrack of Spanish-language film &quot;Tuno Negro.&quot;
 As well as Europe, Kemopetrol also performed at a corporate party this fall in Beijing. According to the band's vocalist, Laura Narhi, the concert in China almost didn't take place, because of the strict customs regulations.
 &quot;We arrived in Beijing on Friday,&quot; she says. &quot;Chinese customs released our instruments just a few hours before the gig, which was on Tuesday.&quot;
 As far as Russia is concerned, the country played a key role in the band's choice of name. At first, the musicians, still nameless, played a sort of industrial-electronic-ambient music, which they say had a &quot;Russian atmosphere.&quot; It was for this reason that they chose the name &quot;Kemopetrol,&quot; after what they thought was a Russian ice-hockey team. (Later, they discovered that Chemopetrol Litvinov actually hail from the Czech Republic.) In addition, Kemopetrol's label, Plastinka, has a Russian name (<i>plastinka </i>means &quot;record.&quot;)
 However, if Swedish and other Western popular cultures are strong in Finland, Narhi admits that she has almost no idea what is happening in her country's eastern neighbor's musical scene.
 &quot;The only [Russian] band I can name is girl duo Tatu - you hear them every day on Finnish radio,&quot; she says. &quot;Otherwise, we Finnish young people have quite weak knowledge of Russian music.&quot;
 &quot;I have never been to Russia. None of us has,&quot; she comments, adding that she is looking forward to the trip.
 As for fans of the band in St. Petersburg: &quot;Well, we received one e-mail from a Russian guy who said that he can't wait for our gig,&quot; says Narhi. &quot;But that's probably all.&quot;
 So why is Kemopetrol venturing into such unknown territory? The answer is Ivan Kalichevich, a Russian also in his twenties. Kalichevich moved to Finland from the Western Siberian city of Omsk seven years ago, being able to do so because of his grandmother's Finnish roots.
 Kalichevich remembers often hearing Kemopetrol's songs on the radio while driving to work in the morning.
 &quot;The DJ said that [Kemopetrol] should play abroad,&quot; he remembers. &quot;So I decided to help them.&quot;
 &quot;Finland and Russia are close neighbors and, with this kind of cultural exchange, I want to remove some of the prejudices that young people in these countries may have,&quot; he explains.
 And Kalichevich's master plan, which he has named &quot;Art/Machine,&quot; is starting to become reality: The next plan is to take Russia's biggest-ever rock band, Akvarium, to play in Finland.
 
 <i>
Kemopetrol plays Red Club at midnight on Saturday. Links: www.kemopetrol.org </i>

TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: Folksy art-rock band <strong>Vermicelli Orchestra </strong>will play its biggest concert to date at the 2,000-seat Lensoviet Palace of Culture on Friday.
 
Formed by former Akvarium accordion player Sergei Shchurakov, the band has recently been experimenting, performing with both a chamber orchestra and the electronic band EU.
 According to Artyom Tamazov, the band's manager and sound engineer, the concert will be divided into two parts.
 The first will contain totally new material from the band's forthcoming album, while the second will include rearranged numbers from Vermicelli's first two albums, performed with a string orchestra. 
 Ex-Akvarium cellist Seva Gakkel, who frequently performs with the band, will not be playing, but is expected to appear in the future.
 Vermicelli's next album, tentatively titled &quot;Strannik&quot; (&quot;Wanderer&quot;), will be recorded in the band's own studio and is exptected to be released &quot;no earlier than the spring.&quot;
 Tickets cost from 80 to 180 rubles ($2.50 to $5.65). See Gigs for details. 
 <strong>Halloween</strong> celebrations have been gratefully adopted by local audiences, and have become one of the most popular festivals on the local club scene. This year's main event will be at Fish Fabrique, the underground club that first introduced Halloween to club goers as early as 1993.
 &quot;We were young and had a lot of friends, including Americans. It's one of their favorite festivals, but nobody celebrated it in Russia,&quot; says Pavel Zaporozhtsev, the owner of Fish Fabrique. &quot;We were an alternative, reckless place, so they came to us with an idea and we jumped at it.&quot;
 However, it took time for local audiences to work out what it was all about.
 &quot;The funniest thing was that many Russians, after reading 'dress only' on our posters, came to a club like Fish Fabrique wearing suits and ties,&quot; says Zaporozhtsev. &quot;But, now, it's become a Russian national holiday. It's become difficult to buy a pumpkin, so my mother-in-law grew some and I brought them to a couple of clubs.&quot;
 This year's party at Fish Fabrique will be &quot;very trashy and horror,&quot; according to the event's English-language flyers, and will be hosted by The Pikes and DJ D. Ska-Messer. 
 The Pikes are a garage spin-off project of the popular ska-punk band Spitfire, incorporating singer and guitarist Konstantin Limonov, bassist Andrei &quot;Ded&quot; Kurayev and drummer Denis &quot;Kashchei&quot; Kuptsov. Unlike Spitfire, it performs evergreens such as &quot;Burning Love,&quot; &quot;Money (That's What I Want)&quot; and &quot;Route 66.&quot;
 Tickets cost 100 rubles ($3.15).
 Other parties of note take place at Griboyedov Club, Moloko, PAR.spb, Red Club and Faculty.
 
 <i>- by Sergey Chernov </i>

TITLE: something very fishy going on
AUTHOR: by Peter Morley
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: I had been meaning to check out Delfin's for some time. The stylish-looking eatery caught my attention this summer, with its promise of fresh fish from Portugal, cooked by a Portuguese chef, for whom the place is named. (Cynical thought: Surely, I can't be alone in thinking that it is a bit <i>too </i>convenient that the chef's name means &quot;dolphin&quot; in Russian?). 
 
I was pleased, therefore, when a friend called in the middle of the afternoon on Sunday, suggesting we go for breakfast (sic), and reminded me about Delfin's. So it happened that, as the snow fell, three of us entered the small, snug basement. And it was as we entered that we first noticed something a bit fishy (sorry), as one of my companions complained that the plaice (sorry) smelled &quot;gristly&quot; - as though the cooks were using cheap, greasy oil. Putting these fears aside, we picked a table in the corner.
 Aesthetically, it must be said that Delfin's is a delight to behold, with its Gaugin-esque figures adorning the walls. (We disagreed over which French impressionist's paintings the walls resembled, but I'm claiming reviewer's privilege.) Clearly, a great deal of effort and money has gone into the decor. Purists, however, might want to dispute the &quot;Bar 'n' Grill&quot; tag that Delfin's has adopted, especially on seeing the distinctly un-grill-like menu.
 If only the same effort had gone into developing the service - which was at best indifferent and, at worst, bordering on rude - and the music. For some unfathomable reason, the soothing strains of West African star Cesaria Evora that greeted our arrival were soon replaced with thumping, Latino-inflected Euro-pap. This is a common complaint about St. Petersburg restaurants, and a place setting its sights as high as Delfin's should know better. (Our server informed us that Evora had dined in the place only a few days before.)
 The menu is also slightly bewildering. While I accept that the restaurant's specialities are Portuguese fish dishes, these dominate the menu almost to the exclusion of anything else. For example, there are only three (count them!) desserts - and that includes Sangria, which I have never seen listed as a dessert anywhere else. There are also no vegetarian dishes (except for a couple of cold starters), although I suspect that this is due to cultural factors - neither Russia nor Portugal are noted for their vegetarian tendencies. 
 Prices on the menu proper range from high (470 rubles, $14.80 for paella, which our server recommended for its large portions) to ridiculous (1,920 rubles, $60.55 for a two-person sole dish; the one-person version goes for 1,050 rubles, $33.10). Other tempting examples include the swordfish kebab, for 600 rubles ($18.90) and the sturgeon with black caviar and champagne sauce, at 630 rubles ($19.85). While it takes a lot to dissuade me from ordering sturgeon, I did blanch at this particular offer.
 We were saved - or so we thought - by the card inserted into the main menu, which listed Delfin's current &quot;special offer&quot; of nine dishes for 195 rubles ($6.15) each. As these all sounded tempting enough, we let budgetary constraints dictate our actions.
 I began with a starter of mozzarella with tomatoes (100 rubles, $3.15). This was a simple, small plate of the two main ingredients, generously seasoned, and was quite adequate, although the mozzarella was, in places, extremely soft, to the point of being almost liquid.
 Then the mains arrived, and we discovered that our companion's olfactory senses had not let her down. Unfortunately, all three of our dishes left much to be desired.
 Item: Churrasco (&quot;Grilled chicken with spicy sauce, fried potatoes and green salad&quot;). The green salad is not mentioned in the Russian menu, and proved to be similarly absent on the plate. The &quot;spicy sauce&quot; was almost as undetectable, and we couldn't work out the part of the chicken from which the meat had been taken. That aside, the meat was declared decent, but nothing exceptional.
 Item: Coimbra (&quot;Grilled lamb chops with white wine&quot;). Here, the Russian menu promised &quot;Lamb brisket on the bone, marinated in garlic and rosemary&quot; - in short, a much more detailed description than the English menu. My companion ended up leaving almost as much of the meat as she ate, as it was full of gristle and, on the whole, tough. The dish was also light on flavoring (although it was there, apparently), and my companion, who knows a thing or two about <i>degustation, </i>suspected that the wine employed came from the lower end of the price register.
 Item: Lagareiro (&quot;Cod fish baked with olive oil, garlic and potatoes&quot;). This was a real let down. I had images of a lightly flavored juicy fillet, but was instead presented with a largely unidentifiable lump of bony fish that was, on the whole, almost impossibly chewy and, on top of that, liberally strewed with fried onions. The one saving grace were three baked-potato halves (although even I, no kitchen conjurer, can manage to bake spuds). Still, at least I left feeling half full.
 After we finally managed to pay - a process that took at least 20 minutes, as another group of three that had come in seemed to consume all of our server's attention, when she was in the room at all - we shuffled out into the snow, disappointed. I can only assume that Delfin's philosophy is something along the lines of &quot;you get what you pay for&quot; - in which case, unless you can afford the sole, this is one establishment best avoided.
 
 <i>
Delfin's Bar 'n' Grill. 4 Malaya Sadovaya Ul. Tel.: 310-1077. Open daily, noon to midnight. Menu in English and Russian. No credit cards. Breakfast for three, with one beer: 783 rubles ($24.70). </i>

TITLE: U.S. Police Arrest Two Men in Sniper Case
AUTHOR: By Aleen Breed
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: FREDERICK, Maryland - Two men, one of them described as recently converted to Islam, were arrested at a roadside rest stop Thursday for questioning over the three-week wave of deadly sniper attacks that has terrorized the Washington area.
 
The arrests - linked to a telephoned boast about a deadly Alabama robbery - raised hopes of a conclusion to the intensive and often frustrating investigation of the shootings that have killed 10 people and critically wounded three others since Oct. 2.
 The men taken into custody were not immediately charged in the sniper attacks, but authorities made it clear that the arrests were considered pivotal. A newspaper report said that the men were motivated by anti-American bias; police in Washington state, where the men recently lived, said that they were not part of any organized group.
 U.S. President George W. Bush was told that federal authorities were reasonably sure the case had been solved, a senior administration official said, on condition of anonymity.
 &quot;There's a strong feeling that these people are related to the sniper shootings,&quot; said Douglas Gansler, state's attorney in Maryland's Montgomery County, where the sniper task force is based. Asked if he believed the sniper was still at large, he said &quot;no.&quot;
 The arrests occurred hours after authorities descended on a home in Tacoma, Washington, believed to hold clues important to the investigation. They then issued a nationwide alert for the car, spotted by a motorist and an attendant at the rest stop.
 Charles Moose, the Montgomery County police chief who is leading the investigation, had said that John Allen Muhammad, 42, was being sought for questioning in the shootings and called him &quot;armed and dangerous.&quot; Muhammad was said to be traveling with a juvenile, identified by a law-enforcement officer as John Lee Malvo, 17.
 The key break, authorities said, was a phone call to the sniper task-force tip line suggesting that investigators check out a liquor-store robbery in &quot;Montgomery.&quot; The caller claimed credit for both the robbery and the sniper shootings, officials said.
 Investigators checking the tip matched it with the Sept. 21 liquor store robbery in Montgomery, Alabama, in which two employees were shot, one fatally. Montgomery Mayor Bobby Bright said that Malvo's fingerprint was found at the scene on a magazine about weapons.
 Police then traced Malvo to a home in Tacoma, Washington, that was searched Wednesday by authorities looking into the sniper shootings. Malvo had been living in the home with Muhammad, a source said, also on condition of anonymity.
 A composite sketch of the suspect in the liquor-store shootings was made and &quot;there are some very good similarities&quot; to Malvo, Montgomery Police Chief John Wilson said. He said that the gun used in Alabama was not the same as the one in the Washington, D.C.-area shootings, however.
 Members of the task force arrested the men without incident at 3:19 a.m. local time off I-70 in Frederick County, Maryland, about 80 kilometers northwest of Washington, said Larry Scott, an agent for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. State police said that the men offered no resistance.
 &quot;I'm confident that these are indeed the people&quot; sought in the killings, a law enforcement source said.
 The relationship between Malvo and Muhammad, who also goes by the name John Allen Williams, was not clear, but several newspapers reported that the teen is Muhammad's stepson.
 The Seattle Times said that Muhammad changed his name after converting to Islam.
 Several federal sources told the Seattle Times that Muhammad and Malvo may have been motivated by anti-American sentiments in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Both were known to speak sympathetically about the men who hijacked jetliners over Washington, New York and Pennsylvania, the sources told the newspaper.
 <i>

 Stephen Manning and Jesse Holland contributed to this report. </i>

TITLE: Resolution On Iraq Put To Security Council
AUTHOR: By Dafna Linzer
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: UNITED NATIONS - Pushing ahead on Iraq after weeks of diplomatic wrangling, the United States put its tough new proposal into the hands of the Security Council in preparation for a vote that could come as early as next week.
 
Russia appeared to be the main obstacle Thursday, rejecting the draft, chiefly due to language that could trigger military action against Iraq. But France, which has similar objections and was a vocal opponent of earlier U.S. offerings, was ready to negotiate and wouldn't block the resolution's passage, French diplomats said.
 The U.S. proposal gives UN inspectors broad new powers to search and destroy banned weapons and warns Iraq of &quot;serious consequences&quot; if it obstructs their work. British Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock said that the text &quot;is very clearly intended to be a last-chance offer to Iraq.&quot;
 Stepping up the pressure on the council, White House officials said that they wanted negotiations wrapped up quickly. A senior U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the draft was introduced to the full 15-member council Wednesday in the hope of showing China, France and Russia that it had support from other members.
 U.S. President George W. Bush told supporters from North Carolina Thursday that Iraq's president posed a threat to America and the world.
 &quot;We have made the call to the international community and to Mr. Saddam Hussein himself to disarm. But, friends, if the United Nations won't act, if they're feeble in their responsibility, and if Saddam Hussein will not disarm, the United States will lead a coalition in the name of peace to disarm Saddam Hussein,&quot; he said.
 But Moscow didn't seem hurried.
 &quot;A quick putting of the draft to vote would be counterproductive,&quot; Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Yuri Fedotov said in Moscow on Thursday.
 An overwhelming majority of Security Council members said in closed-door consultations Wednesday that they favored the new resolution, the return of inspectors, and a unified message to Iraq to disarm, diplomats said on condition of anonymity.
 But several ambassadors who got their first look at the new draft also cautioned against resorting to a military solution and complained that they were kept in the dark too long about where the United States was going on Iraq, diplomats said. Only Syria remained opposed to the new resolution.
 In remarks to the Arab satellite-television broadcaster al-Jazeera, Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri branded the new draft resolution &quot;an insult to the United Nations&quot; and a &quot;pretext to attack Iraq.&quot;
 Sabri also accused the United States of &quot;harassing&quot; Iraqi diplomats in New York and Vienna &quot;to try to lure them into betraying their country.&quot;
 The U.S. plan has been a work-in-progress since Bush came to the United Nations on Sept. 12 and challenged world leaders to get tough on Iraq or stand aside.
 The new draft finds Iraq in &quot;material breach&quot; of its obligations under previous resolutions, language interpreted by some as paving the way for a unilateral use of force by the United States.

TITLE: Envoy, Palestinian Representatives Discuss New Peace Plan
AUTHOR: By Ibrahim Hazboun
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: JERICHO, West Bank - Palestinians must take decisive action against militants and get serious about internal reform if they want to embark on the road to statehood, as outlined in a new Mideast peace plan, a U.S. envoy told senior Palestinian officials Thursday.
 
Israelis and Palestinians have expressed reservations about the three-phase plan.
 The document, referred to as a &quot;road map&quot; to Palestinian statehood, envisions a gradual Israeli troop pullback in the coming months to positions held before the outbreak of fighting two years ago. It also calls for Palestinian elections by May 2003, followed by a provisional Palestinian state by the end of that year and a final peace deal and full Palestinian independence by 2005.
 Palestinian cabinet minister Saeb Erekat noted that the plan only refers to parliamentary and not to presidential elections - an apparent attempt to circumvent President Yasser Arafat.
 &quot;This is interference in our internal affairs, which is not acceptable,&quot; Erekat told reporters after a meeting with the envoy, Assistant Secretary of State William Burns, in the West Bank town of Jericho.
 The United States and Israel hope to sideline the Palestinian leader, whom they consider an obstacle to a peace deal. Burns is not meeting with Arafat, in line with a U.S. boycott of the Palestinian leader. Arafat's popularity has plummeted - but if elections are held he is widely expected to be re-elected as Palestinian Authority president, if only for lack of a charismatic challenger.
 The peace plan also calls for naming a prime minister, who would take over the day-to-day affairs of government. Arafat opposes the idea.
 After the meeting with the Palestinian officials, Burns acknowledged that the &quot;very real suffering and humiliation the Palestinians experience under occupation every day.&quot;
 However, Burns said that the Palestinians won't be able to end occupation unless they end terror, which he said has undermined their aspirations.
 &quot;It is only through decisive action to end terror and violence, and decisive action to reform in preparation for Palestinian statehood, that we are going to be able to move ahead on a practical pathway to end occupation and this terrible conflict,&quot; Burns said.
 Burns also held separate talks with Hani al-Hassan, expected to be named by Arafat in the coming days as interior minister. In the job, al-Hassan will be asked to oversee the restructuring of the Palestinian security services - a key element of the reforms sought by the United States.
 Earlier Thursday, Burns met with Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who said that the plan did not address all of Israel's security concerns.
 &quot;The defense minister emphasized the need to strengthen the security element in the road map because, without security, there can be no progress,&quot; said a statement by Ben-Eliezer. &quot;Israel reserves the right to self defense and will not accept any constraints by this or any other road map.&quot;
 The U.S. mission is seen, in part, as an attempt by Washington to keep a lid on Mideast violence as it prepares for a possible strike against Iraq. A flare-up in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would make it more difficult for the United States to maintain support from moderate Arab governments.
 Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, addressing a convention of his Likud party late Wednesday, charged that Palestinian militants were trying to sabotage the U.S. initiative and implied that Arafat supported them.
 &quot;Even as we are trying to put together a new proposal, a new plan, a formula for progress, the gangs of terror and murder and the one who heads them, make it clear, again, that they do not want a solution,&quot; Sharon said.
 Sharon said that he was prepared to make painful compromises for peace. &quot;We know the price of peace, and the Likud is prepared to pay this heavy price,&quot; Sharon told a convention of his hardline Likud party, but was greeted with boos from the floor.

TITLE: Libya Withdraws From Arab League
AUTHOR: By Khalid Al-Deeb
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TRIPOLI, Libya - Libya has decided to withdraw from the Arab League, Moammar Gadhafi's government announced Thursday.
 
The government gave no reason for the decision. Libyan officials cited the Arab League's inefficiency in dealing with the crises over Iraq and the Palestinians.
 In a statement by the Libyan news agency, the Ministry of African Affairs said that an official notification had been sent to Arab League headquarters in Cairo, Egypt.
 In Cairo, Arab League spokesperson Hisham Youssef said that the 22-nation organization had received no official notice from the Libyans. However, he acknowledged that Libya had raised the possibility of a withdrawal with Secretary General Amr Moussa, who traveled to Tripoli earlier this month to discourage Gadhafi from withdrawing.
 &quot;This is not a new idea,&quot; Youssef said. &quot;It has been raised before, but Gadhafi has told the secretary general that the idea was put on hold.&quot;
 In Tripoli, Libyan officials said that Gadhafi was unhappy with the Arab League's inability to deal with current Arab issues, mainly the standoff between Iraq and the United States and violence between Israelis and the Palestinians.
 Gadhafi has been sharply critical of an Arab League peace initiative formalized at a summit in Beirut, Lebanon. After the summit, he urged the &quot;the Arab street&quot; to distance itself from &quot;crippled&quot; Mideast regimes, and called on the Arab League to cancel the Beirut initiative.
 The March summit was the first time the Arab world collectively offered Israel recognition, security and &quot;normal relations&quot; in exchange for a full withdrawal from Arab lands held since 1967 and a &quot;just solution&quot; for Palestinian refugees.
 Earlier this month, 50,000 people marched in Tripoli, urging Libya to withdraw from the Arab League. They accused the Arab League of being unable to help Iraqis and the Palestinians.

TITLE: Seeds Scattered on Tumultuous Day Four
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: A disastrous day for the organizers of the St. Petersburg Open saw top seed Andre Agassi crash out in the second round on Thursday, just hours after home favorites Marat Safin and Yevgeny Kafelnikov had lost.
 
All three players lost in straight sets to unseeded opponents, as did No. 8 seed Max Mirny of Belarus, who was ousted by Germany's Nicholas Kiefer, 6-3, 7-5.
 Agassi's defeat also effectively ended his hopes of finishing the season in first place in the ATP Champions Race.
 The first of the high-profile victims was Safin, who never really got going against Vladimir Voltchkov of Belarus, and lost 6-4, 6-4.
 In the next game on center court, Kafelnikov put up more resistance against his traditional nemesis, Slovakia's Dominik Hrbaty, taking the first set to a tiebreak, before losing, 7-6, 7-5.
 After the mid-session interval, Agassi faced Hrbaty's compatriot Karol Kucera, but, like Safin, fell 6-4, 6-4.
 Safin, who hasn't won a tournament since taking a title here last year, double-faulted two times in the seventh game of the opening set to trail 0-40. He saved one break point before returning wide on his next serve. Voltchkov held his serve and fired an ace to close the set in game 10.
 Down 15-40 on his serve in the third game of the second set, Safin blasted an ace to save one break point, but then his forehand went wide to give Voltchkov another break. Safin evened 2-2 in the next game, only to be broken again in game 5.
 The 24-year-old Belarusian served at love in the next game and then again in game 8, firing in five powerful winners in a row for a comfortable 5-3 lead. Safin smashed his racket in frustration. 
 &quot;I didn't play good at all, I didn't do anything to beat [him], so maybe it's the reason. I hope, it's the reason,&quot; said the 22-year-old Russian, who is currently No. 3 in the ATP Champions Race and is close to qualifying for the season-ending Tennis Masters Cup in Shanghai. 
 &quot;I don't know. Something is going wrong. It's just terrible,&quot; Safin said. 
 The results mean that France's Sebastian Grosjean, ranked No. 9 in the Champions Race, is now the highest-ranked player left in the tournament. On Thursday, Grosjean had an easy win, 6-3, 6-1 over Argentina's Mariano Zabaleta. The match lasted less than an hour.
 Earlier in the day, all had seemed set for Agassi to take over at the top of the Champions Race, as the current No. 1, Lleyton Hewitt of Australia, was bundled out of the Stockholm Open by unseeded Dutch player Raemon Sluiter, 6-3, 6-3. Had Agassi gone on to win the St. Petersburg tournament, the 50 Champions Race points gained would have propelled him past Hewitt into first place.
 Wimbledon champion Hewitt was joined on the sideline in Stockholm by defending champion Sjeng Schalken and Australian Open winner Thomas Johansson. A third 2002 Grand Slam champion also lost Wednesday: French Open winner Albert Costa was beaten by Adrian Voinea 6-3, 6-3 at the Swiss Indoors in Basel, Switzerland. 
 &quot;He just played too well,&quot; said Hewitt, who got a first-round walkover when Thomas Enqvist withdrew because of an injury. &quot;He came right at me from the start. He was aggressive. You have to give him credit. He's one of the best indoor players.&quot;
 
 <i>(SPT, AP) </i>

TITLE: Giants Crack Rodriguez, Tie World Series
AUTHOR: By Ben Walker
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SAN FRANCISCO - The San Francisco Giants proved the Kid was really Mr. Hittable, after all.
 
David Bell lined a tie-breaking single off rookie sensation Francisco Rodriguez in the eighth inning as the Giants rallied past the Anaheim Angels 4-3 on Wednesday night, tying the World Series at two games each.
 Down early and in danger of being blown out again, the Giants somehow slowed down Anaheim's persistent hitters.
 And then, the biggest surprise of all: The Giants broke through against Rodriguez, who had been known as Mr. Unhittable, and Bell became the latest son to honor his major-league father with a big hit in this Series.
 &quot;I was just trying to get a pitch I could handle and hit it hard,&quot; Bell said. &quot;I don't know, he's had a lot of success so far. He's done a great job for these guys.&quot;
 &quot;So to get a win tonight was big,&quot; he said. &quot;I think to get a run off him is important, too.&quot;
 Officially, it was an unearned run because of a passed ball charged to Bengie Molina. No matter, it counted all the same as Giants came back from a 3-0 deficit and posted their first Series win at home since 1962, setting off fog-horn blasts from the nearby bay.
 Rodriguez put down Barry Bonds in pitching a perfect seventh, but the 20-year-old with a wicked slider and crackling fastball soon took his first major league loss.
 Rodriguez had blown away all 12 San Francisco hitters he faced until J.T. Snow singled to start the eighth. Snow moved up when Molina let a fastball skip off his mitt, but stayed put when first baseman Scott Spiezio made a sensational, diving catch on Reggie Sanders' foul bunt.
 Bell singled sharply past diving shortstop David Eckstein and Snow scored ahead of center fielder Darin Erstad's throw, setting off a celebration at Pacific Bell Park.
 Tim Worrell got the win and Robb Nen closed for a save.
 Bell's father, Buddy, and grandfather, Gus, both played in the majors. Buddy, who was at Pac Bell, and Gus combined for nine All-Star appearances, yet made only one World Series appearance - Gus in 1961 for Cincinnati.
 Spiezio and Bonds, of course, also had dads in the big leagues. Snow's father played in the NFL.
 Pitching on his 24th birthday, Angels rookie John Lackey picked up a nice present, the souvenir ball from his first major league hit. More importantly for Anaheim, he avoided trouble on the mound, thanks mostly to Benito Santiago.
 Twice, Lackey intentionally walked Bonds to load the bases with one out. Both times, he got Santiago to hit grounders to Eckstein that the shortstop turned into inning-ending double plays.
 &quot;When I hit into the second double play, I didn't even want to go back to the dugout,&quot; Santiago said. &quot;I felt like jumping into the stands and sitting with the fans.&quot;
 Yet Santiago got sweet redemption with an RBI single that capped a three-run fifth that made it 3-all. And in a strange twist for a Series dominated by long balls, the comeback started with two of the shortest hits yet.
 Pitcher Kirk Rueter led off with a high chopper that he beat out for an infield single. Kenny Lofton followed with a bunt that slowly danced down the chalk line, until third baseman Troy Glaus picked it up, for another little single.
 Rich Aurilia singled home the Giants' first run, Kent hit a sacrifice fly and, after another intentional walk to Bonds, Santiago singled up the middle. The MVP of the NL championship series clapped his hands and pointed toward the San Francisco dugout after rounding first base.
 Glaus hit a two-run shot, tying Bonds' record of seven home runs in a postseason, to give the Angels a 3-0 lead in the third.
 Lackey was no lackey at the plate in his first major league at-bat - then again, he hit .428 in leading Grayson County, Texas to the 1999 Junior College World Series championship.
 With runners on first and second and one out in the second, Lackey fouled off a bunt attempt. Undaunted with two strikes, he expertly took a low-and-away fastball the other way to right for a single that loaded the bases. Eckstein's sacrifice fly made it 1-0.
 A leadoff single by Tim Salmon set up Glaus' third homer of the Series, a shot to center over the leaping Lofton.

TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: <b>Howe About That?
 </b>

NEW YORK (AP) - Art Howe will be the next manager of the New York Mets, three newspapers reported Thursday. One of the papers also said that Lou Piniella agreed in principle to manage Tampa Bay.
 Howe, who guided Oakland to three straight playoff appearances, agreed to a four-year contract worth $9.4 million, according to the New York Daily News and New York Post. Newsday reported the same financial terms, but said the deal was only reached in principle.
 The newspapers said Howe and agent Alan Nero, who also represents Piniella, worked out the deal Wednesday during a meeting in New York. However, the Mets must wait until after the World Series to announce managerial hiring.
 "It's done," the Daily News quoted an unidentified source as saying. "The Mets' people were really impressed with Howe and they obviously proved that by giving him a four-year deal."
 Newsday said Piniella, unable to negotiate with New York after the Mets failed to reach a compensation deal with Seattle, agreed in principle to a $13 million, four-year deal with the Devil Rays.
 
 
<b>Becker Escapes Jail
 </b>

MUNICH, Germany (AP) - Former tennis star Boris Becker was sentenced Thursday to two years of probation for tax evasion.
 "I'm happy and relieved that this chapter is finally closed," Becker said following the verdict, which was greeted by applause in the courtroom. "I'm a free man. That's the important thing."
 "I accept that I am responsible for a mistake that I made 10 years ago, and I know that I have to pay for that," he added.
 Becker, accused of avoiding $1.7 million in taxes, was fined $300,000 and ordered to pay court costs. He admitted in court Wednesday that he kept a residence in Germany 10 years ago while claiming to reside in the tax haven of Monaco.
 Prosecutor Matthias Musiol had asked for a 3 1/2-year jail sentence, arguing that the 34-year-old Becker deliberately gave false information to save money.
 
 
<b>Lightning Strikes Again
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TAMPA BAY, Florida (AP) - The Tampa Bay Lightning are displaying the confidence of a team accustomed to winning.
 And for good reason. They haven't experienced that once-familiar losing feeling, so far this season.
 "Guys believe they can score goals and we can come back on teams," left wing Dave Andreychuk said after the Lightning erased a two-goal deficit to tie Columbus 2-2 on Wednesday night.
 Tampa Bay, which had the third-fewest points in the Eastern Conference last season, is 4-0-2-0 and the only unbeaten team in the NHL. The start is the best in franchise history.
 Winning has a way of breeding confidence, especially with a team that has had just one winning season and made the playoffs just once - in 1996 - in its 10 years in the league.
 Tampa Bay's Martin St. Louis scored his sixth goal with just over a minute left in the first period, and Marc Denis mishandled Dave Andreychuk's blast from the slot 12 seconds into the third.
 "We were able to battle back," said Nikolai Khabibulin, who made 24 saves. "We didn't take them lightly. We knew coming in here that they're a hardworking team, especially playing at home. It was just one of those games."
 In other games, it was: New Jersey 2, Atlanta 1; Ottawa 4, Carolina 1; Washington 2, the New York Rangers 1; Los Angeles 3, Detroit 3; and Florida 4, Toronto 1.