SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #844 (12), Tuesday, February 18, 2003
**************************************************************************
TITLE: Protestors Hit City's Streets Over Iraq
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: A protest march by 200 people from the British Consulate to the U.S. Consulate as part of a worldwide day of actions against a possible U.S.-led war against Iraq ended surreally on Friday, as law-enforcement officers and protesters struggled over possession of a dead pig's head.
The police, who had followed the events of the two-hour long, officially sanctioned protest from a distance in a bus, stepped in when a group of young men identifying themselves as members of the Anti-Globalization Patriotic Youth Union tried to set an Uncle-Sam style hat on the pig's head in front of the U.S. Consulate. The protesters then broke up and dispersed peacefully.
The protest was called to coincide with rallies planned around the world, including anti-war demonstrations in other Russian cities, as well as in Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and Kazakhstan.
The St. Petersburg protesters, most of them pensioners and youth, marched carrying signs bearing anti-American and anti-war slogans, as well as photos of Iraqi Saddam Hussein and U.S. President George W. Bush.
"NATO! Hands off Iraq," read one of the placards.
" I survived the siege of Leningrad, and I don't need a third world war," said Eleonora Chizhevskaya, a 68-year-old pensioner, who took part in the protest. "The U.S. is just trying to save its dollar, and it spits on the rest of the world."
Like Chiznevskaya, Mikhail Kuznetsov, the head of the Anti-Globalization Patriotic Youth Union, said that the group feared that a war against Iraq could snowball into a larger conflict.
"This war could cause a dangerous conflict with the entire Islamic world," said Kuznetsov. "The current U.S. policy is a policy of fascism, which hides under the mask of 'fighting international terrorism.' Their real aim is Iraqi oil."
Meanwhile, in Moscow, waving banners and chanting "No to War," about 300 people on Saturday turned up for a march against the possible war. Their ranks grew to about 1,000 people as they made their way from the Foreign Ministry's headquarters to the U.S. Embassy.
One of the signs implored President Vladimir Putin to "Be Firmer With America," while others said "U.S. - International Terrorist #1."
In Voronezh, TVS showed a group of protesters printing anti-war pamphlets and preparing a giant replica of U.S President George W. Bush. The protesters demonstrated alongside World War II veterans.
Young girls in Yekaterinburg shouted "Yankees Go Home" and stamped on the U.S. flag in footage shown on TVS.
Meanwhile, some 2,000 protestors waved banners and chanted at a protest in a central square in Kiev, Ukraine.
Anti-globalists backed by musicians led a peaceful "Rock Against War" protest joined by Communists, Socialists, Kurds, pacifists and rank-and-file Ukrainians who chanted "No war against Iraq."
"We're against all wars, Chechnya, Palestine, everything," said Fedir Lynov, 21, who described himself as an anti-globalist.
Other people carried posters reading "U.S.- Evil Empire" and "American Imperialism: Yesterday Vietnam, Today Iraq, Tomorrow Ukraine."
About 1,500 people rallied in Minsk, Belarus, in support of Iraq and against the United States in a quasi-official demonstration that some participants said they had been forced to join.
The demonstrators held portraits of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
"Together with Russia, we won't allow American aggression against Iraq," Leonid Kozik, leader of the Federation of Labor Unions and head of the Belarusian-Iraqi trade commission, told the demonstrators.
Nina, a 45-year-old worker at Minsk's tractor factory who declined to give her last name, said the factory's management had ordered her to attend the demonstration, threatening to deprive her of a bonus if she did not.
Protests continued Sunday, where about 200 young Moldovans rallied in Chisinau.
Members of the youth organization that planned the rally - "The 21st Century" - distributed leaflets claiming bus fares in this impoverished country would double if the United States gains control of the Iraqi oil supply.
The rally was initially planned for Saturday, but organizers had to postpone the peace rally to Sunday because another group had reserved the same location - the capital's main square - to commemorate the 14th anniversary of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.
(SPT, AP)
TITLE: Group Says Getting Up Early Is Bad for You
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: As the State Duma prepares for the first reading of a bill to return Russia to its pre-1930 standard time, a St. Petersburg group last week released the results of research that, it claims, demonstrate the positive impacts the proposed change will bring.
The group, which comprises biologists, astronomers and other specialists, argues that the current situation - in which Russia is one hour ahead of its former standard time in winter, and two hours in summer - is damaging to people's health, impairs workplace productivity, increases the number of road accidents, and drives some people to drink, drugs and even suicide. A return to the previous standard, the group says, would reduce Russia's mortality rate by as much as 10 percent.
Russia belongs to a tiny minority of countries whose time is set one hour ahead of their natural time zone in winter and, consequently, two hours ahead during the summer, when the clocks go forward. The others are France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain, Tanzania, Argentina and Chile.
Prior to 1930, Moscow standard time was set at two hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT, the international standard adopted in 1884 that set time zones - centered on Greenwich, near London, and referenced by 24 standard meridians each 15 degrees of longitude apart - with one hour difference between adjacent zones. Under a 1930 decree, Moscow time moved to three hours ahead of GMT, for economic reasons.
According to an official comment to the draft law from the State Duma's Health and Sports Committee, which backs the proposed changes, Russia saves, on average, 1.8 billion kilowatt hours of electricity per year as a result of being in its current standard time. However, the comment goes on to say, citing the 1997 figures as an example, the saving represents less than 0.5 percent of Russia's total energy production.
The draft law was discussed in the State Duma last fall, but made little progress, with the hearings postponed until March. Science Minister Ilya Klebanov said during last fall's session that the government would not support the bill, as it did not believe that changing standard time is a crucial factor in, for example, Russia's mortality rate.
"The government hasn't received objective information about the negative effect of the existing system on human health. The problem shouldn't be exaggerated," Klebanov said, adding that the government's main reason for withholding support for the bill is financial.
"A return to the old standard time would saddle the government with losses, as people would use more electricity," he said.
But now, says St. Petersburg's Committee for the Restoration of Standard Time in Russia, it is time to think about human, rather than economic, benefits.
The committee, which was founded six years ago, believes that returning to Russia's pre-1930 standard time would synchronize standard time and the natural cycle of day and night, which would be more convenient and less distressing to the body's internal clock. The problems are compounded, says the committee, by moving the clocks forward in spring and back in fall.
Committee chairperson Vyacheslav Aprelyev, a St. Petersburg astronomer, said the problem is that, now, people have difficulty adjusting to summer time, as they begin the working day before their bodies wake up. According to his calculations, labor productivity drops by 10 percent after the clocks are put forward in spring, leading to a decrease in gross national product of 1 to 2 percent.
"Put in figures, this is a loss of 76 billion to 152 billion rubles [$2.4 billion to $4.8 billion] per year," he said.
Aprelyev estimates that 70,000 people die prematurely every year in Russia because of the current time regime - which he calls a "weapon of mass destruction" - while millions get sick.
A five-year study published in 1999 by Vyachelav Khasnulin, director of the Healthcare Program in Novosibirsk, Western Siberia, clock changes cause headaches, insomnia, heart defects and minor hormonal disturbances. Khasnulin found the problems were particularly acute after the spring clock change. Fatalities caused by heart attacks jumped by 75 percent in the first five days after the change, while the suicide rate went up by 66 percent.
According to committee member Ida Karmanova, a senior researcher at the laboratory of the evolution of sleep and wakefulness at the Russian Academy of Science's Sechenov Institute of Evolutional Physiology, children suffer most from lack of sleep in the morning.
"There are from four to six phases of human sleep, each of which are equally important and fulfil a particular task, such as, for example, rehabilitating or activating the brain," she said.
Missing morning sleep, Karmanova said, deprives the brain of large chunks of its activation phase, which plays an important role in brain development. In children, she said, this can result in impaired mental development.
Aprelyev, of the Committee for the Resoration of Standard Time in Russia, says he can convince the Duma that the economic argument favors the change.
"I'm working on the possibility of making a short speech in the Duma, which I've done twice before, to tell lawmakers that low productivity due to the discomfort of adapting to time changes surpass the electricity savings by 17 to 34 times," he said.
The Committee for the Restoration of Standard Time in Russia believes pharmaceutical giants operating on Russia will attempt to pressurize the Duma to reject the bill.
"If Russia returns to its old standard time, people will certainly use fewer drugs," said committee member Tatyana Syrchenko, an associate member of the International Academy of Informatization and editor of Anomaliya newspaper. "Look at the aggressive advertising campaigns for various medicines. The media boosts and exaggerates the level of influenza to make people to buy more medicines - just in case"
According to Duma deputy Oksana Dmitriyeva, the whole problem of standard time is "artificial."
"The question is not about standard time, it is about when the working day starts," she said. "In Russia, people usually start at 9 a.m. but, in Western Europe, they start at 8 a.m., or even 7 a.m., so the difference is not that big."
"Maybe getting up that early is something of a problem for some deputies," she said. "But look how seriously the Duma discusses even more absurd issues, such as, for instance, returning the monument to Felix Dzerzhinsky [on Lyubyanskaya Ploshchad in Moscow]."
Health and Sports Committee spokesperson Vladimir Usanov sounded pessimistic when asked about the chances of the new law being passed.
"The hearings were postponed in the hope that the government would change its opinion, but it didn't happen, so the chances for the law to pass are rather modest," he said Thursday. "The Duma rarely votes against the government."
TITLE: Skinheads Arrested Over Racist Attack
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast police department detained three skinheads last week that it says are connected with the fatal beating of a 23-year-old student at the Mechnikov State Medical Academy on Feb 1, Interfax reported on Monday.
The police have initiated a criminal investigation on charges of hooliganism against the suspects.
Atish Kumar Ramgoolam and a group of friends were waiting at a streetcar stop on the academy's campus on their way back from visiting another friend at the Piskaryovsky hostel, when they were approached by a group of about fifteen skinheads screaming racist slurs.
According to the police report the skinheads were on their way back from a concert by Russian punk-rock band Korol i Shut.
Ramgoolam and another of the students were attacked by the group and Ramgoolam died later in hospital from his injuries.
The police said that three St. Petersburg residents, young men aged 17, 18 and 20 years, were detained after investigators concluded that skinheads were linked to a number of crimes committed in the city, including recent cases of street assaults and theft.
Less than a week later, on Feb. 6, another attack on a foreign student was reported by Rosbalt news agency, which said that a group of about ten young people threw bottles at and threatened to kill an Indian student on Nevsky Prospect.
Ramgoolam's death raised an outcry in the foreign-student community, with students meeting with local law-enforcement and academy officials as well as staging a protest on the school's campus.
But, while the arrest of the three suspects may be a step in the right direction for visible-minority students in the city, there is a concern that the arrests may have been made to give the appearance of action on the part of the police.
"If the interior ministry has really detained those who are linked to the crime, then I am extremely happy that they have," said Yury Vdovin the deputy head of the St. Petersburg office of the human-rights group Citizen's Watch, in a telephone interview on Monday. "But I have a sneaking suspicion that that this was done in the same old Soviet style, in order to find scapegoats.
The police report quoted by Rosbalt stated that one of the detainees "had fascist symbols sewn on his clothes and swastika tattoos on his body, which show that he is a member of an unofficial fascist group of young people.
"I really don't like skinheads, but the law doesn't say that somebody can be convicted for wearing certain symbols or tattoos ... . Those who committed the crime should be detained," Vdovin said.
The police could not be reached for comment on Monday.
Shortly after Ramgoolam's murder, the police announced the establishment of two telephone hot-line numbers to take reports about racist incidents in the city. The numbers are 340-1020 and 278-3014.
"Not that many people call. Nobody called today," said a police officer who answered a call to one of the lines on Monday, who refused to give his name.
TITLE: Borodin Set To Run for Moscow Post?
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Pavel Borodin, the chief executive of the Russia-Belarus Union and on old friend of President Vladimir Putin, is considering running for the post of Moscow region governor in December, Interfax reported.
Borodin's spokesperson told Interfax on Sunday that his boss had met with the representatives of several public organizations from the Moscow region, and they promised to add him to their lists of gubernatorial candidates.
Borodin, the former Kremlin property chief under then-President Boris Yeltsin, was convicted and fined by Switzerland last year on money-laundering charges. He faces no charges in Russia.
TITLE: Gil-Robles Backs Chechnya Referendum
AUTHOR: By Sarah Karush
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - A top European human-rights official endorsed a planned referendum in Chechnya as the beginning of a path to peace Saturday, but warned that Moscow must do more to stop military abuses in the region.
Council of Europe Human-Rights Commissioner Alvaro Gil-Robles said at a news conference that the March 23 constitutional referendum would be the beginning of a political resolution to the three-year war between separatists and federal forces.
"I am convinced that the continuation of war and the search for a military solution is absurd," he said. "For me, holding the referendum is a beginning."
At the plebiscite, residents of Chechnya will be asked to approve an internal constitution that will be subordinate to federal law. Approval of the constitution would open the way to presidential and parliamentary elections.
Many human-rights organizations have criticized the idea of the referendum, saying a fair election cannot be held in conditions of war. The Kremlin, which has ruled out negotiations with the rebels, portrays the upcoming vote as the centerpiece of a peace process.
Gil-Robles said Chechen refugees in Ingushetia should be given an opportunity to vote in the referendum.
The commissioner met Saturday with Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov. Earlier in the week, he visited Chechnya and Ingushetia, where he met with Chechen refugees.
Gil-Robles condemned the "atmosphere of impunity" he said reigned among federal forces in Chechnya. He said cases of people disappearing during security sweeps had become more frequent since the deadly hostage-taking raid by Chechen rebels in Moscow in October.
In his meetings with Russian officials, Gil-Robles said he emphasized the need to punish troops who commit crimes against civilians. He said civilian and military prosecutors should intensify cooperation to investigate such cases.
In a discussion of Chechnya on NTV television Friday, Union of Right Forces leader Boris Nemtsov said that if the referendum is held "amid mop-up operations, at gunpoint and with a curfew in effect, nobody in Russia or the rest of the world will trust the results."
Also Friday, the military branch of the Supreme Court received the case of Colonel Yury Budanov, who was found mentally ill and not criminally responsible in the killing of an 18-year-old Chechen woman in 2000, Itar-Tass reported.
Budanov has admitted strangling Elza Kungayeva, saying he suspected her of being a rebel sniper who had killed his comrades and acted in a fit of rage. Kungayeva's family says she was dragged from her home, raped and murdered during a drunken rampage by soldiers.
Her family and state prosecutors appealed the lower court's decision.
TITLE: Numbers Released of Casualties in Chechnya
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ROSTOV-NA-DONU, Southern Russia - In 2002 alone, 4,739 service personnel were killed in Chechnya, 13,108 more wounded and 29 went missing, Itar-Tass quoted military officials as saying Monday, in the first apparent acknowledgment of high casualties in the nearly 3 1/2-year-old conflict.
The casualty figures released to the state agency by the North Caucasus Military District were much higher than previous official data on losses during the war.
In December, Interfax quoted the military command in Chechnya as saying that Russia had lost 4,705 soldiers, officers and police officers in Chechnya since the war started in fall 1999. It said that 13,040 other military and police representatives had been wounded between Oct. 1, 1999, and Dec. 15, 2002, and that 28 others were missing.
Major Igor Kaverin, a spokesperson for the North Caucasus Military District headquarters, denied Monday that it had issued the casualty report to Itar-Tass. He refused to give any casualty figures, saying he was not authorized to do so.
The Defense Ministry issued an official denial of the Itar-Tass report, saying that 4,572 service pesonnel had been killed in Chechnya between the war's start and Dec. 23 and 15,549 more had been wounded.
Despite the denials, Itar-Tass said it stood by its report. The one-time state news agency of the Soviet Union, Itar-Tass has maintained a close relationship with the government.
Human-rights groups have long accused the military of downplaying its losses in the war - Russia's second in Chechnya in a decade. Casualty figures are tallied through different government structures - with the Defense and Interior ministries keeping separate counts of their own troops, for example - and are impossible to verify independently.
The casualty reports issued by the government throughout the war have often been contradictory, apparently reflecting official attempts to conceal losses in order to prove that the rebels have been defeated. But despite official claims that the war is largely over, federal troops and pro-Moscow Chechen police continue to suffer daily losses in rebel ambushes and mine explosions.
The Soldiers' Mothers Committee, basing its information on information from wounded troops and soldiers' relatives, estimates that about 11,000 service personnel have been killed and more than 30,000 wounded since the war's start, said its chief, Valentina Melnikova. In the previous, 1994-96 conflict, 14,000 died, according to the group's estimate - well over twice the official toll of 5,500 dead and 700 missing.
According to those unofficial figures, the shorter Chechen wars have been far more deadly for federal forces than the Soviet war in Afghanistan, in which an estimated 13,000 Soviet personnel were killed and 35,000 wounded over close to a decade of combat.
Melnikova dismissed earlier government casualty reports as "nonsense" and said that the figures carried by the Itar-Tass on Monday appeared to be genuine.
"The North Caucasus Military District collects all the information on casualties in Chechnya because it's in charge of paying insurance premiums to the victims' families," Melnikova said in a telephone interview Monday. "They might have run into funding problems and decided to make the information on casualties public."
TITLE: Yastrzhembsky Says No to Negotiations With Maskhadov
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - The Kremlin will not negotiate with Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov through a new emissary who is calling for negotiations with Moscow, President Vladimir Putin's chief spokesperson on Chechnya said Friday.
Putin aide Sergei Yastrzhembsky spoke a day after ethnic Chechen politician Salambek Maigov announced he has been named as Maskhadov's envoy in Russia and called for contacts aimed at ending the conflict.
"It is possible to talk to this person [Maigov] as an individual, not as a representative of Maskhadov. Maskhadov has lost the ability to appoint anyone because, right now, he does not represent anyone but himself," Yastrzhembsky was quoted by Interfax as saying.
"You can't represent what doesn't exist. You can't represent a soap bubble," he said.
Maigov's initiative came despite repeated statements from Russian officials that they will not negotiate with Maskhadov, who was elected president of Chechnya in 1997. Russian officials call him a terrorist and blame for the October theater raid in Moscow.
Yastrzhembsky suggested Maskhadov, whose control over separatists has waned, fears the referendum and elections that are to follow will further decrease his clout.
"Maskhadov is running wild trying to remind people of himself and to influence this process in some way. I don't think he can do that," he said.
q
The Supreme Court on Friday ruled that 15 Islamic organizations, including two tied with Chechen rebel leaders, are terrorist groups, and Yastrzhembsky expressed hope that the United States would soon similarly brand several groups operating in and around Chechnya.
The two Chechnya-related groups are the Unified Forces of Caucasian Mujaheddin of warlord Shamil Basayev and the Congress of the Peoples of Ichkeria and Dagestan of Movladi Udugov, a publicist for the separatist cause. The list also includes al-Qaida and the Taliban and radical parties based in Lebanon, Egypt, Pakistan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
The Supreme Court decision makes the groups' activities on Russian territory illegal, and gives the authorities a legal basis to block their finances and their members' movements.
Yastrzhembsky said the decision was vital because many European countries wanted to see the country where the groups are operating recognize them as terrorist before taking similar action. "After that, we can demand that our [foreign] partners add the movements operating in Chechnya to their lists," he was quoted by Interfax as saying.
TITLE: Russia Should Play Moderator's Role
AUTHOR: By Natalia Yefimova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - While there is little Russia can do to stop U.S. military action against Iraq, Moscow should position itself as a "responsible partner," pushing Washington to abide by international law and avoiding rash moves that could jeopardize Russian interests in a post-war Iraq, a group of experts said Monday.
There is no need to view the United States as a potential enemy, Iosif Diskin of the Institute of Socioeconomic Problems told a round table.
"It is not in Russia's interests to pursue a confrontational strategy in its relations with America. We must not haggle; we must seek a balance of interests based on international law," Diskin said.
Russia's main diplomatic goal has been upholding the authority of the UN Security Council, one of the few international institutions where Moscow wields considerable influence.
If Washington acts unilaterally, "the United Nations will effectively be trampled to bits," Federation Council Senator Anatoly Korobeinkov warned.
Another important aim for Russia is to bolster the close ties it has established with Western leaders since the 2001 terrorist attacks and to use these relations to advance its national interests in trade and international affairs, political analyst Sergei Markov said.
Most of the speakers agreed that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein poses an international security threat. But they felt this did not justify, in Markov's words, Washington's "behaving like a cowboy in a saloon" and could set a dangerous precedent.
"Today they get rid of Saddam, tomorrow [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Il. It is a flagrant violation of international law," said Fyodor Ladygin, who headed the Foreign Intelligence Service from 1992 to 1997.
If the United States firmly decides to oust Hussein, it will do so, but what's important is the aftermath, State Duma Deputy Alexei Arbatov said. Arbatov pointed out that restoring and policing Iraq in the post-war phase is when Washington will need most help from its allies.
Meanwhile, a delegation of several dozen scholars, journalists and lawmakers, including Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, arrived in Iraq on Monday for a three-day visit meant to highlight Moscow's opposition to military action, Interfax reported.
TITLE: Dudov Wins Runoff For Magadan Post
AUTHOR: By Catherine Belton
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Nikolai Dudov, a former deputy to slain Magadan Governor Valentin Tsvetkov, came from behind to beat Magadan Mayor Nikolai Karpenko in a runoff Sunday for the governor's post.
Preliminary results showed that Dudov, who replaced Tsvetkov as acting governor after his death in October, took 50.4 percent of the vote, ahead of Karpenko with 42.4 percent, said a spokesperson for the regional election commission. Voter turnout was 52 percent, and 6.2 percent voted against all candidates, she said.
Official results are to be announced Wednesday, and Dudov is expected to be inaugurated March 1.
Dudov's victory came as a surprising turnaround. He had dropped behind Karpenko in the first round with just 26 percent of the vote compared to Karpenko's 37.5 percent.
A majority of the region's political elite - including Tsvetkov's widow and leading private businesspeople - had publicly united behind Karpenko. He also appeared to have the nod of the Kremlin, with Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu and pro-Kremlin Unity faction leader Vladimir Pekhtin openly voicing their support.
But analysts said Dudov's surge to victory meant members of Tsvetkov's former administration had joined forces behind him to protect their regional business empire in fish, gold and alcohol.
In a phone interview following the results Sunday, Dudov said he would not change the economic course charted by Tsvetkov, who angered local businesspeople by plowing millions of dollars of regional funds into that empire of state-owned companies run by crony officials and by pressuring companies outside of his control.
Dudov said, however, that he would attempt to level the playing field.
Alexander Sechkin, who came fourth in the first round of voting two weeks ago, said Sunday that Dudov appeared to have won the backing of Vladimir Potanin's Interros, which has set its sights on the Natalkinskoye gold field.
The field is up for privatization this year.
Dudov said he had no contacts with anyone from Interros.
Sechkin also said Karpenko's bid may have failed because voters balked at his attempts to pressure them into backing him with threats to cut off fuel supplies.
"The protest vote in Magadan is normally very large," said Nikolai Petrov, head of the Center for Political and Geographical Research think tank.
TITLE: Tax Police To Use Lie Detectors
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Hot on the heels of a controversial Tax Police instruction permitting preventative action against people it considers likely to evade taxes, Tax Police first deputy director Sergei Verevkin-Rakhalsky has put his signature on regulations allowing lie detectors to be used on suspects.
Under new instruction No. 426, a copy of which was obtained by The St. Petersburg Times, those suspected of committing tax crimes or deemed to be intending to commit them can be asked to undergo "questioning in the form of special physiological analysis."
While a suspect must give their written permission for the test - and children aged 14 to 18 will only be tested with the written permission of their parents - a refusal could make them suspects by default and thus open to other forms of preventative action set out in the previous instruction, No. 525. That instruction, which was signed off at the end of last month, allows the Tax Police to contact people it thinks might be considering evading taxes and encourage family members to exert a positive influence over them.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Mordovia Vote
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Mordovian President Nikolai Merkushin won re-election in a vote held in the Volga River republic over the weekend, Interfax reported Monday, citing local election officials.
Merkushin, 52, collected more than 87 percent of the poll, finishing far ahead his four rivals in the Sunday election, Interfax said. Voter turnout was 81.5 percent, and 2.2 percent of voters cast ballots against all of the candidates.
Merkushin has headed Mordovia since 1995.
Militants in Pankisi
TBILISI, Georgia (AP) - Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze said Monday that 10 to 20 militants remained in the Pankisi Gorge on the border with Chechnya.
"They're being monitored," Shevardnadze said at his weekly news conference. "They are not committing any crimes now."
Last year, the gorge became a focus of tension between Georgia and Russia, which accused Tbilisi of allowing Chechen rebels to shelter there. Georgia denied the charges and refused to let Moscow conduct a military operation in the gorge.
Instead, Georgia accepted anti-terrorism training for its military from the United States, which said fighters connected to the al-Qaida terrorist network were also in the gorge.
Shevardnadze said that this year should be a turning point for the border region, with security forces rebuffing illegal attempts to cross from both sides. He voiced hope that the thousands of Chechen refugees who have taken refuge in the Pankisi Gorge would want to return home.
NTV Appointment
MOSCOW (SPT) - Former NTV journalist Alexander Gerasimov, who most recently ran news and current affairs programming at second-tier RenTV television, has been appointed NTV's first deputy general director for news, NTV said Monday.
Gerasimov, who worked at NTV as both commentator and administrator from 1993 to 2000, is perhaps best known as the anchor of midnight news programs at NTV in 1995 and 1996 and at RenTV from October 2001.
Gerasimov's appointment comes during a bitter conflict between NTV journalists and the channel's management. Several NTV journalists had been offered the post and turned it down, the Kommersant newspaper reported.
Actor Meets Bear
ROSTOV-NA-DONU, Southern Russia (AP) - When a man encounters a bear in Russia, the result can be tragic for one of the two - but U.S. actor Eric Roberts is the star of a man-meets-bear story with a happy ending, zoo officials said Friday.
With Roberts' help, a brown bear named Stepan has traded a life swilling beer in a tiny cage for a new home with a water pool, said Alexander Lipkovich, spokesperson for the Rostov-on-Don zoo.
Stepan's story began last fall, when Roberts and his wife, Eliza, came to the Black Sea resort of Sochi for a film festival and noticed the bear in a cramped cage in a park where patrons of a nearby restaurant often fed him beer, Lipkovich said.
The couple wanted to take the bear to the United States, but when that didn't work out, Eliza Roberts called animal-rights activist Kim Basinger, and Stepan's transfer to the zoo was arranged, Lipkovich said.
The move was paid for by Channel One television and a U.S.-based animal rights group, he said.
TITLE: Putin: Gazprom Too Powerful for Breakup
AUTHOR: By Catherine Belton
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin squashed market hopes of quick reforms at Gazprom on Friday, saying that the government opposes plans to break up the gas giant.
"The state does not support any plans to split or break up Gazprom," Putin said at a reception held to celebrate the monopoly's 10th anniversary.
This was Putin's strongest statement yet against Gazprom reform. Under CEO Alexei Miller, Gazprom has strongly fought Economic Development and Trade Ministry plans to split off its production units from its pipeline network in a bid to increase efficiency, even though daughter companies would remain 100-percent Gazprom-owned.
Miller has argued that such a shake-up would endanger Russia's gas supplies.
"Gazprom, as a strategically important company, should be kept, and has been kept, as a single organism," Putin said.
"Gazprom is a powerful political and economic lever of influence over the rest of the world," he was quoted by Prime-Tass as saying. "Gazprom is light and heat in the homes of the population. It is the activity of enterprises."
"Taking this into account, the state has been very careful about reforming the gas sector. We will continue to be careful in the future," he said.
Analysts said that Putin was being pragmatic ahead of next year's presidential elections. An overhaul of the gas sector could lead to an unpopular surge in gas prices. But they also said that the government would eventually have to allow hungry oil giants access to Gazprom's pipeline, since its gas production alone would not meet growing demand abroad and at home.
Yukos, TNK, LUKoil and Surgutneftegas have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in gas refineries and fields in hopes of gaining part of the market as debt-laden Gazprom struggles to meet mounting demand.
Stephen O'Sullivan, head of research at United Financial Group, said that holding out the promise of future gas-pipeline access was a good way to keep powerful oligarchs in Putin's camp through the elections. "This is a useful bargaining chip for Putin," he said.
Gazprom has acknowledged that it can keep production at 530 billion cubic meters per year only for the next decade. Brunwsick UBS Warburg estimates that will mean a shortfall of 50 to 70 bcm by 2007 or 2008 for export and domestic needs.
At an energy-strategy meeting Friday, Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov said that the lack of gas-market competition could "put the brakes on economic growth," Interfax reported.
The government is planning to create a gas exchange this year where independent producers, including oil companies, will be able to sell gas domestically at market prices.
Though siding with management against restructuring, Putin nonetheless rebuked the company for its opacity.
"The opaqueness of Gazprom's [financial accounts] could have a serious impact on attracting investment into the sector," Interfax quoted him as saying.
Under former CEO Rem Vyakhirev, the company became a byword for financial scams, under which, independent board director Boris Fyodorov claims, up to $1 billion in revenues were siphoned off annually into crony companies.
But at the 10th anniversary celebrations, Putin had high praise for Vyakhirev, whom he sacked in May 2001 as well as for Viktor Chernomyrdin, the former prime minister who founded Gazprom.
Putin thanked them for "maintaining the sector, for preserving its potential for maintaining it as the foundation of the Russian economy."
TITLE: British Firm Opens New Red-Tape Warehouse
AUTHOR: By Angelina Davydova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A British company, OSG Records Management, has set up shop in St. Petersburg to offer a novel service, although some potential clients maintain that, for the time being, there is little demand for document-storage facilities.
The St. Petersburg OSG branch opened this month, but the company has already been operating in Moscow for five years, with total investment in Russia amounting to $5 million, said Tim Slesinger, a company director for OSG. Branch General Manger Anatoly Lytkin said that the company has acquired and fitted out a 400-square-meter facility, complete with fire-proof vaults, on Prospect Marshala Govorova, complete with fire-proof vaults.
"In St. Petersburg, we don't have any competitors, and there're no firms providing records management," said Slesinger. By comparison, Moscow already has five companies that offer similar storage services.
Lytkin said that the current need for such facilities is largely historic - in the Soviet era, state-owned enterprises and organizations had access to state archives but, now, only companies with state shareholders are permitted to store their documents in these archives.
Slesinger said that new legislation will only further develop the demand for additional storage space. "We're predicting that the volume of documents in storage will increase immensely when third-party auto insurance becomes obligatory in July 2003," he said.
"We don't just store the documents - we also manage the whole process of archive storage. We know how long each document should be kept - personnel records have to be held for 75 years, certain insurance papers forever and most financial documentation has to be kept for three to seven years - and we regularly inform the owners of the expire dates," Shlesinger said.
Tatiana Zhilkova, supervisor at KPMG St. Petersburg's tax and legal department, was skeptical about the new services. "I haven't heard of anyone providing such services here, but, then again, I haven't heard of there being any great need for off-site document storage," she said.
"Large enterprises here have their own spaces for storing documents and reports, so maybe this service will be able to attract medium-sized and small businesses. There might be a greater need for record management in a few years' time," Zhilkova said.
"Such a service will only be in demand in three years' time," said Tatiana Bulankina, spokesperson for the St. Petersburg branch of RESO, an insurance company.
OSG Records Management has 11 offices dealing with 3,000 clients and more than 4 million cubic meters of documents worldwide. 85 percent of the storage is occupied by paper documents, with the remaining 15 percent held in magnetic media-storage and computers.
TITLE: Landmark Oil Deal Threatened by Minority Shareholders
AUTHOR: By Catherine Belton
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Storm clouds are gathering over BP's landmark $6.75-billion deal with the Tyumen Oil Co., as once-burned minority investors dig up old allegations of extortion, cutthroat-takeover tactics and financial fraud being used to create TNK and redirect them at its new global partner BP.
Minority investors in Sidanco, the Siberian oil firm that is going to be folded into BP and TNK's new company, are threatening to sue BP on charges of being party to a transfer-pricing scheme to siphon off up to $2.5 billion in revenues via the 10-percent stake that BP has owned in Sidanco since 1997, the Financial Times reported Monday.
Lawyers for the claimants, Nicholson Graham & Jones, refused to comment further on these threats pending the outcome of a meeting late Monday.
The FT reported that the claimants are Indian Ocean Petroleum Services, based in the Seychelles, and Astian Group, based in the British Virgin Islands. Astian Group has also accused Yukos of asset stripping at its Angarsk Refinery, where it was a minority shareholder. It lost its legal case.
The claimants said that Sidanco had funneled profits away from minority shareholders in daughter companies by buying oil at less than market prices, the FT reported.
A BP spokesperson said Monday that he was confident that Sidanco management had purchased the oil at market prices.
These fresh threats of litigation come hard on the heels of another legal claim lodged by Norex, a Canadian company that has filed a racketeering suit against TNK in New York on extortion charges. Norex says that it was illegally forced out of its 60-percent stake in Yugraneft, now a key TNK subsidiary, after TNK sent in machine gun-toting guards to take over the production facility in 2001.
Just one day after the BP-TNK deal was announced, Norex flooded the media with statements condemning the deal as "the result of numerous corrupt, illegal and predatory maneuvers," and said that it was going to subpoena BP for the information it had gathered against TNK shareholders in its own fight against the Russian company in 2000.
Norex president Phil Murray said in a telephone interview Monday that TNK had been put together in a "chain of illegal, rigged bankruptcy proceedings.
"Now these assets, which have been taken from the Russian people, are held offshore through TNK International based in the British Virgin Islands and, under the BP-TNK deal, not one penny of the $6.75 billion BP is paying for its share in the joint venture is going to end up in Russia," he said.
As a minority investor in Sidanco, BP was also burned badly enough to write off $200 million of its $471-million investment in the oil firm, after TNK moved in to take over key subsidiary Chernogorneft.
Analysts said that BP Chief Executive John Browne's ambitions for BP to become the world's No. 1 oil producer have outweighed his concerns about the risks he knows he is taking by joining forces with a former foe in a country still dominated by ruthless business dealings and often-rigged court proceedings."
A key architect of the merger deal, Alfa Bank CEO Alexander Knaster, said in a conference call Monday that TNK and Sidanco could achieve double-digit growth in the next few years. Last year, production at TNK soared 9 percent.
Under the tie-up, BP will boost its reserve base by 30 percent and increase output by an initial 16 percent over 2002, according to BP.
BP's head of external affairs, Peter Henshaw, said Monday that Russia has made vast progress in improving the investment climate in recent years. "This is Russia. But we are confident Russia is moving in the right direction," he said. "Somebody had to make the first move, and I'm glad it's BP."
BP Group Vice President Robert Dudley said in a recent interview that BP was well aware that there remains a risk in doing business in Russia. But he cited improvements in corporate governance at Russian oil companies, including TNK, in recent years as a reason why BP felt safer wading in now.
TITLE: Megafon Launches Services in Chechnya
AUTHOR: By Larisa Naumenko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Megafon on Saturday will become the first cellular operator to launch services in Chechnya, a move the company hopes will help end hostilities in a war-torn region virtually devoid of telecommunications infrastructure.
"I hope that this brings more peace there and makes life better," Andrei Krainik, general director of Mobikom Kavkaz, Megafon's subsidiary in southern Russia, said Thursday. "This will help Chechens understand that Russia can do something good for them."
Organizations and businesses will need to get permission from the Federal Security Service to use Megafon's services, because of a regulation limiting the use of cellular communications in the region in an effort to curb rebel activities.
Mobikom Kavkaz, which will operate the network, estimates that only 700 people will sign up for the services, mostly staff of the local administration and the local offices of the federal government.
The company will not open an office in Chechnya at first, instead relying on Chechen Cellular Network, a subsidiary of local fixed-line provider Chechenelektrosvyaz, to sell its services.
Chechen Cellular had its own nondigital, NMT-450 network in the early 1990s, but it was destroyed over the course of the two Chechen wars.
Megafon's main nationwide competitors, Mobile TeleSystems and Vimpelcom, are in no hurry to enter the Chechen market. MTS does not have a license for the region, while Vimpelcom said that it is waiting for the political situation to stabilize.
Vimpelcom's license for Chechnya obliges the operator to launch a network in the region no later than the end of 2003, said Artyom Minayev, a spokesperson for the operator. But the government resolution limiting cellular communications allows Vimpelcom to hold on to the license longer.
"We have a letter from the Communications Ministry that permits us to prolong the license we have for Chechnya, even if we don't launch there by 2003," he said.
A monopoly in Chechnya, combined with higher-than-average tariffs, gives Megafon a good base to start from, said Vyacheslav Nikolayev, an analyst at Trust and Investment Bank.
"Chechnya is a region where there will be demand for cellular communications," he said. "Megafon will be able to skim the cream off the market there."
Mobikom Kavkaz expects the high prices to bring big average revenues of $33 to $34 per user per month. The company is charging a $20 initial fee, $20 monthly fee and per-minute rates starting from $0.20.
Tariffs are more expensive, because Mobikom Kavkaz rents satellite channels in the mountainous south rather than placing base stations there. The company has built 17 base stations covering up to 70 percent of Chechnya.
TITLE: Transneft Struggling To Increase Capacity
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The government is fully on board for making Primorsk the country's biggest crude-oil port, the head of national pipeline monopoly Transneft said Friday.
Semyon Vainshtok said that Transneft plans to boost Primorsk's oil throughput from the current 12 million metric tons per year, or 240,000 barrels per day, to 42 million tons by 2005.
From there, Transneft could raise throughput to 62 million tons, or 1.2 million bpd. These increases would be achieved by expanding the capacity of the Baltic Pipeline System, which channels oil to the port.
"All obstacles have been removed, and we have confirmation that our project has been approved at the highest level," Vainshtok told reporters at an annual Energy Ministry meeting.
Hiking pipeline-export capacity has become a hot topic between oil majors and the government. Companies' soaring production is already straining the country's 3.5-million-bpd export capacity, raising the potential economic impact of factors like bad weather.
Up to this point, domestic and export demand has kept pace with supply. But domestic demand is flat, meaning that, as companies raise production over current levels, they will become increasingly desperate to get their oil to foreign markets.
Vainshtok said that, by 2012, Russia will pump 11.5 million bpd.
It was unclear Friday whether the government's apparent fondness for Transneft's proposal to increase BPS capacity would affect the debate over the future of privately owned pipelines. To overcome the looming problem of export-capacity deficiency, oil majors have intensively lobbied for the right to build their own pipelines.
Securing access to pipeline-export routes took on a sense of urgency last month, after Transneft refused a shipment of 500,000 tons of oil from Surgutneftegaz. Oil majors bewailed the news as the first sign of a domestic and export glut, although government sources said that it was merely the result of paperwork confusion.
Last year, oil companies, led by LUKoil, proposed building a pipeline stretching from western Siberia to Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula.
Yukos chairperson Mikhail Khodorkovsky on Friday repeated the offer to take the responsibility for building pipelines off the government's hands. "If you don't have the money to build pipelines, let us do it," he said.
The cabinet, meanwhile, has shown no willingness to relinquish control over the country's export routes.
"Russia's pipeline system should remain under state control, but the state should work out an automatic system for oil companies to access the pipes," Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov said, speaking at the same meeting. "There should be an exact formula," he said.
Khodorkovsky warned that, if the state continues to ignore the magnitude of the problem, it could cost the country $7 billion over the next couple of years in lost production and export growth. "Right now, it comes to $10 million per day. If you want to wait another month, that adds up to $300 million," he said.
TITLE: Former Governor Dumped as Head of Fisheries Ministry
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov on Friday suspended the compromised head of the State Fisheries Committee, Yevgeny Nazdratenko, whose battles with Far Eastern governors over the distribution of quotas has paralyzed the fishing industry there.
Nazdratenko, the former governor of Primorye, opposed the quota allocations put forward by his successor in Primorye, Sergei Darkin, and also by the administration of Magadan, the government information department said.
With 2003 quotas still awaiting federal approval, fishing companies have been unable to send their boats out to sea. Hundreds of fishermen protested last week in Primorye.
Kasyanov, who announced Nazdratenko's suspension at a meeting of Energy Ministry officials on Friday, said that he had been receiving "several telegrams a day" from unhappy regional officials.
The federal government allocated 2003 fishing quotas for each of Russia's coastal regions in December. The Primorye and Magadan administrations, as was their right, divided up the quotas among fishing companies in their regions and submitted their plans to the State Fisheries Committee for approval.
The plans, however, did not suit Nazdratenko, who insisted that quotas be cut for some companies and increased for others, Kasyanov said.
The prime minister appointed Nazdratenko's first deputy, Yury Moskaltsov, to run the State Fisheries Committee, which he said has until Tuesday to redistribute quotas in the Far East in "accordance with the existing procedures and wishes of the regional authorities," Interfax reported.
Yelena Tekanova, a spokesperson for the State Fisheries Committee, said thhat Nazdratenko strongly objected only to the quota plan submitted by Primorye.
"The plan provided for some companies that had only two vessels or so to get the lion's share, while other companies, which had more than 20 vessels, would have got only a fraction of a percent of the quota," Tekanova said in a telephone interview Friday.
Nazdratenko asked Darkin's administration to submit a new plan by Feb. 15, she said.
With the strike in Primorye getting national television coverage, the committee was "working in a very tense environment," Tekanova said. Even so, Nazdratenko's suspension came as a "complete surprise" for his staff, she said.
Nazdratenko left Moscow on Friday to celebrate his 54th birthday and could not be reached for comment, said another spokesperson for his committee, Alexander Shcherbatov.
Moskaltsov, who is taking over the committee, was visiting the Baltic Sea port of Kaliningrad on Friday, the spokesman said.
It remains to be seen whether Nazdratenko's suspension will be made permanent.
Nazdratenko, who had governed Primorye for seven years, abruptly resigned in early February 2001 after talking by telephone with President Vladimir Putin. Later that month, he was given the fisheries post, an appointment that was widely criticized.
The Kremlin wanted Nazdratenko out of Primorye, which, during his time in office, had seen crippling energy crises, garbage strikes and numerous scandals. There was much speculation at the time that he was awarded the fisheries post in return for his agreement not to run in Primorye's gubernatorial elections in May 2001.
Boris Reznik, a member of the State Duma's corruption committee and a former Far East correspondent for Izvestia, said Friday that he hoped Nazdratenko's suspension would allow the federal government at least to chip away at the corruption in the fishing industry.
"I hope this suspension becomes permanent," said Reznik, who has written numerous investigative articles about alleged corruption in the fishing industry that point the finger at Nazdratenko.
Reznik said that the Prosecutor General's Office is investigating a series of corruption cases that target the "entire leadership" of the State Fisheries Committee. He would not elaborate, other than to say that the cases are not related to a criminal case against two senior fisheries officials who are suspected of stealing about 3,000 tons of shellfish.
Deputy Prosecutor General Vladimir Kolesnikov said in November that Leonid Kholod, a deputy head of the State Fisheries Committee, and Alexander Rogatnykh, chief of a Magadan-based state fishing research institute, are being investigated for alleged abuse of power that could have robbed the state of 100 million rubles ($3.1 million) through illegal fishing for crab and other shellfish under the guise of scientific research.
Prosecutor General's Office spokesperson Natalya Veshnyakova, reached Friday by telephone, refused to comment immediately on whether her office is investigating any cases against the leadership of the State Fisheries Committee. She noted that it is the Moscow city prosecutor's office that is investigating Kholod and Rogatnykh. Svetlana Petrenko, spokesperson for the city prosecutor's office, confirmed that the investigation is under way, but would not elaborate.
Fishing is also big business in Magadan, whose governor , Valentin Tsvetkov, was gunned down in Moscow in October. Tsvetkov had concentrated control over the region's gold, silver and fish in his administration's hands. His deputy, Nikolai Dudov, who took over as acting governor, won election to the post Sunday.
TITLE: Ilyushin-86 Plane Escapes Safety Ban
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Aviation officials decided Friday not to ground the widely used Il-86 passenger jet after its certification was suspended pending completion of a probe into a July crash that killed 14 crew members.
At a meeting on the issue, authorities "came to the unanimous opinion" that measures taken by the plane's manufacturer "provide the appropriate level of flying security," said First Deputy Transport Minister Alexander Neradko, head of the State Civil Aviation Service.
"And, taking into account the undertaken measures, the Il-86 plane remains one of the safest planes in civil aviation," he said on TVS television.
He did not detail the measures taken by the manufacturer, Ilyushin, but said that they "are included in a supplement to the operation manual," suggesting the possibility that no physical changes to the plane will be required.
The meeting came a day after Rudolf Teimurazov, head of the crash-investigation section of the Interstate Aviation Committee, said that the certification was suspended until an investigation into the July 28 crash at the Sheremetyevo Airport is complete. The Il-86 that crashed was en route to St. Petersburg with only crew aboard when it crashed shortly after takeoff. Two crew members survived.
The suspension by the committee, which links former Soviet republics in the Commonwealth of Independent States, left it up to civil aviation authorities in each country where the Il-86 is used to decide whether to allow further flights.
TITLE: Duma Finally Gives UES Revamp Green Light
AUTHOR: By Alla Startseva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - It took years, but lawmakers finally gave the government what it wanted Friday, approving by an unexpectedly comfortable margin the key legal components required to begin reconstructing the world's largest power company.
The State Duma passed in the key second reading a total of six bills that pave the way for industry-wide modernization, the creation of a free market for electricity and the breakup of Unified Energy Systems' sprawling monopoly.
"Russia is now on the list of countries that have managed to create a [free] market in the power sector," Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref told reporters after 260 deputies voted in favor of the first and main bill, the "Law on Electricity," which was debated for several hours.
"Two-hundred and sixty votes - that is more than we expected," Gref said.
Before President Vladimir Putin can sign the bills into law, the bills must pass a third reading, considered a formality, and the Federation Council, which is expected to resist only the bill that calls for an end to the price-setting regional energy commissions.
The reform package had been delayed several times since October, as lawmakers weighed the costs of the potentially politically explosive reform package, and jockeyed for position ahead of upcoming elections.
Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov warned deputies Friday that a failure to pass the bills would "inevitably lead to a crisis in the sector."
However, despite Putin's public support for the legislation and Kasyanov's assurance that the government - and not the deputies - would take full responsibility for the reform, several deputies in pro-Kremlin centrist factions were still undecided early Friday.
Fatherland-All Russia, for example, threatened to sink the bills if the government failed to curb rises in electricity prices, which have jumped 53 percent in some regions in the last month alone.
Although the federal budget calls for a 14-percent cap on electricity tariff hikes, regional energy commissions have free rein to set their own rates. Fatherland-All Russia demanded - and got - legal changes that will put the federal government fully in charge of tariff hikes.
"The government's flexible position in depriving the regional energy commission's absolute influence on tariff increases predetermined the success of the vote," said Fatherland-All Russia leader Vyacheslav Volodin.
Gref said that Kasyanov had already ordered the Economic Development and Trade Ministry to analyze and present concrete proposals by Tuesday on how to prevent excessive tariff hikes in the regions.
"Now, the government will be in charge of tariffs and bear full responsibility for prices," Volodin said.
"Tariffs must be brought under control," Gref agreed.
Andrei Sharonov, Gref's deputy and the government's pointman on the UES revamp, said that the third reading would likely be scheduled for Friday.
The overhaul of UES is one of the most complicated reforms Russia has ever tried to tackle, and delays have been due not only to the unprecedented complexity of the revamp, but also because it involves the vested interests of nearly every major economic player in the country.
Ahead of Friday's vote, for example, "mystery buyers" representing powerful financial-industrial group MDM and, reportedly, Base Element amassed as much as 17 percent of UES' stock in an apparent effort to influence the restructuring.
The run-up to Friday's vote also saw a high-profile assault on controversial UES CEO Anatoly Chubais by Putin's top economic adviser, Andrei Illarionov, who more than once called for Chubais to be sacked.
Added to the mix were several influential minority shareholders, including foreign investors, who, collectively, control some 10 percent of UES. Some had decried earlier versions of the UES bills, based mainly on Chubais' plan for the sector, as a blatant attempt to allow assets to be sold for a song, similar to the loans-for-shares scandal Chubais orchestrated as privatization tsar in the mid-1990s.
On top of it all were the political interests of regional governors keen to keep their hands on a major lever of power.
With so many hurdles in the way of avoiding a collapse of the industry, Putin made Kasyanov personally responsible for pushing the bills through the Duma after lawmakers refused to vote on them in December.
The support of the key centrist factions was later assured after Kasyanov ordered new amendments to the bills.
The amended package approved Friday gives the government the power to make all major decisions, including when and where liberalization will take place. The government will also regulate all volumes and prices for electricity sold under long-term contracts and dictate the volume sold on the free market for an unspecified transitional period.
Gref said Friday that prices for domestic consumers will be regulated by the government until 2008 - which would be the end of Putin's second term in office - to avoid any potential social unrest.
In fact, the bills passed Friday have been transformed to such a degree that Chubais can no longer be considered the author of the reform.
UES was less than elated over the new restructuring blueprint.
"I can't say that this is a celebration for us," said deputy CEO Vyacheslav Sinyugin.
"However, it is good that there is some definition on the future of the industry," he said.
Critics say that the plan does nothing to encourage efficiency in the sector, nor does it set out exactly when and how it will be liberalized.
Bill Browder, chief executive of Hermitage Capital Management and a UES minority shareholder, said that the concept for pro-rata distribution of UES shares after the giant is broken up should calm fears of asset stripping and let investors get down to the more important business of lobbying for tariff reforms.
The bad part is that there is no clear timetable for when the government stops, and the market starts, to set prices.
The debate on UES has also created strange bedfellows.
Members of the Communist and Yabloko parties, normally on opposite ends of the political spectrum, were united in opposition to the government's plan - although their styles of dissent were starkly different.
Members of both parties protested against the bills in front of the State Duma early Friday, the Communists waving their red flag and Yabloko members wearing Chubais-inspired red wigs.
Meanwhile, across the street, draped over the Hotel Moskva, hung a huge banner featuring Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov and his deputy Vasily Shandybin side by side with Fredrich Engels, Karl Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Boris Berezovsky.
The banner, the brainchild of the Putin youth movement Moving Together, was ostensibly a birthday greeting in honor of the Communist party's 10th anniversary, but Zyuganov demanded in the Duma that it be taken down before the UES vote began.
The banner stayed.
TITLE: Wheels of Industry Grinding to a Halt
AUTHOR: By Alex Nicholson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: To hear manufacturers tell it, the economy is in crisis and recovery is nowhere in sight.
After 49 consecutive months of production growth, the manufacturing sector contracted in January for the first time since the economy was temporarily shellshocked from the debt default and steep ruble devaluation of 1998, according to the latest seasonally adjusted Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) conducted by Moscow Narodny Bank.
"It's the first time in four years that we've actually seen an index below 50," said MNB economist Paul Timmons.
In the single-figure snapshot of manufacturing conditions, any figure below the no-change level of 50 signals shrinking output in the sector.
"Widespread uncertainty over the strength of underlying demand for manufacturing goods was mentioned by a number of panel members for the slowdown in output growth," MNB said in its monthly survey for January, released last week.
Economists say that the benchmark index proves what many observers have been warning about for months - high world oil prices may be continuing to put a shine on the country's headline economic figures, but the benefits to the bulk of Russian industry afforded by the 1998 ruble devaluation are over.
As during the banner economic year of 1997, consumers with relatively high disposable incomes are increasingly choosing imported goods over domestic products, forcing the majority of manufacturers - already reeling from rising costs and thirsty for investment - to scramble for survival.
"Over the past year, particularly, there has been a sense, a growing sense, that everything is OK in the economy," said Chris Weafer, chief strategist at Alfa Bank. "It is absolutely wrong that people have become so complacent ... The economy is still very fragile and vulnerable to something like an oil-price shock."
"The strength that we see at the top line clearly has not extended across the whole economy, and the [PMI] survey illustrates this very starkly," he said.
THE SOVIET SANDWICH
Anton Strutchenevsky, an economist at Troika Dialog, says that the government needs to overhaul its concept of the economy dramatically if it is to meet its ambitious annual growth targets of 6 percent to 8 percent in the coming years.
"It is impossible to live according to the model of economic growth that was in place in 2002, when growth came not from investment but mostly from the oil sector, which guaranteed an influx of currency into the country that was then redistributed through the system of budget finance," Strutchenevsky said.
"The model that exists now is limited by the world demand for oil products, and can support no more than a slowing growth rate," he said.
Falling export orders, shaky domestic demand and climbing input costs have managers jittery and are symptomatic of an unhealthy economic model that some economists have dubbed the "Soviet sandwich."
In this Epicurean model of capitalism, the bread of the sandwich is far from stale, and was chiefly responsible for industry's 3.7-percent output growth last year. The top slice is the raw materials companies that have restructured, consolidated and invested heavily on a wave of oil revenues. The bottom slice is the newer industries - food processing, retail and construction - that are free of the Soviet heritage of scattered structure, confused management and antiquated equipment.
Renaissance Capital strategist Roland Nash described the filling: "In the middle is the icky processed pink salami of industry struggling with its Soviet legacy - automobiles, aeronauticals, heavy-machinery defense, textiles, etc. Unable to obtain capital and with market-challenged management, they ramped up production behind the protective barrier of an artificially cheap ruble and are now cutting output as their competitiveness is squeezed."
Nash said that heavy machinery output grew 53 percent between 1999 and 2001, but just 2 percent last year, while textiles grew 45 percent and shrank by 1 percent in the same periods, respectively.
A BITTER TASTE
"There is no investment in industry, in machine building," said Nikolai Panichev, president of Stankoinstrument, the successor to the Machinery and Tool Building Ministry that unites more than 100 manufacturers of machine tools making parts for automobiles, airplanes, railroad cars, drilling rigs and tanks.
"Investment goes into everything - oil, gas, electricity, all raw materials - but, unfortunately, we can't seem to understand that Russia, which is so rich in natural resources, cannot live without its own technologies," he said.
"Machine-building factories are in a crazy position - interest rates are too high for borrowing to be affordable, while utility bills are growing and getting closer to those in the West," Panichev said.
"The industrial base of the country is unprepared for this. Machine-building factories can barely pay their debts, but they can't afford to buy a new lathe or press," he said.
One area that has been hit especially hard is the automobile industry.
As the government moved last year to protect the sector by raising tariffs on imported used cars - the main competitors to new domestic cars - Russians hurried to buy the imports before the duties came into effect, forcing lead automakers VAZ and GAZ to temporarily halt production.
"But, even so, this tells us that consumers have more money. Disposable income grew by 8 percent last year, and they are starting to choose quality," Troika's Strutchenevsky says.
The automotive sector is not alone.
According to the State Statistics Committee, or Goskomstat, output in the tractor industry fell by more than 60 percent last year, despite a bumper grain harvest. In fact, across the manufacturing spectrum, any pockets of booming productivity are generally due to one-off factors.
The machine-tools factories that service the railways, for example, are enjoying a temporary surge in orders from oil majors trying to avoid pipeline bottlenecks until new export capacity is added to the network.
Russian aircraft manufacturers, once the world's most prolific, are operating at 30-percent capacity, and have been forced into noncore activities such as building boats and railway-car interiors to make ends meet.
And many firms in the defense industry, once the state's largest employer, have had to branch into completely new activities to survive.
One of these is Splav, a manufacturer of high-precision missile systems. It has adapted its production facilities to turn out equipment that can extract milk and additives for yogurt and cheese from soya beans.
As for the consumer-electronics sector, it is virtually nonexistent, with a few exceptions, such as television sets.
"All the stores are filled with imported goods," said Natalya Zagvozdina, consumer-markets analyst at Renaissance Capital.
"The industry is extremely depressed. Modern technology is an area where Russia has lost its position. We still have scientific institutes and research, but they are not applied to industry," she said.
RISING COSTS
Manufacturers' real costs have risen as much as 35 percent in the last year, according to Weafer of Alfa Bank.
While rising energy prices are certainly putting the squeeze on companies, what is really hurting the largest manufacturers is their inability to streamline their workforces, according to Weafer.
"Russia really has to avoid going the route of the Japanese or Central Europe, where it is impossible to reduce labor forces. Wages are the biggest single factor in cost growth. It's not really tariff increases or energy costs, it's the cost of employing people and the fact that you can't reduce," he said.
Stanislav Budnikov, technical director of Elektroagregat, a Kursk-based company that makes generators, says that since tax breaks on capital investments were terminated by amendments to the Tax Code in January 2002, orders have dried up.
Elektroagregat's only hope of survival now, he says, is a depreciation tax that the government is talking about introducing from next January. Until then, "we'll have to find a way to survive," Budnikov said.
Another pressing issue is the exorbitant cost of money.
Panichev of Stankoinstrument said that interest rates of 25 percent for ruble loans or 18 percent for hard-currency loans are laughable. "Where in the world would you see an idiot take loans like that?"
Peter Westin, chief economist at Aton, said that financing isn't likely to get much cheaper in the near term.
"On the one side, you have the manufacturing sector. On the other, you have the banking sector, which is not willing to lend to these companies because there's no single credit agency in Russia, so there's no way of checking credit history," he said.
And, for many of these companies, raising cash from exports is not a viable option.
"It makes no sense for us because it takes so long for the tax bodies to return VAT to us," said Valery Ermilov, general director of the Novaya Ivanovskaya Manufaktura textiles plant.
Reclaiming VAT on exports has long been a thorn in the side of domestic manufacturers.
The procedure takes months and requires voluminous documentation. Despite government plans to make the procedure the same as reclaiming VAT on the internal market, Yermilov is holding out little hope.
"We've been waiting 10 years. They've been promising to pay more attention to us, but they just erect more barriers," he said.
BRIGHT SPOTS
One area where overseas investment has been considerable is the food-and-drink sector. Here, as in the retail and construction segments, growth - particularly in Moscow - has been propelled by relatively high disposable incomes, and Western and domestic companies alike have been rushing to fill the gaps in the market.
The average Russian has no mortgage, pays no school bills, and utilities are still relatively cheap. Add to that all the dollars kept under mattresses, and a consumer boom is born.
The optimism of a company like Happyland, which makes alcoholic soft drinks, reflects the trend.
"In Russia, the low-alcohol-beverage culture is extremely well developed," said Svetlana Drozd, head of PR for Happyland. "The target group is prepared to try new things, use and accept new things. The market has all the necessary conditions for growth. No slowdown is predicted in the coming years."
According to Drozd, Russia is the fourth-fastest growing market in the world for alcoholic soft drinks.
Still, as Drozd put it, the shelves in food stores aren't endless, and there are signs of stagnation in certain areas.
Vladimir Salnikov, a leading expert at the Center for Macroeconomic Analysis, believes that disposable incomes will soon start to fall.
This, he said, would come as a result of real income growing much faster than labor productivity, and he anticipated that the balance at least in the short term will be re-established as the lack of financial resources in the real sector increases.
THE ROAD AHEAD
"The big problem facing the government in the next few years is to create conditions that would allow investment flows into manufacturing so that the economy grows in a more balanced way," Weafer said.
The government has made it its declared goal to shake the oil needle from the vein of the economy and introduce changes that will breathe life into the manufacturing sector.
But those changes are still at the discussion stage.
At a recent conference on exports, Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref said: "We, with full decisiveness, intend to change the situation so that Russian manufacturers and exporters are in no worse a position than their Western counterparts.
"God has given Russia a lot of carbon reserves, but this should not be a factor that allows us to ignore traditional Russian exports," Gref said.
At a cabinet meeting two weeks ago, a range of tax incentives for businesses was aired, including proposals for reducing the burdensome unified social tax and VAT.
Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov instructed the Finance Ministry and the Economic Development and Trade Ministry to prepare and submit a draft law on "the future reduction of the tax burden on the economy and primarily in the sectors of the manufacturing industry."
But the experts say that, like it or not, bolder reforms are required to cut the deadwood from industry. However, implementing the reforms and handling the social fallout as unprofitable companies implode are not questions likely to be addressed in the buildup to parliamentary elections in December, followed by the presidential election three months later.
"The reforms will be progressed," Weafer said, "but none will be completed."
"No one seriously expects reforms to be finalized because of the political risk."
TITLE: Behind the Fine Linen, There is Dirty Laundry
AUTHOR: By Alex Nicholson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: When Theresa Tollemache started bringing back towels from the Soviet Union for her friends in England in 1989, she had little idea that a decade later she would be importing linen from Ivanovo, Vologda and Kostroma for politicians, celebrities and even for the king of Swaziland's bed.
Before setting up her upscale mail-order service - the Volga Linen company - Tollemache worked with the BEARR Trust bringing medicines into the Soviet Union.
"I fell upon these simple things - they were linen towels, the only thing I could find that was nice in those rather lean times" she said.
The linen gifts went down very well with an interior designer friend, who, impressed by their high quality, first gave her the idea to tap into Russia's mighty textiles industry and its linen factories in particular.
"All Russians had linen rather than cotton in their houses," she said.
"Everything was linen, linen sheets, linen table cloths, linen bed rolls on the train. Everything was flax. Whole cities were working in these huge factories. Northern Russia was the largest flax-growing area in the world."
Today, Tollemache's company works with two Russian sewing workshops that make up clients' individual orders. The linen itself is sourced from a number of factories in Russia.
Which ones Tollemache isn't saying, but to remain flexible, she keeps four to five on the go at a time.
But for the factories themselves, Tollemache's orders hardly amount to a lifeline. Rising electricity bills and gas bills mean that managers are constantly pushing for bigger orders, she said.
"Factories start up manufacturing then stop again. I'm not talking about the people who make up [the finished orders], but the actual looms. So you never quite know where you are," she said. "You think you've got a supply of linen from a certain factory that you like, but when you go back to it, you realize that they're not producing any more," she said.
Output in the textile industry fell last year for the first time since the 1998 financial crisis. Imports are soaring, and industry experts fear that the government is doing little to bail out struggling factories.
"They had a good program for the linen industry, but nothing came of it," said Ilya Tikhonov, editor of the Textilemarket.ru Web site. "They have to make more effort so that these things don't stumble when it comes to implementation."
High interest rates mean that companies steer clear of loans, and delays connected with reclaiming export VAT have put manufacturers off exports.
While the sector is attracting foreign interest - in August, the East Russia fund put $1.5 million into Pervomayskaya Zarya, a women's clothing manufacturer based in St. Petersburg - the bulk of Russia's 22,000 textile companies and organizations are taking each day at a time.
"We've had no interest from foreign investors. We're an old company - we develop from our own funds," said Valery Ermilov, general director of the Novaya Ivanovskaya Manufaktura textiles plant in the central Russian city of Ivanovo, which produces chintz-cotton fabrics that are used to make bedclothes, housedresses and underwear.
Success stories like the Western-style Gloria Jeans label, Russia's largest jeans maker, are in a minority and many factories are still stuck in the past, Tikhonov said.
"The equipment is old, many of the factories are managed by red directors," he said, referring to the factory bosses during Soviet times.
Despite having the largest number of looms in Europe, the bulk of facilities in Russia are currently standing idle.
Speaking at an economic forum on the development of the light and textile industries last December, Boris Fomin, chairperson of the Russian Chamber of Trade and Industry's textiles and light industries committee, said that many of the country's factories are working at a fraction of their total capacity.
Production of woolen fabrics was at 17 percent last year, knitwear and footwear were at 28 percent, tights and socks at 49 percent and cotton at 54 percent, he said.
In the shoe industry, for example, the main problem is the undeclared gray imports that account for 65 percent to 70 percent of the 200 million to 210 million pairs of shoes required by the market each year.
Official imports are also on the rise. In 1999, they accounted for 9 million pairs of shoes, 24.6 million in 2001 and about 40 million in 2002. Imports from China increased from 28.7 percent to 61.2 percent of total imports while imports from European countries fell - from 7.1 percent to 6.4 percent from Italy.
At a leather and footwear conference held in the Moscow region last October, participants expressed fears that the government could back down on protections on light industry to please the World Trade Organization.
While generally optimistic, Tollemache said that she is concerned by the market trend.
"I don't know which way it's going to go," she said. "They're bound to increase prices, and I will just have to increase mine. But there is obviously a limit that I cannot go beyond in order to stay competitive."
TITLE: Few Causes for Optimism in Small Enterprise
AUTHOR: By Irina Khakamada
TEXT: THE notion that Russia's small-business climate has improved of late seems to be gaining currency. From research and my own experience, however, I can say that this isn't the case.
Business daily Vedomosti reported in late January, for example, that the small-business climate has improved, and relations between government and small-business owners have taken a turn for the better. The article cited statistics presented at the Davos forum by Yekaterina Zhuravksaya, head of the Center for Economic and Financial Research.
I have no problem with upbeat talk aimed at creating a positive image of Russia abroad, but this particular image doesn't correspond with the reality back home. I recently organized a series of trips through the regions to collect information about business conditions first-hand. The results of this research show that more than half of all entrepreneurs say that the business climate in Russia is invariably bad. Among the main problems facing small business, they name the difficulty of obtaining financing, leasing and buying property, corruption, inspections, tax rates and the complexity of accounting procedures. All of these factors, with the possible exception of limited access to financing, attest to the excessive pressure that government puts on business.
A group of analysts led by former Economics Minister Yevgeny Yasin has reached similar conclusions (the group's full analysis can be found at www.hakamada.ru). Government red tape stifles small business more than anything else - i.e., the endless inspections, approvals and other procedures that bureaucrats use to put pressure on business. Overcoming the various administrative barriers ends up costing business up to $8.5 billion per year, or 2.9 percent of GDP. Assuming that these costs are spread proportionately across small, medium and large businesses, small businesspeople end up shelling out as much as $850 million every year.
Small businesspeople are also compelled to make "voluntary contributions" to all manner of pet projects dear to the hearts of bureaucrats at all levels. These contributions amount to some $4 billion per year, or 1 percent of GDP, of which small business coughs up approximately $400 million.
Huge sums are also spent on gifts to individual bureaucrats to take care of specific problems, mostly involved with leasing property from government agencies. According to the latest estimates, this form of corruption costs Russian business some $33 billion per year, of which $3.3 billion falls to small business.
The government has launched a campaign to cut red tape, but the results to date have been less than encouraging. Plans to establish "one-stop" registration for businesses have not worked in practice. The number of operating licenses has been trimmed, but getting one can be as hard as ever. Police, tax police, economic-crime units and other law-enforcement agencies do not fall under the new "anti-inspection" law. And the new Administrative Code has effectively increased the number of agencies with inspection powers from 40 to 63!
The total burden that government places on business, therefore, comes to some $40 billion per year, or up to 13 percent of GDP. Nearly $4 billion of that falls on small businesses. This figure represents income that could, otherwise, be plowed back into enterprises to expand production and raise wages, or business owners could use for personal expenditures, such as insurance and education.
As of Jan. 1, just over 800,000 small businesses were registered in Russia. At the same time, the federal bureaucracy alone employed more than 1.5 million people. The result is akin to something from the works of Saltykov-Shchedrin: Every entrepreneur (although not he alone, of course) feeds two "generals." So, why doesn't the government want to hear what "the hand that feeds it" has to say?
The main reason is that small business has no place in the current balance of political power. Big business has lost some of its influence under President Vladimir Putin, but it can still pull any number of levers to influence economic and political decisions. And big business is primarily interested in liberalizing currency laws, the conditions for entering the World Trade Organization and profit-tax breaks for investment.
However, big business should also take an interest in the development of small business. After all, major companies always need new sources of employees with the on-the-job experience that smaller companies can provide. Big business has exhausted its ability to hire and train inexperienced workers, a point noted on a recent edition of the talk show "Vliyaniye" featuring Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Yet, while large companies can absorb the costs of dealing with Russia's bureaucracy, small business is defenseless. OPORA, a small business support organization, has stepped in to fill this gap, but its influence to this point remains limited.
The banking sector is primarily concerned with cultivating relations with the Central Bank and its policies on interest rates, exchange rates and structural changes in the sector. Bankers may say that making credit available to small business is a priority but, in practice, this goal comes a distant second to their shareholders, major borrowers and, lately, development of the consumer-lending and mortgage sectors.
The interests of the bureaucracy, even its liberal wing, are directly opposed to those of small business. Cooperation is, therefore, possible only in specific conditions, and on a limited number of issues - as a rule, not issues that are of primary concern to businesspeople themselves.
Government officials view small business, first and foremost, as an additional source of income that can be applied to chronically underfunded sectors of the budget such as social programs, public services and amenities, etc. Beyond that, small business provides extra personal income obtainable as a result of nontransparent administrative and regulatory procedures and contradictions in the regulations governing these procedures, or by plain extortion. It is not normally in the bureaucrat's interest to ruin a business. They try, instead, to keep it healthy, but dependent, so that they can continue to milk it regularly.
The best way to support small business is not to hinder its efforts at self-organization. Legislation affecting its interests should not be passed without seeking input from small-business associations. Indirect assistance should be provided via a specialized infrastructure to the most promising and innovative small-business groups. It is significant that the government is now considering scaling back the powers of police and other agencies to inspect traders and perform other economic checks. At present, police sometimes inspect outdoor markets as often as twice a week. New legislation has not helped to alleviate this problem.
But the best way to help small business is not to change the rules of the game every time the wind blows. Entrepreneurs need stability if they are to take care of business, rather than spend all their time familiarizing themselves with new laws.
Only once such measures are taken will small-business owners and their supporters stop reacting with skepticism to claims about the improving climate for small business in Russia.
Irina Khakamada is a deputy speaker of the State Duma and co-leader of the Union of Right Forces party. She contributed this comment to the Vedomosti newspaper.
TITLE: Speaking Out Over Racist-Attack Death
TEXT: In response to "Asian Student Dies in Racist Attack," on Feb. 4.
Editor,
As an Indian student who has been studying here in St. Petersburg for the past two years, this is the first time that I have seen that the newspapers have given such detailed information on the hardships that we students face here. I hope that, in the near future, your paper would give more focus and more detailed stories of students problems here in Russia, and try to make the officials more aware that they have to do their job to protect us and not just harrass us every time they get the chance.
Thank you.
Dr. Ranjive Varkey
St. Petersburg
Editor,
I am a 23-year-old student in my 6th year at the Mechnikov Academy. I want to say that you have done a great job by doing justice with the news. But we, as students, are not at all satisfied with the Russian administration. They are not doing a good job, and we don't feel secure in Russia.
I think that, if a dog dies or a foreigner dies in Russia its all the same to them. No human rights at all.
I hope that this news will reach the "international media."
We knew that something like this was going to happen one day, because there is no student who hasn't been attacked by skinheads or other such people. All of the students already thought that, someday, somebody was going to die.
But what will happen now?
I think that the answer is: "nothing." It will be business as usual. God only knows when all of this is going to stop.
Jatt Punjabi
St. Petersburg
Editor,
Absolutely shocking!! The thing that hurts the most is that this student was there to study and then go back to his country. He had faith in this university. Instead of going back with a medical degree, he will be going home in a coffin.
Those responsible will probably go unpunished, judging by the way the authorities have been handling the case so far.
What more can I say? Words cannot express the feelings of revolt and disgust I have.
Nittin Teelock
London, United Kingdom
Editor,
I was the victim's brother in law and know that this murder is the result of pure racism. I bet the authorities concerned will turn a blind eye to the case and not do anything about it.
Sooner or later, people will just forget until there is another murder or similar case. The university will just continue to take big university fees from students and will not bother about their security in a city where foreigners (especially Asians) are always at risk.
Why can't there be police patrols? Why not a special taks force near the university? What will it cost? It would cost less than the death of a student, at least!
Rajesh Jeewon
Portsmouth, United Kingdom
Editor,
I would like to convey my sincere sorrow to all the Mauritians out there and to the family of Atish.
I am deeply concerned with this crucial attack on my compatriot. I am also a medical student (5th year), in Donetsk, Ukraine.
There are many attacks on foreigners here as well and nothing has been done.
I am really furious that such things don't seem that important to the authorities concerned. We are studying we pray each day that we will leave the country alive.
My country, Mauritius, is one of the most tourist-orientated countries in the world, and these types of things don't happen to forigners.
Suren Naiken
Donetsk, Ukraine
Unreal Republicans
In response to "What Are the Real Reasons for a War in Iraq?" a comment by Robert Skidelsky on Feb. 14.
Editor,
Thank you for providing us with this column. Lord Skidelsky's analysis is not only accurate, it is also typically British - a dispassionate comment on U.S. President George W. Bush's short attention span and shoot-first-ask-questions-later policies. As an American living in Moscow, I am regularly embarrassed by the genuine bewilderment of Russians (and other non-Americans) at current U.S. policy.
Although I'm a card-carrying Republican, I have a difficult time recognizing President Bush as one of us. Republicans have a long and proud isolationist tradition. It is usually the Democrats who go looking for trouble "over there" somewhere. Republicans are also supposed to be good about keeping the U.S. government's books in balance. Projected U.S. budget deficits are now so staggering that the Bush administration has simply stopped making projections for more than five years out - and current projections don't even include the upcoming War to Finish Daddy's War.
To round things out, relations with America's most important allies and counterweight countries - France, Germany, Russia, and China (this list will no doubt grow longer) - have never been worse. It's been painful for me to watch how President Bush has managed to squander absolutely all the goodwill and sympathy that other nations and peoples felt for America after the Sept. 11 tragedies.
Vladimir Berezansky, Jr.
Moscow
Less Than Welcome
In response to "Russia's New Visa Laws Put It on a Fast Track to Chaos," a comment by Vladimir Kovalev on Feb. 7.
Editor,
It's a pity that the issuing of visas has become such a mess. I had intended to visit St. Petersburg for the 300th-anniversary celebrations, but the new regulations are immensely discouraging, and the chances that I will be there for the celebrations has fallen dramatically.
I love the country very much, but Russian bureaucratics know how to ruin their own party. Even the idea of coming with a group of students doesn't make sense.
The number of tourists this year will not increase, thanks to paperwork-loving apparatchiks.
T.E.A. Vanwelij
Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Editor,
I work at a foreign company here in St. Petersburg. Although I'm a Russian citizen, I have something to say on the subject.
It seems to me that, while preparing the new laws, our authorities didn't bother to take into consideration the experience or the opinion of even a single foreigner. Instead of attracting foreign employees and investors to our city, they have made it almost impossible for them to work here. If I were a foreigner, I would just give up the idea of working in Russian and go somewhere else.
I feel really sorry for all of the foreigners who have to find their way in the jungle of Russian bureaucracy.
Maya Polyakova
St. Petersburg
Editor,
I have lived and worked in Russia since 1990.
With the new visa laws, you can be sure that many foreigners will now be "illegal" during the long registration process. The former two weeks of registration with the tax inspectorate and the immigration service does not exist any more. It is finally obvious that it is not easy to invest in Russia. The new laws are a real obstacle to the investor in controlling their company. With very little effort, Russian employees can even bar them from the company created (read the law).
The new laws have also created also a headache for people who have lived and worked in Russia for five to 10 years, have an authentic relationship to the country, have personal property and friends here, etc. These people can be forced out of the country very easily should they lose their jobs. At the end of last year, when I changed my job, I could not be registered at the Department of Visas and Registration (OVIR) because my visa was issued based on an invitation from my previous employer. I was forced to leave the country in order to get a new visa. I will always remember the words of a senior official at the OVIR after I asked him for help with the problem : "We do not allow foreigners to change their jobs."
There is also a financial side to the problem: The lawmakers did not calculate how much the budget loses because of the application of the new visa laws. (I suggest that foreigners pay their taxes to their home country during the long registration process.)
When Vladimir Putin took over as president, he called on each federal ministry to create its own Web site. But you will not find any information there about how to get a visa, where to get some help, etc.
Strangely enough, it was easier to get a visa and registration during the Communist era. The bureaucratic revenge has begun.
A. Popowski
St. Petersburg
Blood Feud
In response to "Tsar Ivan, Rasputin Split Over Sainthood," on Feb. 7.
Editor,
The church has at least part of the solution in its own hands. A simple re-assessment of the Tsarevich Alexei's symptoms of a blood disorder has the power to bring a very quick end to the Patriachate's problem with any religious followers of Grigory Rasputin. Even Edvard Radzinsky, author of "The Last Tsar" and "Rasputin: The Last Word" and the best known member of Russia's State Romanov Commission, freely admitted in a London interview three years ago that: "Maybe Alexei did not have haemophilia. At the time, medicine was not so advanced ..." (Royalty Magazine, Spring 2000).
The symptoms of a blood disorder that were suffered by the Tsarevich Alexei Nikolayevich are far better explained by a group of blood disorders known as haemolytic anaemias, in which the symptom of spontaneous recovery from apparently life-threatening episodes of internal haemorrhage is a perfectly normal and expected outcome. If this can be proved to be the case - that the Tsarevich Alexei had, in fact, suffered from bleeding episodes resulting from haemolytic anaemia rather than haemophilia - then it will also be proved that Grigory Rasputin had no powers of healing. Tsarevich Alexei's seemingly miraculous spontaneous recoveries will then have a perfectly sound medical explanation - and Rasputin will then be proved not to have been a saint.
A simple test of the DNA samples that were taken from the discovered remains of Alexei's mother, Tsarina Alexandra, will solve the Patriachate's problem. If a test of the Tsarina's DNA samples fails to find any evidence of the faulty gene that causes haemophilia (at gene locus Xq28 on the end of the long arm of the X chromosome), then Alexandra was not a carrier of haemophilia and her son Alexei's blood disorder was not haemophilia. His mysterious recoveries will have a very simple medical explanation, and the church's current difficulties with the religious followers of Grigory Rasputin will have been solved by modern science.
John Kendrick
Vancouver, Canada
Cosmic Geopolitics
In response to "Effects of the Columbia Disaster Run Deep," a comment by Pavel Felgenhauer on Feb. 11.
Editor,
Pavel Felgenhauer's piece - although not void of valid points - misstates the true reason behind Russian involvement in the ISS. It is well known that, due to economic difficulties, Russia's space program can't contribute much beyond fairly old technology and the occasional cosmonaut or two. So the reason behind Russian inclusion in the program is not money, technology or even America's penchant for charity.
It is geopolitics. By tying Russian hands with the ISS, the United States effectively takes Russian know-how away from the world market. It is the American desire to prevent Russia from helping China's space thrust that drives the whole project.
That's why the ISS project will continue, no matter what. Because it is a political enterprise, and the very cause for its existence - China's space program - is more present than ever.
Oleg Beliakovich
Seattle, Washington
Bad Cash-Flow Sign
In response to "Taking Cash out of Russia Made Easier," on Feb. 11.
Editor,
I would like to make two general comments about the article "Taking Cash Out of Russia Made Easier." For four years, I lived in the CIS and travelled across many borders by land, rail, and plane. I have also travelled across the U.S.-Canada border many times as well as within Europe. The fact remains that border crossings everywhere have their good and bad days and I have experienced delays in Kazakhstan as well as in the U.S. and Canada.
To be frank, I have experienced very little trouble in Sheremetyevo or Domodyedevo in Moscow and have found Russian visa controls, etc., to work very well relative to others.
Second, most countries do exactly the wrong thing when it comes to preventing capital flight. Most countries try to make it harder for people to take their money out of the country when, in fact, the better response is to make it easier. As people take their money out of the country, capital becomes scarcer and the interest rates people have to pay on it begin to increase - which in fact encourages people to invest and keep some money in the country - it is self correcting. By preventing people from taking money out, it suggests that the country has a problem keeping capital in. It encourages people to hide their funds and avoid taxes, and it removes the incentives to borrowers in the country to behave in ways that attract capital.
Imposing barriers to taking capital out of the country makes the situation worse, not better.
Barrie B.F. Hebb,
Antigonish, Canada
TITLE: The Specter of Truth
AUTHOR: By Fred Hiatt
TEXT: ONE is a frail old Russian, moving through the West like a ghost whom everyone would rather forget. The other, Russia's defense minister, is ramrod straight and self-confident as he strides purposefully, meeting nothing but deference and respect.
That the ghost speaks the truth and the defense minister the opposite has no impact on this equation. Or, rather, it has everything to do with this equation, but not in the way you might expect. For, when it comes to Russia's grinding war in Chechnya, audiences in the West are as uninterested in the truth as most Russians.
The ghost has a name, Sergei Kovalyov, and an age, 76, and an amazing resilience. His comrade Andrei Sakharov is long dead, and most of his other fellow dissidents from Soviet days have also died or retired or given up the romantic ideas of human rights and speaking the truth to power in favor of more practical avenues of business.
Anyone who knew Kovalyov 10 years ago, hacking and coughing inside a constant fog of cigarette smoke, would have said that he too should be dead by now. But he has, improbably, given up his cigarettes and survived a heart attack, as well as innumerable fearless trips to the Chechen war zone at Russia's southern edge.
Last week, he was in Washington reciting his views on President Vladimir Putin and his war in Chechnya to anyone who would listen, which in the U.S. government was not many people: Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican from Nebraska; Representative Chris Smith, a Republican from New Jersey; a couple of other members of congress; and, in the administration, the Russia desk officers at State and Defense and the National Security Council.
"Strange things are happening in the modern world," Kovalyov said in his gentle, bemused voice. "In order to fight international terrorism, people are looking for allies among governments that perpetrate state terrorism."
Russia is deep into its second war, and its second decade of war, against the independence aspirations of the Chechens, a small (fewer than a million people even before the killing began) Muslim nation living where the Russian steppe meets the Caucasus Mountains. Russian troops have succeeded in destroying Chechnya's capital, in driving hundreds of thousands of civilians into desperate exile and now in depopulating many mountain villages with bombing and land mines. They have not succeeded in defeating the Chechen guerrillas or bringing peace to the province, though their leaders in Moscow have many times proclaimed victory and an end to the war.
Though the conflict has not much changed, the vocabulary Russia uses to describe it shifted radically after Sept. 11, 2001. "It would be wrong to think that the Russians are fighting the Chechens in Chechnya," Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov proclaimed preposterously at a security conference in Munich 10 days ago. "No, it's far from being so. Out in Chechnya, the citizens of the Russian Federation of various nationalities, including the people of Chechnya proper, are waging a war on gunmen and terrorists of a variety of nationalities."
No one in the audience of defense ministers and generals and politicians bothered to challenge this statement. For one thing, there are terrorists and bandits and kidnappers among the Chechen guerrillas; if this war ever had good guys, that era is long past. For another, the West, and the United States in particular, wants Putin on its side in other fights - Iraq first of all. If the price is silence on Chechnya, so be it.
Privately, administration officials deny such a calculation. Privately, they deplore the Russian tactics of indiscriminate roundups and torture and looting. It's just that Putin, they say, gets so unhappy when President George W. Bush brings up the subject. What is to be gained by provoking him? Surely quiet diplomacy will be more effective.
Kovalyov responds by analogy. "If just two politicians" - Bill Clinton and the then German chancellor, Helmut Kohl - "had taken a different attitude during the first Chechen war, that war would have ended in two months, not two years," he says. "You wouldn't have had to use bombs, God forbid, or embargoes or even withdrawing ambassadors. All that would have been needed was to repeat in every speech: 'This dirty war has to stop.'"
Clinton, like Bush, had his reasons for silence, Kovalyov acknowledges. Then, it was not the war on terrorism, but the conviction that Boris Yeltsin was essential to Russian democracy. "Of course, Clinton and Kohl had a right to their calculations," Kovalyov says. "But their calculations sacrificed other people's lives - tens of thousands of lives."
Kovalyov says he would not presume to tell Bush what to do, in the improbable event of an Oval Office meeting. He says only that to close your eyes to the true nature of Putin's war and Putin's regime of "managed democracy" is "not farsighted."
But Kovalyov is a ghost in a Washington consumed with hardheaded calculations about Security Council votes and European alliances and intelligence cooperation. He slips in, he slips out, nothing changes.
Fred Hiatt is editor of The Washington Post editorial page, where this comment first appeared.
TITLE: Nazdratenko Better Late Than Never
TEXT: WHATEVER the actual reason for Yevgeny Nazdratenko's suspension as head of the State Fisheries Committee, one can only hope that this temporary measure is followed by something a little more permanent - such as dismissal, with the words "this man is not fit for public office" being indelibly branded on his forehead.
Exactly two years ago, there was quite a hoo-ha when President Vladimir Putin did a deal to prize the odious Nazdratenko - then a governor - out of his Primorye fiefdom, where corruption and "mismanagement" (including a chronic electricity/heating crisis) had reached such levels that the Kremlin had little choice but to take action. With Nazdratenko loyalists and cronies ensconced throughout Primorye, there was a concern that if sacked, the governor would simply run for re-election and win. So the Kremlin hastily offered Nazdratenko a "golden parachute" in the form of the State Fisheries Committee, in return for his word that he would not participate or interfere in the gubernatorial election.
While the rationale behind Putin's actions is entirely understandable, it did not establish a particularly good precedent "pour encourager les autres." On the contrary, it sent out a clear message to the political elite that those who become too much of an embarassment will be rewarded by being kicked upstairs and given a lucrative sinecure. (Not the best way to strengthen the presidential power vertical)
Unfortunately, the practice of providing officials who have been disgraced or fallen out of favor with a "soft landing" has an all too rich history. Pavel Borodin and Rem Vyakhirev provide two shining examples.
Now two years later, with Nazdratenko's power base in Primorye crumbling and the threat largely neutralized, the federal government apparently feels sufficiently confident to consider ousting him from its ranks.
Some might see this as a vindication of what Putin did two years ago. However, the limitations of the Kremlin's approach are all too evident. The reliance on backroom deals and strong-arm tactics, the carrot and the stick, does absolutely nothing to entrench democracy and to teach the elite that certain forms of behavior are unacceptable and will not be tolerated.
The result: Nazdratenko has been able to go about business as usual for the past two years, only having the whole of the country's fishing industry as his play thing instead of Primorye. A less than stellar regime has emerged under his successor, Sergei Darkin. And Primorye, which considering its location (the Pacific, Japan, China, Korea), the port facilities, Trans-Siberian, etc., should be flourishing as Russia's gateway to the East, is still infested with corruption.
This isn't exactly progress.
TITLE: Iraq the Most Righteous War Of Them All
AUTHOR: By Pavel Felgenhauer
TEXT: THE Soviet Politburo hoped that some day the Franco-German axis, initiated by French President Charles de Gaulle some 40 years ago, would break up NATO and deliver Western Europe into Soviet hands.
Many in Moscow are happy to see that the dream of a "multipolar" world seems to be materializing. France, Germany, China, Russia, the Vatican are joining forces to prevent the U.S. war machine from rolling Iraqi President Hussein out of office.
It would seem strange that so diverse a collection of forces would unite to defend a bloody Nazi-style dictatorship in Iraq. But actually this de facto alliance has existed for decades.
In the 1930s, West European pacifists were the prime political force that supported appeasement of Adolf Hitler. In the 1940s, the Vatican wholeheartedly cooperated with the Nazis and after the demise of Hitler helped war criminals to escape justice.
I lived for almost 40 years under a totalitarian regime, and I know from first-hand experience what life without freedom means. Anti-war protesters in Western Europe and America do not know, and could not care less.
Only by military means can millions of Iraqis be released from total servitude and Hussein destroyed, along with his Baath party, which has ruled the country since 1958. If there ever existed such a thing as a "just war" then the coming U.S.-led invasion of Iraq could be the most righteous of them all.
In 1991, after a military victory and the liberation of Kuwait, allied forces stopped short of Baghdad. A ceasefire was signed that left Hussein in power.
It's easy to envisage a similar scenario in 1944: After the liberation of France and Belgium, the war could have stopped at the borders of Hitler's Reich. A ceasefire could have been signed (the Germans were at the time actively trying to start negotiations to organize such a ceasefire).
Western pacifists, the Vatican and all those that today adamantly oppose the liberation of Iraq by force would surely have liked an outcome that would have left Hitler in power and saved many German lives and German cities.
In April 1975, Hussein paid a visit to Moscow to ask for Soviet help to build a full reactor to make nuclear weapons. Although Russia agreed to supply Iraq with staggering amounts of conventional weapons, it balked at helping Baghdad go nuclear. In September 1975, Hussein went to Paris to meet politicians with far fewer scruples than Soviet Communists. The French prime minister at the time, Jacques Chirac, signed an agreement to sell Hussein a reactor and arms-grade uranium.
If Chirac and other French politicians had had their way, Hussein could have made tens of nuclear bombs by 1990. The war to liberate Kuwait would never have taken place or would have turned into an all-out nuclear confrontation between Iraq, Israel and the United States. The tragedy was avoided when, in 1979, Israeli agents near Toulon destroyed two French-built reactors en route to Iraq. In 1981, the Israelis bombed to debris the French replacement reactor in Iraq before it could be made operational.
Maybe France and Germany are so loyally trying to save Hussein because they want to cover up their long-time cooperation in helping to build weapons of mass destruction? Is the treachery of the past feeding more treachery today?
Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst.
TITLE: Global Eye
TEXT: Cold Fronts
The opening of a long-delayed civil suit in a London courtroom; a brief, buried article on a judicial nomination; a fluctuation in the commodities market: three mundane, seemingly unrelated items in the news last week that combined to give a fleeting glimpse of the ugly reality behind the frantic, diversionary facade of the "civilized world."
The London case involves our old friend BCCI, the international bank that served as the front for a global crime ring involving top officials and establishment worthies in dozens of "civilized" countries. BCCI ran guns to Saddam Hussein and other heavies, funded Pakistan's illegal nuclear-weapons program, laundered drug profits, peddled prostitutes, doled out bribes, served as a conduit for covert CIA operations - and, through its connections to the bin Laden family, gave George W. Bush a sweetheart loan of $25 million to bail out one of his many business failures.
One of the respectable organizations tainted by the ring was the Bank of England, which was the financial regulator for BCCI when the front finally collapsed in 1991 - leaving its legitimate creditors some $11 billion in the hole. Not surprisingly, some of these victims filed suit against ye olde B of E, claiming that its oversight of BCCI left something to be desired. But successive British governments - including the plagiaristic, poodle-led pack currently in power - have fought for years to quash the lawsuit, the Observer reports.
That's because the trial could open a can of particularly grubby worms concerning the U.K. government's extensive canoodling with BCCI. A host of worthies are expected to be grilled in the dock, including John Major, former U.K. prime minister and current business partner of George Bush I in yet another secretive international front that profits from war, weapons, violence, repression and the greasing of highly-placed palms: the Carlyle Group.
Even as the trial finally gets underway, British PM Tony "Bow-Wow" Blair is withholding crucial BCCI evidence, claiming it's top secret. In fact, says Blair, the hidden juice is so red hot that even the law under which it has been declared secret must remain secret. An overreaction? Probably not - not when you consider that BCCI was one of the chief conduits by which Western governments secretly armed Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction throughout the 1980s. This is not the kind of dirty laundry you want aired at the very moment you are waving the bloody shirt of war at, er, Saddam Hussein for, er, possessing weapons of mass destruction that, er, you and your allies sold to him in the first place.
Which brings us to the judicial appointment. The Italian bank BNL was one of BCCI's main tentacles. BNL's Atlanta branch was the primary funnel used by the first Bush administration to send millions of secret dollars to Saddam for arms purchases, including deadly chemicals and other WMD materials supplied by the Chilean arms dealer Cardoen and various politically-connected operators in the United States, like weapons merchant Matrix Churchill. (As always with the Busha Nostra, geopolitics - in this case, helping Saddam wage aggressive war against Iran - and crony profits go hand in hand. Once the war was over and, Iran was left a shattered hulk, with millions dead and displaced, the useful idiot Saddam was expendable, swiftly morphing from good buddy into budding Hitler.)
As soon as the BNL case broke, President Bush I moved to throttle the investigation. He appointed lawyers from both Cardoen and Matrix to top Justice Department posts - where they supervised the officials investigating their old companies. Meanwhile, White House aides applied heavy pressure on other prosecutors to restrict the range of the probe - especially the fact that Bush cabinet officials Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger had served as consultants for BNL during their pre-White House days as spear-carriers for yet another secretive international front that profits from war, weapons, etc., etc.: Kissinger Associates.
One of the White House aides who unlawfully intervened in the BNL prosecution was a certain factotum named Jay S. ByBee. Last week, said factotum was nominated by the current warmer of the Oval Office seat, George W. Bush, to a place on the federal appeals court - a lifetime sinecure of perks and power. Well done, good and faithful servant!
And the commodities connection? President Pretzel's relentless hissy-fit for war on Iraq has of course goosed the price of gold enormously - and that's set theBush family coffers a-clinking. How so? In the waning days of his failed presidency, Bush I invoked an obscure 1872 statute to give a Canadian firm, Barrick Corporation, the right to mine $10 billion in gold from U.S. public lands. (U.S. taxpayers got a whopping $10,000 fee in return.) Bush then joined Barrick as a highly-paid "international consultant," brokering deals with various dictators of his close acquaintance. Barrick reciprocated with big bucks for Junior's presidential run. And, in another quid for the old pro quo, last year, Junior dutifully approved Barrick's controversial acquisition of a major rival. (Barrick is also one of the biggest polluters in America, by the way.)
Thus, every step toward war fills Bush pockets quite literally with gold. That's the way they operate, these liars and thieves in thousand-dollar suits, these secretive fronts who profit from war, fear, blood and greasy palms. They arm the "monsters," they disarm the monsters, making money both ways. Then they drape themselves with Bible and flag, like smug pimps promenading to church, singing "Glory Hallelujah" while the whole world burns.
For annotational references, see the "Opinion" section at www.sptimesrussia.com
TITLE: Protests Bring Cities to a Halt
AUTHOR: By Verena Dobnik
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK - Millions of protesters around the globe - many of them marching in the capitals of America's allies - demonstrated Saturday against U.S. plans to attack Iraq.
In a global outpouring of anti-war sentiment, Rome claimed the biggest turnout - 1 million according to police, while organizers claimed three times that figure.
In London, at least 750,000 joined in the city's biggest demonstration ever, police said. Madrid, Spain had 660,000 people on the streets, police said; Berlin had up to half a million and Paris was estimated to have had up to 100,000.
North of the United Nations headquarters in New York, demonstrators packed the streets, filling police-barricaded protest zones for more than 20 blocks as civil rights leaders and celebrities energized the banner-waving crowd.
"Peace! Peace! Peace!" Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa said as he walked from the United Nations toward the rally. "Let America listen to the rest of the world - and the rest of the world is saying, 'Give the inspectors time.'"
Several thousand protesters in Athens, Greece, unfurled a giant banner across the wall of the ancient Acropolis - "NATO, U.S. and EU equals War" - before heading toward the U.S. Embassy.
Police fired tear gas in clashes with several hundred anarchists wearing hoods and crash helmets who smash store windows and threw a gasoline bomb at a newspaper office. Four youths were arrested.
London's marchers hoped - in the words of keynote speaker, Rev. Jesse Jackson - to "turn up the heat" on Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has been Europe's biggest supporter of U.S. President George W. Bush's tough Iraq policy.
Rome's legions were showing their disagreement with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's support for Bush, while demonstrators in Paris and Berlin backed the skeptical stances of their governments.
"What I would say to Mr. Blair is stop toadying up to the Americans and listen to your own people, us, for once," said Elsie Hinks, 77, who marched in London with her husband Sidney, a retired Church of England priest.
New York police wouldn't provide a crowd estimate, but the protesters stretched for 20 blocks along First Avenue and spilled west to Second Avenue, where police in riot gear and on horseback patrolled. Organizers had hoped to draw at least 100,000 people.
Police reported some arrests, but didn't immediately provide details.
Anti-war rallies were also planned in about 150 U.S. cities.
Police estimated that 60,000 turned out in Oslo, Norway, 50,000 in bitter cold in Brussels, while about 35,000 gathered peacefully in frigid Stockholm.
About 80,000 marched in Dublin, Irish police said. Crowds were estimated at: 70,000 in Amsterdam; 20,000 in Montreal; 40,000 in Bern, Switzerland; 30,000 in Glasgow, Scotland; 25,000 in Copenhagen; 15,000 in Vienna; 5,000 in Cape Town and 4,000 in Johannesburg in South Africa; 5,000 in Tokyo and 2,000 in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
"Saddam is powerful, but that doesn't justify the death of millions of people," said Rogerio Silva, who wore a Saddam Hussein mask as he marched with more than 1,500 flag-waving and dancing demonstrators along Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana beach.
On Sunday, over 100,000 people took to the streets in San Francisco. Demonstrators had postponed their event one day to make way for the city's popular Chinese New Year parade and celebration. But the delay didn't hamper turnout, which appeared to swell throughout the day Sunday.
Security in New York was extraordinarily tight, with the city on high alert for terrorist threats.
All along the streets around the UN headquarters on Manhattan's East Side, authorities deployed a new security "package" including sharpshooters and officers with radiation detectors, hazardous materials decontamination equipment, bomb-sniffing dogs and air-sampling equipment able to detect chemical or biological weapons.
Several leaders of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder's government took part in the Berlin protest, which turned the tree-lined street between the Brandenburg Gate and the 19th-century Victory Column into a sea of banners, balloons emblazoned with "No war in Iraq" and demonstrators swaying to live music from the stage. Police estimated the crowd at between 300,000 and 500,000.
In the Bosnian city of Mostar, about 100 Muslims and Croats united for an anti-war protest - the first such cross-community action in seven years in a place where ethnic divisions remain tense despite a 1995 peace agreement.
"We want to say that war is evil and that we who survived one know that better than anyone," said Majda Hadzic, 54.
About 1,000 demonstrators gathered on Manhattan's West Side in New York, where 41-year-old George Sarris held a sign reading "Bomb Iraq."
"The liberals are the complainers," Sarris said. "The Republicans aren't. So I came out to tell our side of the story."
In Baghdad, tens of thousands of Iraqis, many carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles, demonstrated to support Saddam Hussein and denounce the United States.
"Our swords are out of their sheaths, ready for battle," read one of hundreds of banners carried by marchers along Palestine Street, a broad Baghdad avenue.
TITLE: U.S. Considering All the Options for Next Move
AUTHOR: By Gina Holland
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - U.S. President George W. Bush's administration is mulling its next move in the showdown with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, including a possible attempt to push a new United Nations resolution authorizing force against Iraq.
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said Sunday it was becoming more obvious that the Iraqi president would not disarm voluntarily, and that the UN Security Council was letting him get away with it.
"The Security Council has to be an instrument of peace, but it has to be an instrument of peace that has teeth, or it is never going to be able to deal with the myriad difficult actors out there in international politics who intend to disturb that peace," Rice said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
The White House had a long holiday weekend to weigh options after being rebuffed Friday, as most members of the Security Council lined up behind France's call for more weapons inspections and against military action.
Rice said on "Fox News Sunday" that the administration may ask the council to take up a new resolution authorizing force against Iraq, although she said that wouldn't be necessary to take action to forcibly disarm Saddam.
Senator John McCain said on the same program that the plan being presented this week by the U.S. and Britain would likely call for "definitive progress" in the disarmament of Iraq.
"If that's rejected, then I think the United States of America is going to have to make some difficult decisions," McCain said.
Rice said the wording of a new resolution was not finished and that the White House would oppose a new policy statement that amounts to a "delaying tactic."
France has led a formidable bloc calling for extended inspections and wants to wait on a resolution at least until mid-March. Inspectors report on March 1 to the Security Council.
Meanwhile, the chief UN nuclear inspector said Sunday that countries opposed to using force against Iraq could change their minds, if Baghdad doesn't show more willingness to reveal evidence of weapons programs.
Mohamed ElBaradei, who heads the UN search for banned weapons along with Hans Blix, said that the onus was on Iraq, not the UN inspectors searching for weapons of mass destruction, to prove that it had nothing to hide.
In her appearances on the Sunday talk shows, Rice repeatedly said Hussein has weeks, not months, to disarm or face a military strike.
But former NATO supreme commander Wesley Clark said on "Meet The Press" that the White House should consider allowing inspections to seek out weapons of mass destruction and not follow an "artificial deadline."
"It's unlikely the inspectors will ever find the so-called smoking gun on this. But if it makes our allies more able to go to their publics and justify their support of our operation, then I think that's important," said Clark.
Rice said a confrontation was inevitable with Hussein.
"Sooner or later, we believe sooner, the Security Council is going to have to say that he has not taken that final opportunity to comply, and the Security Council is going to have to act, or the United States will have to act with a coalition of the willing," she said on Fox.
Christopher Meyer, British ambassador to United States, said on ABC's "This Week" that a decision would be made in the next few days on "the tactics and timing of a second resolution - when to do it, what to put into it, even who's going to table it."
TITLE: A Divided Europe Seeks Consensus on Iraq
AUTHOR: By Paul Geitner
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BRUSSELS, Belgium - A deeply divided Europe struggled Monday to close a rift over Iraq and speak with one voice to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, though leaders were encouraged after resolving a monthlong NATO deadlock on defending Turkey.
EU leaders held an emergency summit amid warnings that continued disagreement over a threatened U.S.-led war on Iraq could impede European integration and dilute the continent's influence on the world stage.
Foreign ministers, who met to lay the groundwork for the leaders, were united that Iraq must disarm. But, with Washington pushing its allies for quick action, differences remained over how much more time to give to UN weapons inspectors.
Each camp remained firm heading in, with France and Germany insisting there is no case yet for military action against Hussein.
French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin appeared defiant as he arrived, hailing Belgium's stand supporting UN efforts to avert war during a contentious NATO meeting Sunday over defensive planning.
On French TV ahead of the summit, he reiterated the French position, shared by Germany and Belgium, that UN inspections were working and should continue. Britain, Italy and Spain, he said, were taking "strictly an American line."
But British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Washington's key ally, stood firm as well, saying, "Time is running out."
The United Nations "set out very clearly that this was the final opportunity for Iraq to comply," Straw said. "That involves hard decisions for everyone across Europe. It is only by fighting tyranny that we are able to enjoy the freedoms that we do."
Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said Rome hadn't changed its mind either. "Our policy is based on two pillars: the cohesion of the European Union and a strong relationship with the United States," he said.
Images of millions of people protesting at peace rallies around the world appeared to strengthen the anti-war cause. Straw said Monday that war against Iraq would be "very difficult" with much of the public opposed to military action.
He told the BBC that the protest march in London on Saturday was a "very, very large demonstration, probably the largest one we've seen in our recent democratic history in London. We have to take account of public opinion."
Asked whether Britain could go to war with Iraq despite widespread public opposition, Straw said it would be "very difficult indeed in those circumstances."
German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said he was optimistic a common position could be reached to exert pressure on Iraq. But different approaches already were evident.
Besides giving inspectors more time, Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel said his country would push - as it did at NATO - for linking any future action to the United Nations.
Dutch Foreign Minister Jaap De Hoop Scheffer said he hoped EU leaders would agree to allow more time for inspections, but with a firm deadline.
Acknowledging the deep divide, Greece - which hold the rotating EU presidency - was not drafting a proposed statement ahead of the summit, preferring to wait and see what emerges from Monday's discussions.
"We do not want dividing lines between the EU countries," Greek Prime Minister Costas Simitis said Sunday in Athens. "We all want peace and we all want to try and find a more practical way of promoting peace."
The disunity within Europe was reflected at NATO headquarters, where Belgium, France and Germany had held out for a month against 14 European allies - as well as the United States and Canada - over starting defensive measures to protect Turkey in case of an Iraq war.
Germany and Belgium dropped their objections for a deal late Sunday, but only after NATO went to its Defense Planning Committee, which does not include France.
TITLE: Blizzard Batters the Eastern U.S.
AUTHOR: By Jason Straziuso
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK - Millions of people across the East spent Presidents Day weekend with shovels in hand after a massive winter storm buried some areas with over half a meter of snow - snarling traffic, closing airports and causing at least a dozen deaths.
The storm was part of a huge system that left its mark in a variety of ways: blizzard conditions in the Northeast; rain, mudslides and floods in the South; heavy snowfall across the eastern United States.
By early Monday, Silver Spring, Maryland, had 64 centimeres of snow and Berkley County in West Virginia had 69 centimeters, the National Weather Service said.
Flakes piled up at a rate of up to 15 centimetres an hour in parts of Maryland, where Governor Robert Ehrlich banned most civilian traffic from state highways. He was one of several governors to declare disaster areas.
"This is looking like the largest storm this year, and it may be one of the top five in our recorded history," said Lora Rakowski of Maryland's Highway Administration. "You name a place, they've got snow - and a lot of it."
At least a dozen deaths have been blamed on the weather since snow and rain moved across the Plains on Friday. The storm moved east at a lethargic pace over the next two days, taking aim at the Ohio Valley and mid-Atlantic before heading into the Northeast.
Forecasters predicted the storm would leave 45 to 65 centimeters in Philadelphia. Forty five to 55 centimeters was expected in New York City. Most areas of the city had received about 25 centimeters by 7:30 a.m. local time Monday - with more snow yet to come.
Some 1,500 plows and 350 salt spreaders were in use, sanitation department spokesperson Keith Mellis said.
"It's getting bad, and it's going to stay bad," said Gary Szatkowski, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Mount Holly, New Jersey.
Forecasters said the storm system would continue its northeasterly trek into Vermont and New Hampshire late Monday as the snow finally tapers off.
In Louisville, Kentucky, wrecked cars lined several area interstates after heavy rain turned to sleet and ice. More than 40,000 households in Lexington were without electricity.
"You'll go down a street and you're lucky if you can get from one end to the other without having to drive around trees," said Pat Dugger, director of environmental and emergency management in Lexington.
In West Virginia, some of the approximately 60,000 residents without electricity were told crews might not be able to restore power until at least Wednesday.
New Jersey, Delaware and New York were under a blizzard warning Monday, meaning visibility could be reduced to less than a quarter mile. Coastal residents in Delaware and New Jersey braced for flooding brought on by an 2 1/2-meter storm surge that was compounded by a full-moon high tide.
The major airports in Philadelphia and the Washington area were closed early Monday except for one runway at Washington Dulles International Airport. Amtrak suspended service between Washington and Richmond, Virginia.
In Tennessee, more than 17 centimeters of rain helped trigger a mudslide early Sunday, destroying an apartment building outside Knoxville, chasing out several dozen tenants.
Hospitals in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania asked for volunteers with four-wheel-drive vehicles to help employees get to and from work.
"It's very nerve-racking out there, because you can't even find the road," said Merrie Street, a spokesperson for the Harford County, Maryland, emergency center.
Public schools and many offices had already been closed Monday because of Presidents Day, a federal holiday.
TITLE: Israel Launches Response To Deadly Suicide Bomb
AUTHOR: By Ibrahim Barzak
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Israeli soldiers killed a top Hamas fugitive in a roadside ambush Monday and, in a separate operation, raided a stronghold of the militant Islamic group, shooting dead two Palestinians and blowing up the house of a suspected bombmaker.
The two Israeli strikes came in response to a deadly Hamas attack on an Israeli tank over the weekend. Israel said it will intensify its hunt for Hamas militants, who have carried out many of the bombings and other attacks against Israeli targets in the past 29 months of fighting.
The Hamas fugitive, Riyad Abu Zeid, 32, was shot and seriously wounded when undercover troops, hiding in a van loaded with vegetables, fired on his black Honda traveling along Gaza's coastal road, witnesses said. Troops apprehended Abu Zeid, who died on the way to an Israeli hospital, the military said.
A Palestinian taxi driver, who gave only his first name, Mohammed, said there were two Palestinian men in the Honda, both taken away by the Israeli military. One man was apparently killed at the scene, the other injured, he said. The identity of the second man was not immediately known.
The army described Abu Zeid, 32, as a senior member of Hamas' military wing who had organized attacks against Israeli targets in the Gaza Strip and suicide bombings inside Israel. He was planning additional attacks, the army said in a statement, without giving details.
Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said Sunday that troops would strike harder against Hamas, including targeted attacks on militants. On Saturday, Hamas activists set off a roadside bomb in Gaza that hit a tank and killed four soldiers.
"There will be no immunity, no sanctuary, not in Gaza ... not in any other place," said Raanan Gissin, an aide to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
In all, 14 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and Gaza Strip during a 24-hour period from midday Sunday to midday Monday, including six Hamas members who died in an unexplained explosion Sunday.
The fresh violence erupted amid new efforts to negotiate a cease-fire and resume peace talks. Israel and the Palestinians sent delegations to London on Monday to meet with members of the so-called Quartet of Mideast mediators - the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia - who are trying to draft a plan to end the fighting and establish a Palestinian state.
Israeli officials did not rule out the possibility that Israeli and Palestinian delegate would meet in London, the first such meeting in many months.
On Sunday, six Hamas activists, including an aide to another top bombmaker Mohammed Deif, were killed in an explosion in another part of Gaza City. It remained unclear Monday whether the blast was caused inadvertently by militants handling explosives or whether Israel targeted the group.
Hamas said in a statement that the six were killed when a small remote-control plane they were testing blew up. The group blamed Israel for the explosion, but did not give evidence. A number of militants have been killed while building bombs. The Israeli military declined comment.
A Hamas leader, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, said Monday his group would retaliate for the deaths of the six activists. "The crime against our fighters will not pass without punishment from Hamas and the Palestinian people," he said.
TITLE: Over 20 Die in Chicago Club Crush
AUTHOR: By Brandon Loomis
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CHICAGO - Hundreds of screaming guests rushed the exit of a crowded nightclub after someone set off a chemical spray, and at least 21 people were crushed to death in the panic on Sunday, fire officials said.
"Everybody smashed; people crying, couldn't breathe," said club goer Reggie Clark. "Two ladies next to me died. A guy under me passed out."
Twenty one people were confirmed dead, Chicago police spokesperson Pat Camden said.
There were more than 1,500 people in the two-story Epitome Night Club on the city's South Side when someone released pepper spray, or Mace, into the air sometime after 2 a.m. local time, Fire Commander Will Knight said.
"It appears a disturbance from within led to a mass chaos where people headed for the door. Most of the fatalities appear to have been crushed or had injuries due to suffocation," said police Officer Ozzie Rodriguez.
Cory Thomas, 33, went to the club to pick up two friends. As he waited outside, he saw people inside the club start to back up against the glass front door.
"You could see a mound of people. People were stacking on top of each other, screaming and gagging, I guess from the pepper spray. The door got blocked because there were too many people stacked up against it," he said.
"I saw them taking out a pregnant woman," Thomas said. "She was in bad shape. I saw at least 10 lifeless bodies."
Kristy Mitchell, 22, was one of the people trampled on the stairway.
"People were stomping my legs," she said. "When they pulled me up, I was dizzy and I couldn't breathe."
Knight said the total number of injuries was unclear because many of those with minor injuries were being taken to hospitals by family and friends.
The melee marks one of the nation's deadliest stampedes.
In December 1991, nine young people were crushed to death in a gymnasium stairwell while awaiting a celebrity basketball game in New York.
In December 1979, 11 people were killed in Cincinnati in a crush to get into a concert by The Who.
TITLE: Houston Wins the Battle of L.A. for N.Y.
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LOS ANGELES - It became the Allan vs. Kobe Show at Staples Center.
Surprisingly, Allan won. And so did his team.
Allan Houston scored an NBA season-high 53 points as the Knicks beat Kobe Bryant and the short-handed Los Angeles Lakers 117-110 on Sunday night.
Houston shot 18-of-29 including 4-of-5 from 3-point range, and made 12 of 14 attempts from the foul line in 43 minutes, as he surpassed the 51 points scored by Bryant at Denver last Wednesday night.
Houston became the fifth player in franchise history to score 50 or more points, and the first since Patrick Ewing accomplished the feat on Dec. 1, 1990.
It was the most points by a Knicks player since Bernard King scored 55 against New Jersey on Feb. 16, 1985.
The total tied for the fourth-highest in franchise history.
"To get a win and have something like that happen individually, it feels great," Houston said. "It felt good just to get going and then it didn't stop."
"It was like being out on the playground again, you're just out there having fun and playing the game," he said.
Houston said he had never scored that many points at any level.
"Never, ever," he said.
He also said he didn't know how many he had most of the game.
"Sometimes I am aware," he said. "I didn't know, I really didn't. I didn't want to look."
Bryant led the Lakers with 40 points - the fifth consecutive game in which he's scored 40 or more and the ninth straight of at least 35.
Bryant has scored 378 points in those nine games (42.0 average). Against the Knicks, he made 14 of 31 shots including 3-of-5 from 3-point range and 9-of-10 free throws in 42 minutes.
"He had a wonderful game tonight," Bryant said of Houston, a 10-year NBA veteran. "He was right on target all night long. He's a great shooter. Once a guy gets hot like that, once they catch fire, it's tough to put out."
The Lakers played without Shaquille O'Neal, who missed the game because of a sore left knee.
"The doctors came in and we decided he should sit the game out this time," Lakers coach Phil Jackson said. "It will be game-to-game. We're not taking X-rays or MRIs, he doesn't feel it's necessary."
The loss was the second straight for the Lakers (26-25) following a seven-game winning streak.
"We couldn't seem to do anything with Houston," Jackson said. "We double-teamed him and gave up 3-point shots to somebody else or layups or he made his shots. Obviously it wasn't working very well. Obviously, we have to have our personnel to play well. We don't have a lot of parts that are adjustable without."
The three-time defending NBA champions fell one game behind the Houston Rockets in the battle for the eighth and final Western Conference playoff berth.
The Knicks (23-28) moved within 1 1/2 games of the Washington Wizards, who are eighth in the Eastern Conference.
Latrell Sprewell added 14 points and Othella Harrington scored 10 for the Knicks. Derek Fisher scored 21 points, Brian Shaw added 16 and Devean George had 14 for the Lakers.
San Antonio 104, Sacramento 101. Tim Duncan had 34 points and 12 rebounds, and Emanuel Ginobili grabbed two key offensive rebounds in the final seconds as the Spurs beat the Sacramento Kings 104-101 on Sunday.
Malik Rose had 15 points and nine rebounds and hit two go-ahead free throws with 1:33 left, while Tony Parker had 18 points and seven assists as the Spurs finished their odyssey with eight straight wins after losing the opener at Minnesota on Jan. 27.
"You don't plan on going 8-1 on a road trip," Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said. "At the beginning, we wouldn't have thought that would have happened. We're thrilled, but hopefully we're not that thrilled."
The Spurs beat five playoff contenders during the trip, which stretched through the All-Star break and across all four time zones. Yet after 22 days on the road, San Antonio still had enough hustle and poise to hold off the Kings in the NBA's toughest road arena.
"I'm just glad it's over," Duncan said. "We get to spend some time at home now, and that's a luxury."
So was Duncan happy with the trip?
"We wanted to win all nine," he said, "but there's no disappointment at all."
The Spurs have won 17 of 20 since Jan. 1, and they capped their trip with victories over the Kings and the Los Angeles Lakers. What's more, they did it all without David Robinson, who's on the injured list.
Vlade Divac had 22 points and nine rebounds as Sacramento, the NBA's best home team over the past three seasons, lost at Arco Arena for just the fifth time this season.
(For other results, see Scorecard.)
TITLE: Tugnutt Backs Stars To Win Over Sharks
AUTHOR: By Stephen Hawkins
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: DALLAS - The Dallas Stars reclaimed the top point total in the NHL after another impressive goaltending performance.
Ron Tugnutt, filling in for injured All-Star goalie Marty Turco, stopped 19 of 20 shots - allowing only a 5-on-3 goal - and the Stars beat the San Jose Sharks 3-1 on Sunday night.
"They had some good chances early on, but he was our best player," Stars center Mike Modano said. "It was a good game for him to bounce back with."
Ulf Dahlen scored while sprawling to the ice in the second period for the first goal. That one put the Stars ahead to stay. Derian Hatcher added a goal 90 seconds into the third, and Jere Lehtinen later scored for the Stars in the only NHL game Sunday.
With 81 points, Dallas has the points lead, one ahead of Eastern Conference-leader Ottawa. The Stars have won a league-high 21 home games (21-3-4-1).
While Modano was honored before the game for the milestones he reached this season - 1,000 career points, 600 assists and his 1,000th NHL game, which he played Tuesday - Tugnutt took over the spotlight once the puck was dropped.
In his first start for Turco, who is out at least another week because of a left ankle injury sustained Tuesday, Tugnutt faced just 19 shots in a 4-2 loss to Anaheim on Friday night. But he kept the Stars from losing consecutive games for only the third time this season.
San Jose took 10 shots in the first period, with Tugnutt rejecting a point-black shot by Marco Sturm on a power play just two minutes into the game.
"He was good. Tugnutt has been a good goalie in this league for a long time. Marty Turco is having a great year, but Tugnutt can play well, too," Sharks center Mike Ricci said.
"The first period for me was key, getting a couple of shots," Tugnutt said. "I had more of a relaxed feeling and was more focused. I prepared myself better today than at any time this year."
Tugnutt is 9-4-2 with a 2.37 goals-against average. He has won six of his last eight decisions.
San Jose has lost five of six, all on the road. Dallas has won the first three games in the season series against the Sharks - all by 3-1 scores.
Dahlen worked the puck along the boards behind the net against Todd Harvey. As Dahlen made a move to the front, he fell down and took a swipe at the puck, knocking it between the legs of Miikka Kiprusoff. Dahlen's 13th goal gave Dallas a 1-0 lead with 7:12 left in the second period.
"We started the way we wanted to. We clogged the middle and we only let them have a few shots," Sharks center Vincent Damphousse said. "But then they score a goal and they're tough when they have the lead."
Hatcher assisted on Lehtinen's 23rd goal with 8:28 left, giving him his first multipoint game of the season. Lehtinen's one-timer into the right side of the net, just past Kiprusoff's glove, came after a nifty flipback pass from rookie Niko Kapanen.
Kiprusoff stopped 21 shots.
San Jose had come off a power play, in which Dallas had two slap shots for the best scoring chances, when Hatcher scored on a rebound of Scott Young's shot. Hatcher's fourth goal made it 2-0.
The Sharks were given a 5-on-3 when Stephane Robidas was called for high-sticking, and during the delay before the penalty was enforced Claude Lemieux was whistled for the same offense.
Damphousse found the top right corner for his 16th goal 53 seconds into the two-man advantage. The Sharks weren't able to take advantage of the final 1:07 of the power play when they had a 5-on-4 advantage.
Modano extended his scoring streak to four games with an assist on Dahlen'sgoal. He has 12 points (six goals, six assists) in his last eight games.
(For other results, see Scorecard.)
TITLE: Waltrip Takes Third Daytona Crown
AUTHOR: By Mike Harris
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: DAYTONA BEACH, Florida - Michael Waltrip is the new master of Daytona. He doesn't win anywhere else.
It's a burden well worth bearing - being the best driver in NASCAR's biggest race, at stock-car racing's most famous track.
Under dark clouds, Waltrip raced past leader Jimmie Johnson after a restart on lap 106 Sunday to win the rain-shortened Daytona 500 for the second time in three years.
Counting last year's Pepsi 400, Waltrip has three victories in the last five races at the Daytona International Speedway.
Those are the only ones in his 535 career starts.
Favorite Dale Earnhardt Jr., done in by a bad alternator and dead battery, helped his friend and teammate take the lead on the last green-flag lap.
"I had a plan," Waltrip said. "I knew what I had to do. I had to get behind Junior."
"I did that and I was able to squeeze out the win," he said.
Waltrip's first Winston Cup victory came at the 2001 Daytona 500, in his first race with Dale Earnhardt Inc.
But his joy was wiped away by the fatal last-lap crash of Dale Earnhardt Sr., his boss and friend.
After his latest victory, Waltrip paid tribute to the seven-time Winston Cup champion and Daytona's winningest driver with 34 wins, including the 1998 Daytona 500.
"I'm so thankful - thankful for Dale Earnhardt," Waltrip said.
"He made this place so special over the years," he said. "He was about this race."
"I know he's smiling now," he said.
Kurt Busch finished second, followed by Johnson and Kevin Harvick.
Mark Martin, last year's series runner-up, was fifth, with Robby Gordon sixth and defending Winston Cup champion Tony Stewart seventh.
This was the third time in the race's 45 editions that the Daytona 500 was shortened by rain.
Fred Lorenzen ran 133 laps in winning in 1965, and Richard Petty took the 1966 race in 198 laps.
TITLE: Venus Stars at Diamond Games
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ANTWERP, Belgium - Venus Williams dared sister Serena to a Diamond Games duel next year for the diamond-encrusted trophy.
The challenge came after Venus overwhelmed Belgian star Kim Clijsters 6-2, 6-4 on Sunday, taking a step closer to owning the $1.07 million, 1,700-gem-studded trophy racket for good.
"If you want to challenge me here, Serena, if you are watching, come on," Venus said after winning her second consecutive Antwerp title. "She loves gold and fine jewels. If she comes, she comes ... But I put myself in a good position to get the racket."
If Williams wins the Antwerp event in any of the next three years, she can claim the diamond racket as her own. The trophy goes to the first triple champion in any five-year span.
"I have a great chance to do that now," said Williams, who vowed to come back next year. "I have no choice."
But beating her younger sister will be a tough task. Venus lost to Serena in each of the last four Grand Slam finals, including the Australian Open final last month, and still remains No. 2 in the world behind her sister.
Williams, however, took this weekend's title in stride, playing relaxed and composed against Clijsters, who had the hometown crowd behind her.
In a final against the Belgian, ranked No. 3 in the world, Williams' overpowering serve and flawless backcourt game made the difference. The American slammed serves peaking at 187 kilometers per hour.
"She was simply far too strong on the important points," Clijsters said. "Her first serves made a lot of difference."
Williams sparkling victory capped a great week of tennis in Antwerp, not losing a set in the $585,000 tournament where four of the world's top five players reached the semifinal.
In San Jose, California, Andre Agassi beat Davide Sanguinetti 6-3, 6-1 on Sunday to capture the Siebel Open - his 56th career title.
"I thought he was going to miss a little bit more, but he didn't miss at all," Sanguinetti said. "I said sooner or later he's going to miss, but the time didn't come."
Agassi won 12 of the last 14 games and finished off Sanguinetti in 62 minutes to capture his fifth Siebel Open.
After losing the first two games of Sunday's match, Agassi lost just one more game in the first set. He won the first three games of the second set before Sanguinetti held serve, then won the final three games.
"For me, this feeling only gets better," Agassi told spectators before accepting his trophy.
Sanguinetti, a UCLA alum seeking his third career title, spent much of the match shrugging his shoulders and complaining about line calls. At one point he asked chair umpire Steve Ullrich: "Do you want a pillow?"
The Italian ranked 69th in the world and seeded sixth opened the match by holding serve and then took a 2-0 lead when Agassi double faulted on game point.
But Agassi responded by winning four straight games, including a pair of service breaks. After falling behind 3-2, Sanguinetti looked at coach Roberto Brogin and shrugged as if wondering, "What can I do?"
"When he's playing like that, he's the best. He's hitting the ball on the line, he's perfect, he's like a machine," Sanguinetti said. "When he's playing like that, he's on fire. Everything he was doing was going in."
Agassi, ranked second in the world, indeed is perfect this year - having won all 12 of his matches at the Australian Open and the Siebel Open.
He has lost just two sets all year.
In Doha, Qatar, Second-seeded Anastasia Myskina of Russia beat fifth-seeded compatriot Yelena Likhovtseva 6-3, 6-1 Saturday in the Qatar Open for her third career title.
"I played well and I'm very happy that I won the title," Myskina said. "I didn't have a specific game plan, I just tried to win points as they came."
Likhovtseva said she had no answer to Myskina's attacking tennis.
"She played much better than me. I wasn't playing well at all. The second set ended pretty quickly and I think the turning point was when Myskina broke me in the sixth game of the first set," Likhovtseva said.
"After that, I just couldn't get my act together," she said.
It was the first time two Russian women had met in an ATP tour final.