SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #881 (49), Friday, July 4, 2003
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TITLE: Campaign Kick Off Attracts a Crowd
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Five potential candidates for governor have already submitted their registration documents as the official opening on Wednesday of the campaign ahead of the Sept. 21 vote touched off a flurry of activity.
 
Valentina Matviyenko, the presidential representative in the Northwest Region, filed her documents with the City Elections Committee (CEC) on Thursday morning, making her the fourth person to do so. On Wednesday, Alexander Gabitov, a council member from municipal district No. 62 and the son-in-law of State Duma Speaker Gennady Selesnyov, Gennady Kuptsov, the former governor of the Lipetskaya Oblast, and Alexei Timofeyev, a Legislative Assembly lawmaker from the Sport Russia faction. Nikolai Kuznetsov, the general director of Airlen, a regional air firm.
 While the registration of the three candidates on Wednesday kicked off the campaign, it was Matviyenko's formal announcement that drew the most coverage. Matviyenko showed up at the CEC with here registration papers at 9:15 a.m. and commented both on the activity so far and the race ahead.
 "[The number of candidates so far] is splendid, as the elections have to give the voters alternatives," Interfax quoted her as saying. "The main motive of my campaign will be to get to meet with citizens at the factories where they work and at the places where people live."
 In order to register, candidates must submit either a list of the signatures of 37,000 registered voters - one percent of the total for the city - or pay a deposit of 7.5 million rubles ($247,000). The deposit is refunded as long as the candidate garners over five percent of the votes cast. If the candidate fails to top this plateau, the deposit is forfeited to the city budget.
 "None of the candidates have submitted the signatures [of voters] for the moment and, with regard to Kuptsov, he has yet to submit a number of the other documents," said Dmitry Krasnyanskay, the legal issues consultant at the City Electoral Commission in an interview on Wednesday. "[The fact that] so many candidates appeared in just one day is a little bit overwhelming. I expect that we'll have seven or eight candidates by the end of the registration period."
 "It is still not clear, you see, how many of those who apply will just be crazy people who we will half to rule out," he added.
 The registration period runs for 30 days and ends at 6 p.m. on July 31.
 A poll carried out over the weekend by the Agency of Social Information, a local public-opinion research firm, suggests that Matviyenko enjoys solid popularity for the launch of her campaign.
 Asked to chose from a list of potential candidates 37.7 percent of respondents said that their choice would be Matviyenko. Oksana Dmitriyeva, a State Duma deputy from the Small Business Development Party, who announced this week that she had no plans to run, received the next highest support at 7.6 percent, followed by Communist State Duma Deputy Sergei Glaziyev at 5.3 percent and Yabloko State Duma Deputy Igor Artenyev with 3.2 percent.
 Vice-governor Anna Markova was next with 3.1 percent. Markova announced last month that she would be a candidate to fill the post vacated by former Governor Vladimir Yakovlev when he was appointed deputy prime minister on June 16 but backtracked on Tuesday, saying that she was still considering her options.
 The poll also revealed that Matviyenko drew the largest negative response - 9.8 percent of all respondents.
 The poll involved asking 1,000 respondents to chose from a prepared list of possible candidates and has a margin of error of two percent. Matviyenko was the only candidate of the five who have submitted their documents to date included on the list.
 The results of the poll raised some eyebrows, as the Agency for Social Information has close business contacts with the Rosbalt information agency, which is headed by Natalya Chaplina, the wife of Federal Anti-Drug Committee chief Viktor Cherkesov. Cherkesov occupied the presidential representative's post before moving to his present job and being replaced by Matvityenko in March. Both are close to the Kremlin.
 "Thirty seven? This must have been a misprint - they meant to write 110 percent," Leonid Kesselman, a political analyst at the Sociology Department of the Russian Academy of Science, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. "Soon they would find about another ten [low-profile] candidates and say this offers a good number of alternatives."
 "All of this just leads to more apathy in society with relation to power," he added.
 Roman Mogilevsky, the head of the Agency for Social Information denies that the results were shaped in any way.
 "If her rating dropped tomorrow to half of what it is today, I would report it immediately," Mogilevsky said in a telephone interview on Thursday.
 He said that, according to surveys the agency has been conducting weekly since Matviyenko was appointed as regional presidential representative, her rating has grown from 7 percent to 28 percent at the time she announced her intention to run last Tuesday, and then to its present level of 37 percent.
 "The current jump is linked to the so-called 'lowered expectations' potential voters and the fact that after Gennady Seleznyov said that he wouldn't run, another six percent switched over to Matviyenko, which was a real surprise for me," Mogilevsky said. "If the current trends continue, then it doesn't seem like there would be a need for a second round."
 If no candidate receives 50 percent of the vote in the first round, a run off is held between the top two vote getters.
 Mogilevsky also said that the "Against All Candidates" vote was relatively low - 5.1 percent - a fact that St. Petersburg League of Voters representative Tatyana Dorutina said is linked to the fact that turnout will also be low.
 "I don't think that the turnout will be great because everybody already knows the result in advance," Dorutina said in a telephone interview on Thursday. "Everything has already been decided."
 Gabitov, who was the first candidate to show up at the CEC - at 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday - said that he was counting on picking up the protest vote.
 "I respect Matviyenko very much and it is very pleasant for me to run a campaign in the company of not only a good looking woman, but also a wise politician," Gabitov said in a telephone interview on Thursday, "I will represent a constructive alternative to her, picking up protest votes from young people."
 "We need to do something good for the city, to celebrate an alternative 300th-anniversary celebration, this one for the city's residents, on Sept. 14," he added.
 "We're not going to invite anybody except one very respected person from Moscow: our president, Vladimir Putin," he said.
 But Matviyenko is clearly the front-runner as the campaign opens as, on Wednesday, even acting Governor Alexander Beglov, said that he planned to support Matviyenko's campaign.

TITLE: Oligarch Abramovich Buys English Soccer Club
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina and Kevin O'Flynn
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Roman Abramovich announced on Wednesday that he is buying the soccer team Chelsea FC for $233 million, sending shock waves through the soccer world. British fans and reporters scrambled for information about the publicity-shy billionaire.
 
Abramovich, Russia's second richest person, with an estimated fortune of $5.7 billion, struck the deal with Chelsea owner Ken Bates late on Tuesday. Under the agreement, a newly created British firm, wholly owned by Abramovich will pay ***60 million ($100 million) in cash for a 50.09 percent stake in the club's parent company, Chelsea Village PLC, and assume its debt of ***80 million.
 "We are delighted to agree on this deal to acquire what is already one of the top clubs in Europe," Abramovich said in a statement. "We have the resources and ambition to achieve even more, given the huge potential of this great club."
 The purchase will be financed out of the personal fortune Abramovich has built in oil and aluminum.
 "In today's highly competitive football market, the club will benefit from a new owner with deeper pockets to move Chelsea to the next level," said Bates, who has owned the club for 21 years. "I look forward to working with Roman Abramovich to achieve even greater things."
 Abramovich, however, does not plan to run the club personally. He will be represented on the Chelsea board by Sibneft CEO Eugene Shvidler, Sibneft CFO Richard Creitzman and Millhouse Capital head Eugene Tenenbaum, a source close to Sibneft said on Wednesday.
 Abramovich, 36, is a large shareholder in the Sibneft oil major, while Millhouse Capital is his London-based asset-management company. He also is the governor of the Chukotka region.
 The London Stock Exchange on Wednesday opened an investigation into the Chelsea sale after a sharp jump in the pre-takeover share price of Chelsea Village. Exchange sources said the company's shares surged from 14 pence ($0.23) in April to 30 pence ($0.50) by the end of June, Agence France Presse reported. Abramovich's offer values the company at 35 pence ($0.58) per share.
 News of the deal came as a shock to even the most vigilant of fans. John Russell, the head of Chelsea's main fan club, said that there had been no speculation about the deal before it was signed.
 "The main problem is that no one knows who Abramovich is. No one has even seen a photo of him yet," Russell said by telephone.
 For some, the acquisition was a cause for outright alarm. Former British Sports Minister Tony Banks said that Abramovich would have to answer questions about his intentions for the club and his previous business relationship with Boris Berezovsky, who once owned Sibneft and is being sought by Moscow on fraud charges.
 "We have got to ask questions about whether he is a fit and proper person to own the club," Banks, a Chelsea fan for 50 years, said in a telephone interview. "Is it a mere plaything for a billionaire or has he serious intentions?"
 Others also expressed skepticism. "He's clearly got more money than sense," a Manchester-based lawyer said. "Chelsea Village is making huge losses, so how he's going to turn that around is anyone's guess."
 Russian soccer officials lamented that he was not putting the money into soccer at home. The investment into Chelsea is close to the 2003 budget of all of the Russian Premier League clubs combined.
 "I can only think about how many soccer pitches we could build for that much money," said Vladimir Radionov, the general secretary of the Russian Football Union.
 But one Chelsea fan who also recognized Abramovich's name said that he was thrilled. "I'm quite pleased really," said Gary Tebbutt, operations manager at Renaissance Capital's London office.
 Tebbutt said that Abramovich could help Chelsea get to the top of the English Premier League, providing he does not go on a shopping spree for expensive players and buys "a few quality ones to fill key positions."
 Speculation swirled after the deal around what might have prompted Abramovich to make the purchase.
 "Maybe he can help Chelsea like he helped Chukhotka," said an official at a rival Russian oil major. As governor, Abramovich has won the praise of local residents by putting his own money into building schools and sending hundreds of local children to the Black Sea.
 Stephen O'Sullivan, the co-head of research at United Financial Group, said that the motive might be as simple as Abramovich's interest in sports.
 Abramovich owns the hockey team Avangard Omsk. Speculation has surfaced in recent months that he is buying out soccer club CSKA Moscow. One source close to Abramovich said on Wednesday that he already controls the club, but Sibneft spokesperson John Mann denied this.
 Owning more than 50 percent in both Chelsea and CSKA would pose a headache, because UEFA rules say that only one team would have the right to participate in the same European competition. CSKA and Chelsea will both compete in the UEFA Champions League this year.
 O'Sullivan said that the buy could have been an ego booster.
 "Things like football clubs are also trophy assets for rich businessmen," he said, adding that Abramovich's interests differ little from those of Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed, who owns the Fulham club.
 Chelsea's stadium is located in one of the most fashionable parts of London, and the club has attracted the rich and famous for decades, even though it has won the English championship only once, in 1955.
 Officials at Abramovich-owned companies said that their offices were flooded with calls Wednesday from perplexed British reporters.
 Natasha Chouvaeva, the publisher and editor of the Russian London Courier, also received scores of calls from fellow reporters.
 "Everyone was asking 'Who is Putin?' last week, and this week everyone is asking 'Who is Abramovich?'" she said.
 "Standards have slipped," she said.

TITLE: New Kaliningrad Rules Causing Glitches
AUTHOR: By Alla Startseva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - EU, Lithuanian and Italian officials joined the Kremlin's envoy to Kaliningrad on one of the first trains traveling under new transit rules across Lithuania, and after arriving back in Moscow on Wednesday they conceded that a few kinks remain in the system.
 
"We understand that the Kaliningrad transit system is new, and we expected that some cracks might appear," Kremlin envoy Dmitry Rogozin told reporters. "Problems arose."
 Chaos broke out and tempers flared on the first transit trains to depart the Kaliningrad exclave under the stricter visa regime introduced by EU-hopeful Lithuania on Tuesday. More than 60 people, including a group of 22 children, were thrown off trains at the Lithuanian border.
 Rogozin said those passengers bought their tickets in Belarus and Ukraine, and the Lithuanian authorities were not notified before they reached the border. Those who purchased tickets at Russian ticket offices had no problem, as the offices are linked with Lithuania under a new travel system. 
 Rogozin's Kaliningrad-bound train passed a group of 47 stranded passengers from Chelyabinsk on Tuesday, and he managed to persuade border officials to put them on the next train to the exclave, he said.
 On Wednesday, he ordered the Foreign and Railways ministries to send representatives to the border to assist passengers who run into trouble.
 "I am not going to travel on each transit train myself," he said.
 Representatives from the Russian Consulate in Brest, Belarus, have been dispatched to the border together with a Federal Border Service official, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Alexander Yakovenko said.
 Eleven people were removed from trains Wednesday, Interfax reported.
 The Lithuanian visa requirements came into force as part of the Baltic country's preparations to bring its visa regime in line with the EU's ahead of its entry into the European Union next year.
 Under a deal struck between the EU and Russia in November, Russian citizens are being allowed to make the trip on a multientry visa or a so-called facilitated transit document - a single-transit permit. A passenger must buy the ticket at least two days before the trip - so that Lithuanian Embassy officials have time to process the paperwork - and the permit is handed out on the train.
 Lithuanian Ambassador Rimantas Sidlauskas said that the embassy in Moscow has rejected only three of the 23,000 requests for single-transit permits received so far. He said that the embassy has gotten only two applications for the multientry visas, which cost 5 euros and last three years.
 Sidlauskas made the train trip together with Rogozin and the head of the European Commission's delegation in Russia, Richard Wright, and Italian Ambassador Gianfranco Facco Bonetti, whose country currently holds the EU's rotating presidency.
 The four officials agreed on Wednesday that the transit system is highly effective.
 "I think that there will be no problems within the next few weeks. The system will be fine-tuned," Rogozin said.
 EU officials had expressed concern that Russians might jump off moving trains in an attempt to immigrate into the EU, but Wright said that the trip had assured him that this would not happen.
 "I think the controls on the train will prevent incidents of this kind," he said. "Illegal immigrants will be taken back if they are found on a train."

TITLE: Gryzlov's Party Post Stands Test
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A group of Communist deputies on Tuesday asked the Justice Ministry to issue a warning to United Russia over Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov's leadership post in the party.
 
The Justice Ministry refused, saying that Gryzlov was not breaking any law by holding the two posts.
 The law does not explicitly bar government officials from joining parties, but does ban them from holding senior positions in their parties. 
 If a party breaks the law, the Justice Ministry must issue an official warning and, if the party does not remove the government official from its ranks within two months, the ministry can ask a court to suspend its activities.
 Gryzlov is one of the four co-chairpeople of United Russia's higher council.
 Communist deputies, including Sergei Glazyev, Viktor Ilyukhin and Igor Rodionov, fired off a letter to Justice Minister Yury Chaika on Tuesday asking him to issue a warning to the pro-Kremlin party.
 It took the Justice Ministry just a few hours to decide that the law was not being broken because the higher council is not an executive body of United Russia. 
 "Boris Gryzlov has not violated the letter of law," ministry spokesperson Boris Kalyagin said in a phone interview on Wednesday evening.
 United Russia officials dismissed the Communist appeal. Gryzlov "is not a party member and is fulfilling his duties as a chairperson ... only in his spare time," a member of United Russia's general council, Konstantin Kosachev, was quoted by local media as saying.
 Ilyukhin said Gryzlov has used his Interior Ministry car to travel to United Russia gatherings and even handed out party cards at a police station in the Tver region. Ilyukhin told Gazeta that senior Interior Ministry officials have complained to him that they are "tired of running errands for United Russia."
 On paper, the party's higher council is an advisory body. But its four rotating co-chairpeople are all powerful political players. In addition to Gryzlov, they include Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, Tatar President Mintimer Shaimiyev and Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu.

TITLE: Corrupt Border Police Busted
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Police announced Tuesday that they have busted a ring of active and former Federal Border Service officials who forged Russian foreign-travel passports and arranged for wanted criminals to sneak out of the country through Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport.
 
City-police detectives working with Federal Security Service agents arrested six suspected members of the gang and found 40 forged passports in one of the suspects' apartments, a police spokesperson said.
 Some of the passports were stamped with fake U.S. visas, apparently to make them appear more legitimate, she said.
 The ring operated by entering the forged passports into the Federal Border Service's electronic data base and then arranging for the holders to pass through the airport checkpoint, the spokeswoman said, speaking on condition that she not be identified. The fee varied from $3,500 to $10,000, she said.
 "The largest channel for smuggling people who are on the wanted list has been shut down," Fillip Zolotnitsky, spokesperson for the economic-crime directorate, told Interfax on Monday. Calls to Zolotnitsky went unanswered.
 The group was headed by a former border-guard officer, who ran a private security company after retiring, the police spokesperson said. He and two accomplices worked hand-in-hand with three border guards at Sheremetyevo-2.
 Neither she nor a Federal Border Service officer, reached by telephone at the service's headquarters, would say when the arrests took place or identify the suspects. The border-guard officer said only that two of the Sheremetyevo guards are men, one is a woman, and one of the three is an officer.
 All have been charged with abuse of power and bribery, and could spend up to 10 years in prison if tried and convicted, the police spokesperson said.
 Police are busy trying to identify the people whose photos are in the seized passports and to determine how many people may already have slipped away from Russia with the help of this ring, she said.
 Police suspect that some contract killers could have used the forged passports to flee Russia, Channel One television reported.
 The police spokesperson said that the ring was busted in a sting operation run by the city police force's economic-crime department. She said it worked like this: A detective, posing as a potential client, got in touch with the suspects. They forged a passport for him, and included four fake U.S. visas as well as several exit and entry stamps. The detective then used the passport to go through border control at Sheremetyevo-2 with the help of one of the three border guards.
 The Federal Border Service official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that his service is conducting an internal investigation of what he described as "an unprecedented incident."
 The official disputed the police version of events, saying that even if the three border guards committed crimes, they were not, to his knowledge, members of any organized group. "They do not constitute gang," he said.
 In Russian news reports, the suspects were immediately branded a "gang of border guards." Rossia television called them "werewolves," the same word Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov used to describe a group of officers from the Moscow police force's criminal-investigation directorate, or MUR, who were arrested last week.
 In Russian, the word <i>oboroten</i>, or werewolf, is commonly used for officers who have turned bad.
 The MUR officers are suspected of conspiring to extort protection fees from Moscow businesses and of planting drugs and pistols on those who refused to pay. Following their arrests, the Interior Ministry vowed to crack down on crooked cops and promised more arrests.

TITLE: Traffic Accidents Taking Massive Toll
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Damages incurred in traffic accidents reached 182 billion rubles (about $6 billion) last year, or a whopping 1.6 percent of 2002 gross domestic product, a senior traffic police official said.
 
In 2002, 32,200 people were killed and 215,000 were injured in 184,000 accidents, said Vladimir Kuzin, a department head in the traffic police. Another 1 million accidents resulted in damaged property, he said.
 2002 was the first year the traffic police tallied damages from traffic accidents, as part of the run-up to the introduction of mandatory car insurance across the country on Tuesday.
 Kuzin took the statistics from a new government report on road conditions. He did not provide any details concerning the report's methodology or how damages were calculated.
 &quot;Traffic accidents have worse consequences in Russia than in European countries,&quot; Kuzin said late last week. &quot;In Europe, three to five people die in every 100 accidents, while in Russia this figure reaches 14. This is too high.&quot;
 Moreover, there are 500 to 600 cars for every 1,000 people in Europe, while Russia has only 200 cars per 1,000 people, he said. Some 33 million vehicles were registered in Russia as of last year, excluding those used by the military and several other state agencies.
 Kuzin blamed the high accident rate on poor driving skills.
 &quot;Every third new driver is unable to pass the driving test on the first attempt,&quot; he was quoted by Interfax as saying.
 He did not comment on the widespread practice of drivers paying bribes to skip driving school and obtain licenses.
 Kuzin said that drunk-driving accidents jumped by 16 percent last year, while the number of unsolved accidents, including hit and runs, grew by 18.5 percent.
 In Moscow, meanwhile, traffic accidents appear to be on the decline this year.
 Deputy city traffic police chief Alexander Khodakov said that the number of accidents fell about 18 percent in the first five months of 2003, compared to the same period last year. Accident fatalities have fallen by 25.9 percent.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Request for Transfer
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Legislative Assembly lawmakers sent a petition to the City Court on Wednesday calling for the transfer of fellow lawmaker Yury Shutov to a hospital outside the detention center where he is presently being treated, an Interfax report said.
 Alexander Redko, the head of the Health and Ecology Commission in the Legislative Assembly, said that the commission received letters from Shutov and the city's chief neurologist, Alexander Skoromyets, saying that Shutov had been diagnosed with serious neurological problems, the Interfax report said.
 The Gaza hospital, where Shutov is presently being treated, is not licensed to perform neuro-surgery, so Skoromyets asked the assembly members to ask that Shutov be moved either to City Hospital No. 2 or the Academy of Military Medicine. 



TITLE: Daria Boosts Local Production
AUTHOR: By Angelina Davydova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: One of the leading producers of frozen foods in Russia, Daria, opened the first phase of a new production facility in Pushkin on Thursday at a cost of $14 million, according to the company's director Igor Pastukhov. 
 
Analysts estimate that the frozen-food market is one of the fastest developing sectors in the food industry, with 75 out of every 82 consumers in Russia regularly buying <i>pelmeni</i> or other kinds of frozen, semi-prepared foodstuffs.
 Daria, founded in 1998 by local entrepreneur Oleg Tinkov, the owner of Tinkoff micro-breweries, who later sold it to Planeta Management Group, has a 23-percent market share in St. Petersburg within the frozen-food sector, a 29-percent market share in Moscow and a 10-percent share of the entire Russian market, according to Business Analytica market-research company. The company manufactures 100 tons of foodstuffs per day and markets 130 different brands. Planeta Management Group is owned by Roman Abramovich, the recent buyer of Chelsea Football Club (see story, page 1). 
 The new plant, at a total cost of $21 million and with a capacity of 210 tons per day, will be fully launched at the end of 2004, Pastukhov said. The production line opened with the completion of the first phase of the plant has a capacity of 40 tons per day.
 According to Pastukhov, the new production facility will specialize on new products and brands, while facilities already operating in St. Petersburg, which have a maximum capacity of 60 tons per day, will focus on the manufacture of <i>pelmeni</i>.
 At the press conference on Thursday, Daria also presented two new brands that the company believes will account for 5 percent of its total production volume.
 Consumption of <i>pelmeni</i> and similar products has increased drastically over the last few years. &quot;People have, in general, had negative attitudes towards frozen foods since the Soviet era but, with massive promotional campaigns from leading producers, consumption is growing,&quot; said Michael Podushko, an analyst at research company COMCON-St. Petersburg.
 &quot;The introduction of the term &quot;foodstuffs for light cooking&quot; did a great job for their promotion,&quot; he said.
 According to COMCON research, in 2002, 75.6 percent of St. Petersburg households consumed <i>pelmeni</i> at least once per three months, with brand leaders including Raviollo, Kolpinskie, Daria and Bogatyrskye.
 According to the same research, 42.9 percent of St. Petersburg households consumed frozen cutlets at least once every three months, and 20.2 percent bought bliny.
 There are around 100 <i>pelmeni</i> and frozen-food producers in St. Petersburg, with local manufacturing facilities Talosto, Ravioli, Daria and Kolibri occupying around 75 percent to 80 percent of the local market, according to the statistics of the Toy-Opinion research company.
 According to the Toy-Opinion research, 80 percent of <i>pelmeni</i> produced in St. Petersburg is exported to other regions in Russia.

TITLE: The President's Dangerous Personal Preferences
AUTHOR: By Olga Kryshtanovskaya
TEXT: 
 
President Boris Yeltsin reshuffled personnel so often that officials were prepared for dismissal at any moment. He brought <i>raznochintsy</i> (or &quot;people of other ranks&quot;) to the pinnacle of power - people who had no prior experience of government service. The secretive President Vladimir Putin acts quietly and almost imperceptibly but, in the three years of his presidency, the Russian elite has changed fundamentally. The corridors of power have swelled with people coming from a military, law-enforcement or security-service background; and legislatures at all different levels are overrun by businesspeople. If, as the famous phrase goes, cadres decide everything - then these changes call into question the future of Russian democracy.
 
It is no big secret that Putin trusts those he has worked with and people from St. Petersburg. But the extent to which the authorities have become militarized only really becomes apparent on close study. Between 2001 and 2003, the department for elite studies in the Institute of Sociology has been conducting research on the Putin elite. More than 3,500 biographies of government members, senior presidential-administration personnel, deputies of both chambers of the Federal Assembly, the regional elite and major businesspeople have been analyzed.
 The results of the study make quite an impression. It is the staffs of presidential envoys that have experienced the most precipitous invasion of military personnel (up to 70 percent of the total). The apparatuses of presidential envoys and federal inspectors have consolidated the forces of federal agencies in the regions. And, whereas the heads of the local branches of the FSB, Interior Ministry, Federal Tax Police and prosecutors used to be under the de facto control of the governors, now that control is exercised by the presidential envoys. In each federal district, security councils have been set up that include the regional heads of law enforcement, military and intelligence agencies.This has stripped the regional elite of a serious support base and weakened the governors.
 However, serious changes have occurred at the regional level as well. The number of people with a military or security background has more than doubled over the past three years. A few years ago, affiliation with the security services was considered a big minus for gubernatorial hopefuls. After 2000, the situation changed and, now, it has become fashionable to have a military or, in particular, an intelligence background. Now it is interpreted as an indication that the candidate has Kremlin backing.
 Military and security officers have entered government as well. In part, this is connected with the increased number of miliary, security and law-enforcement agencies. After the KGB's dismemberment in 1991, the number of federal law enforcement and security agencies swelled to more than 20 and, consequently, their weight in government grew.
 But more interesting is the fact that more people with military or security backgrounds are now working in economic ministries. Thus, among the deputy ministers appointed between 2000 and 2003, 35 percent have such backgrounds. Moreover, the majority of them come from various departments of the FSB and have retained their status as &quot;active-reserve officers.&quot; This status normally means that an officer is seconded to another agency organization, but preserves his or her FSB salary and privileges, and is obliged to report not only to his or her minister, but also to the FSB. The greatest concentration of &quot;military&quot; deputy ministers can be found in the Economic Development and Trade Ministry, the Science, Industry and Technology Ministry, the Communications Ministry, the Press Ministry and the Justice Ministry.
 Another prominent feature of the Putin administration has been the number big-business proteges taking up positions of power (their number has grown seven-fold). This process began under Yeltsin and, in contrast to the influx of military personnel, is not directly linked to the president's personnel preferences.
 The development of the bourgeoisie in Russia has, naturally, led to an increase in its political role. New Russians have come a long way from naive attempts to get involved in politics themselves to the development of entire networks of representatives at every level of government. At the moment, their representatives occupy 16 percent of the country's top leadership positions, 17 percent of the Federal Assembly and 5 percent of all government positions.
 Only in the regions have local oligarchs retained seats in regional and local parliaments, where they make up 60 to 70 percent of the total number of deputies. Business and the authorities have become particularly intertwined in the regions, considerably reducing civil society's chances of putting in place its representatives.
 To conclude, over the three years of Putin's presidency, the elite has become more militarized, less intellectual and more closely linked to business. Whereas, in the early 1990s, the elite's strategic core consisted mainly of economists, under Putin, military people and security officers have gained the upper hand in shaping national strategy. This has altered the state's priorities, with issues of security, military reform and Russia's geopolitical place in the world coming very much to the fore.
 One of the dangers of the militarization of the authorities is clannishness, based not on kinship or financial ties - as in the case of the so-called Yeltsin family - but on the corporate spirit inbred in security-service officers. Networks of agents of influence, special channels for information exchange, methods for manipulating people - these skills make officers who work or have worked in the KGB/FSB a special caste dominated by a spirit of mutual assistance. This kind of regime is stable, especially as it is held together by a patriotic ideology, partially diluted by liberal economic ideas.
 Recruiting military and security personnel into the elite, the president and his entourage have influenced the course of short to medium-term reform. The military milieu is, by its nature, authoritarian, and democratic governance is alien to it. Of course, not all military personnel are the same. If it was a matter of a few generals making the transition to politics, talking about the danger posed to society would probably be ungrounded. But we are talking about a huge influx into all branches and at every level of government (comprising 15 to 70 percent of various elite groups).
 Quantity changes into quality, according to the well-known dialectic law. The authoritarian method of governance inbred in military and security structures may well be reproduced throughout society.
 It is true that Putin's miliary and security cohort has passed through the school of democratization and worked in the private sector or abroad. Their inbred authoritarianism has undergone modernization and transformation. The impulse to control everything and everyone has been circumscribed by the law, the norms of Western living standards and an eye to how the international community will react to certain things. But Putin's militocracy, nonetheless, cannot abandon its overriding control impulse. Control, in some cases, takes on covert forms: planting Kremlin commissars in the regions, using administrative resources to swing elections, taking the lead in creating institutions of civil society, planting agents of influence in business, the media, etc.
 Given that there is no real separation of powers in Russia and that the authorities are trying to restore monopoly control, expanding control to all areas of public life, and in the absence of a strong political opposition, businesspeople represent one of the few forces capable of resisting the onset of neo-authoritarianism. Russia has landed big business with the unusual role of providing a form of checks and balances. Will the ship of state be able to steer between the Scylla of militocracy and the Charybdis of the oligarchy?
 
 <i>Olga Kryshtanovskaya, the head of the department of elite studies at the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, contributed this comment to Vedomosti. </i>

TITLE: Placing Bets on Future of Local Democracy
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
TEXT: Call it self delusion, hallucination or pure, simple disingenuity, but the lengths to which local politicians will go to say that the campaign for September's gubernatorial election will be an open race are remarkable.
 
That was the only conclusion I could draw on Monday after listening to Konstantin Sukhenko, the head of the pro-Kremlin Unity faction in the Legislative Assembly, say that he had no recollection of elected officials using whatever resources to which they had access to help their preferred candidates gain office.
 I can understand that people might think that brownish-gray is the natural color of snow if they had only ever seen it within St. Petersburg's city boundaries, but this statement on Sukhenko's part could only be explained by some kind of demonic possession or - dare we hope? - a certain disorientation brought on by exhaustion resulting from working to hard to get everything done before the assembly takes its summer recess.
 &quot;And what about [Vladimir] Putin's campaign during the last presidential election?&quot; I asked.
 The explosions in apartment buildings in Moscow and Volgadonsk that claimed the lives of 300 people in Autumn 1999 didn't hurt Putin - then Russia's Prime Minister - in his grab for the top job in the Kremlin. While people like self-exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky have suggested that the government and security agencies themselves were behind the blasts, paving the way for a new phase of the war in Chechnya, there is no solid evidence to support their claims, so I'll leave that topic alone.
 But Putin's place in the reaction to the situation, coupled with images such as those of him taking the controls of a jet fighter while out for a demonstration flight, played a large role in bumping his popularity ratings up to the 50-percent level by the time of Boris Yeltsin's resignation that New Years and in the election campaign that followed. I wonder if his campaign committee shelled out as much as the cost of fuel for the flight, let alone for the air time devoted to these brazen acts of campaigning as they ate up countless hours of air time.
 I didn't get a chance to provide my piloting example, as Sukhenko was already in full flow defending the president
 &quot;He is the best president we have ever had. He's educated, he's got a good outlook and world leaders like him. Who else could you have found like that at the time?&quot; he asked.
 I wasn't the only one wondering. Just a few minutes earlier, a couple of journalists from NTV and Radio Severnaya Stolitsa, respectively, had cornered Sukhenko, asking him to comment on what they said was a fact that is obvious to anyone in the city: that Valentina Matviyenko, the presidential representative in the Northwest Region had already been chosen to be the next occupant of the governor's seat.
 &quot;This is going to be a democratic election, just as President Putin recently said ... ,&quot; Sukhenko began.
 But the NTV journalist cut him off.
 &quot;Oh, come on! Everybody knows that everything is already lined up!&quot; the NTV journalist said, obviously losing her patience. &quot;Would you like to comment on that?&quot;
 Her colleague joined the ambush.
 &quot;It just seems strange that there is such a unity in the Legislative Assembly. There has always been some kind of opposition,&quot; he added. &quot;But now there is none at all ... Very strange.&quot;
 Sukhenko's answer was that it was the people's right to choose who they want to see as governor and that this was the base definition of a democratic election for governor.
 This answer would have been believable if there had been any high-profile candidates left. Lenenergo chief Andrei Likhachyov? - out. State Duma Speaker Gennady Seleznyov? - not coming home. State Duma Deputy Oksana Dmitriyeva? - also stuck in Moscow. Anna Markova, the vice governor who, on June 5, said that she would run for the spot, now says that she has to think it over. Sukhenko himself should be disappointed if she decides not to run, as he said last week that she would take part in the campaign &quot;just like everybody else.&quot;
 We've gone from a situation where, just four short months ago, Valentina Matviyenko was, according to a local poll, listed as the first choice by three percent of voters, to the present situation where she looks like the only candidate with a chance.
 So, since the campaign kicked off officially on Wednesday, I'd like to get my predictions out of the way early.
 There seem to be only two possible winners in this campaign. The first is Matviyenko, whose campaign would virtually have to implode in order for her to throw away the advantage that her Kremlin backing provides. The second is the ever present &quot;Against All Candidates,&quot; the only refuge-for voters who don't like the options being offered.
 A victory by the former will be a win for the Kremlin and another defeat for open democracy in the city. The latter will be the opposite.

TITLE: seeking the sound of the future
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: &quot;I've become a real hippie these days,&quot; says Garry Cobain, one half of the cutting-edge electronic duo The Future Sound of London, which rocketed to popularity as part of Britain's electronic dance-music revolution of the early 1990s. 
 
Cobain, who prefers to descibe himself as a &quot;psychedelic collage artist&quot; rather than a musician, comes to St. Petersburg this week to perform with his other (and less well known) band, Amorphous Androgynous. The outfit is currently only a trio - a sitar player, a guitarist and Cobain on the turntables - but Cobain plans to expand it to 10 members by next year.
 Although the name Amorphous Androgynous was first used in 1993 on the album &quot;Tales of Ephidrina,&quot; it was last year's Amorphous album, &quot;The Isness,&quot; that marked a decisive move for the band from FSOL's dancefloor beats to the 1960s-style psychedelia and Asian melodies of today's Amorphous.
 &quot;I'm calling the whole thing a 'psychedelic DJ experience.' It's a step towards a 'full live experience,'&quot; Cobain said in a recent telephone interview from his home in London. &quot;It will be a DJ experience like you've not probably seen before, but it won't be like Radiohead playing live. It's not a live band - I'm DJing with several musician friends.&quot;
 Backing Cobain in St. Petersburg will be renowned Indian classical musician Baluji Shrivastav and U.S. guitarist Gary Lucas, who has performed with both Captain Beefheart and Jeff Buckley.
 &quot;At the moment, I play a lot of my own things, and I modify and manipulate a lot of old recordings because, right now, I'm into a quite Eastern-influenced live drum kind of cosmic rock and rare groove psychedelia,&quot; said Cobain of his own role in the July 5 show. &quot;I mean, I play anything and put them together in a way that sounds interesting to me. For me, the word 'psychedelia' is a glorious excuse to play anything.&quot;
 Cobain's involvement with Amorphous caused a bit of confusion when &quot;The Isness&quot; was distributed in the U.S. as an FSOL release, while, in reality, the most recent FSOL album was &quot;Dead Cities,&quot; from 1996. Cobain objected ardently to the inaccuracy. 
 &quot;That confusion has been very destructive to me,&quot; he said &quot;It's people that are very greedy ... I'm trying to start new projects, new chapters, and people around me won't allow me to be anonymous. They keep calling everything 'The Future Sound of London' to try and make more money, and it's very harmful. It's a shame, really.&quot;
 Cobain added that he hopes the situation will become clearer this year when two separate albums, one by Amorphous and one by The FSOL, will be released.
 &quot;Amorphous Androgynous was going to be my live kind of big psychedelic band, and The Future Sound of London would continue doing what it does, which is a warped, organic kind of sampling,&quot; he said, adding that, since the 1993 album, he wanted to use the name &quot;Amorphous Androgynous&quot; again because it is meaningful to him.
 &quot;It means shapeless and sexless, and it represents everything that I love right now,&quot; he said, picking out, in particular &quot;The idea of uncertainty and femininity and psychedelia. So the idea is not everything is to be The Future Sound of London. That's just the sweeping name that connects everything. Yes, it might be produced by The Future Sound of London, but it might be a new band.&quot;
 An eternal experimenter, who, with The FSOL, was a pioneer of live digital broadcasting over the Internet, Cobain said he wants to keep experimenting and not to be categorized. 
 &quot;My future is releasing many different projects under many different names. Because I want to experiment,&quot; he said. 
 &quot;There's so much music in Brian [Dougans, the other half of The FSOL] and in myself, we're so varied. That is what it's about really. ... It's about being free again from the idea that you're just one thing.&quot;
 Formally, the show is part of the Stereoleto festival and Manchester Week, a nine-day cultural, sporting and business event that runs through Sunday. Although the FSOL is now London-based, the history of the band started in Manchester, when Cobain met Dougans at the college at which the two studied electronics and sound engineering. 
 &quot;In fact, we were there when acid house exploded, and the Stone Roses exploded and the whole Manchester scene in 1988, so we were there at a very important moment,&quot; Cobain said. 
 &quot;I went to Manchester because most of my favorite music of all time was written in Manchester, so Manchester is a very, very dear place in my heart, really,&quot; he said, naming groups from the the city like &quot;Joy Division and New Order, A Certain Ratio, The Chameleons, amazing bands. ... I love The Smiths.&quot;
 Cobain said he owes his current interest in Indian music to The Beatles.
 &quot;My family were very interested in The Beatles. ... We just sat around and chose our favorite Beatles album, and sat down as a family and listened to them,&quot; he said. &quot;I always remember George Harrison when I was very young, and I loved &quot;Within You Without You,&quot; which is Maharishi-inspired, the first Western rock raga.&quot;
 At the age of 28, Cobain became interested in Ayur Veda, a form of Indian medicine, and naturopathy, a system of therapy that relies on natural remedies. 
 &quot;I studied that for a couple of years and started traveling around India and was lucky to meet Baluji Shrivastav, a very revered Indian classical musician,&quot; he said. &quot;[Shrivastav] is a very, very great friend of mine, and I love him very dearly, and I developed my love of Indian music basically, but started to fuse it with my other interests which are electronic, ambient, rock, prog rock, you know, everything, I like anything. I'm always tired of restriction. I always try to escape my own restriction.&quot;
 After a decade of immersion in electronica, Cobain said discovering psychedelia felt to him like an escape from a musical rut.
 &quot;I think there was a period when electronic music was really a way out - it was [about] breaking lots of rules - and then it just became a set of rules,&quot; he said. &quot;Most electronic music became very impressive sounding, but there's no soul in it anymore, so we started looking elsewhere and we found psychedelic rock. I think - I always say this [now] - that innovation isn't just related to technology. How about innovating your soul?&quot;
 With his new-found interests in personal health and personal consciousness, Cobain began to look for various references in music, and found himself drawn to the year which he was born, 1967.
 &quot;[1967] is the most famous psychedelic year in the history of music,&quot; he said. &quot;It was the only time when Western musicians and black musicians irrespective of color were talking and singing about cosmic consciousness. You had ... 'rotary connection,' and even Led Zeppelin using sitar. And Donovan. And The Beatles were going to see Maharishi. And 'Sgt. Pepper's [Lonely Hearts Club Band]' was released.&quot;
 &quot;It was openness toward ideas,&quot; he said. &quot;[In] our time ... I think, music is becoming very corporate, and therefore becoming less experimental. I don't think experimental these days is to hide behind technology. Technology was something that I still love, but I found soul as well. And I found spirit and spirituality.&quot;
 &quot;I believe now that if you'd spoken to me 10 years ago, I would have said the revolution is technology, now I believe that revolution is spirituality. But I still love technology,&quot; he laughed.
 Cobain attributed the recent decline of interest in electronic music and a revival of guitar bands principally to electronica becoming &quot;boring.&quot;
 &quot;I think that, to a certain degree, music that is very rigid and very computer-orientated is out of touch with the spiritual freedom revolution that's happening, when people ... are realizing that they want to be free in their being and in their soul, and the kind of music that represents that can never be so rigid,&quot; he said. &quot;I believe the new way forward for music is combining everything. Well, we're trying to; if you hear the new material since 'The Isness,' we're trying to do <i>rock,</i> but we're using samplers. So it's like electronic sampled cosmic rock. That's interesting, because that's new. A lot of electronic music has just stayed exactly where it was, and therefore it's become as bad as any music that stagnates.&quot;
 Cobain sees the way out in diversity and looking for new positivism.
 &quot;When I look at the way people are dressing in England now, there's more color, design is becoming more flamboyant. Music has to go the same way. Music should be a celebration, and I'm tired of music which celebrates fear,&quot; he said. &quot;I'm trying to celebrate joy, happiness, health, love, peace, unity, harmony, balance. I'm trying to find all of those things and I'm trying to bring about a revolution through music that inspires and helps people to live a life ... without fear.&quot;
 So how does Cobain suggest this revolution can be achieved?
 &quot;You can do it by eating food that is beautiful and healthy and keeps you in balance, by meditating, by doing yoga, by being a lover of life, by finding yourself and freeing yourself from fear and darkness, and then we can maybe change the world, my friend,&quot; he laughed.
 
 <i>
Amorphous Androgynous performs at 11 p.m. on Saturday at Molodyozhny Theater, 114 Nab. Reki Fontanki. For more information, call 315-4919. Links: www.futuresoundoflondon.com </i>

TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: The <strong>Stereoleto </strong>festival, which opened last week with an uplifting, punkish performance by Berlin-based duo Stereo Total (which even covered &quot;My Way&quot; rather in the style of Sid Vicious), will be headlined Saturday by <strong>Amorphous Androgynous</strong>, the psychedelic semi-live project formed by The Future Sound of London's Garry Cobain.
 
According to Stereoleto's promoter Ilya Bortnyuk, the crowd will be &quot;two or three times as big&quot; as that on the opening night.
 &quot;I can just feel it, we've sold almost all presale tickets already,&quot; he said by telephone on Thursday. 
 The festival's location, in the Molodyozhny Theater and its gardens, is proving very convenient, as audience members can move from inside to outside and vice versa, or watch a show on a video screen by the outside bar. There are even additional toilets. The only drawback so far is the price of drinks.
 As well as being part of Stereoleto, the night is also officially part of Manchester Week in St. Petersburg, so watch for a couple of DJs from the English city. See article, this page.
 <strong>NOM</strong>, the local band that works in art forms ranging from music to painting to movies, will reunite with its former singer, Switzerland-based Alexander Liver. Liver (real name Dmitry Tikhonov) lives on the France-Switzerland border and sings bass in the chorus of the Geneva Opera. However, he is in constant contact with the band, even contributing to its songwriting.
 A NOM show is not a purely musical adventure; band members are actors and comedians rather than musicians, and have their own specific sense of humor. Red Club, Friday.
 <strong>Multfilmy</strong>, one of the leading local bands, will perform at Red Club on Saturday.
 &quot;We simply want to play without any particular reason,&quot; frontman Yegor Timofeyev by telephone on Thursday. &quot;Our fan club asked us to play a concert in summer, so we're playing.&quot;
 As well as old songs, the gig will introduce &quot;almost all the songs&quot; from the band's forthcoming album, recorded in mid-June, according to Timofeyev. 
 The as-yet-untitled album, due in early September, will be the band's fourth, and the second produced by Andrei Samsonov, known for his work with Akvarium and Marc Almond.
 The group will play as a quartet, without keyboard player Viktor Novikov, who quit early last month.
 Jazz fans should head to the <strong>White Night's Swing</strong> festival, which started Thursday. Friday night will be a competion of local bands, while Saturday will see a gala concert. Both events will be at the Jazz Philharmonic Hall.
 The final day-time gala will, refreshingly, be a free open-air event starting at 1 p.m. on Sunday on Ploshchad Iskusstv, near Russian Museum. See gigs for listings. 
 
 <i>- By Sergey Chernov </i>

TITLE: not quite in seventh heaven
AUTHOR: By Peter Morley
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Oligarch Roman Abramovich this week splashed out almost $100 million on English football club Chelsea. He probably wouldn't think twice about eating at new restaurant Sedmoi Gost for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day; for the rest of us, the first thing to note is that the restaurant is very much aimed at the more deep-pocketed sections of St. Petersburg society. The second thing to note is that Sedmoi Gost offers an inventive menu and a wonderfully relaxed atmosphere, although - much like Dominique Perrault's design for the Mariinsky Theater's new building - it comes with some reservations (no pun intended).
 
The positive aspects are the food, the interior design and the atmosphere. In reverse order, Sedmoi Gost is nicely laid back - two of our party of three showed up in jacket-and-tie combos, and felt overdressed - and has an airy, spacious feel to it. The room in which we were sitting affords a view onto Suvorovskaya Ploshchad (giving me the opportunity to observe the working habits of a traffic-police officer, interestingly enough). The place takes its name from a popular 1990s computer game that had a surrealistic theme, and the interior reflects this, with pastel-shaded walls, sexually-suggestive lampshades, doors on the ceiling and a rest-room straight out of a novel written by Tolstoy on an acid trip. In culinary terms, the menu is broadly French influenced.
 Two of us started out with white-asparagus dishes. I went for the version with boiled potato and Hollandaise sauce (11 conditional units, or u.e.), while one of my companions chose the same dish with Parma ham (14 u.e.). Both variants were devoured with gusto. My other companion chose Parma ham with fresh melon (12 u.e.), which she enjoyed, especially as she claimed never to have eaten melon before. (I couldn't believe it either).
 Inter alia, the presentation of dishes at Sedmoi Gost is absolutely impeccable, with some weird and wonderful-looking plates in a variety of geometrical shapes and color combinations. The place settings and tablecloths are also suitably offbeat, with everything laid out at jauntily novel angles.
 For mains, the newly initiated melon eater plumped for rabbit with mashed potato (16 u.e.), with which she had a lot of fun and gave an unreservedly positive review. The meat, on the bone, was tender and succulent, and the potato, with coarse-grain mustard, was simply beautiful, she said. Meanwhile, my other companion tucked into a fish pie (14 u.e.) listed as &quot;St. Pierre&quot; on the menu, although we weren't sure why. In any event, it came in flaky pastry and disappeared very quickly, with abundant compliments paid to the chef. I chose the salmon tartar, which, although not a large portion, left me satisfied, especially as the salmon was beautifully cooked, firm and with a delicious crispy skin.
 My dessert was a personal highlight. I chose profiteroles (7 u.e.) which came filled with ice-cream and liberally doused in orange, cherry and coffee sauces. I savored every mouthful - and there were lots of them. One of my companions went for the lemon sorbet (7 u.e.), which came in a monumental concoction involving a brandy basket and a spun-sugar decoration with lots of chopped fruit. He was full of praise for the tangy, refreshing sorbet, but my other companion was not quite as convinced about her apple tartatan (6 u.e.), which she found a bit stodgy and bland.
 Our main problem was with the service. I have some experience of working in restaurants and bars, and it seemed to me that, while Sedmoi Gost's maitre d' was a consummate professional, his underlings left something to be desired.
 The problems began even before we were handed the menu, when the maitre d' asked if we wanted pre-dinner drinks. For my female companion, he suggested Kir Imperial, a cocktail of champagne and cassis, and my companion accepted. How charming, I thought - until I saw in the menu that one glass of Kir Imperial costs 17 u.e. (I said the maitre d' was a consummate professional, a word meaning &quot;A skilled practitioner,&quot; according to the invaluable Web site Dictionary.com. This sleight of hand was nothing if not skilled.)
 Later, one of our other two servers poured wine from the bottle we had ordered into our glasses, which still contained some of our pre-dinner wine - of a different variety - without even asking. Later still, the third server hovered by the table as we were choosing dessert, creating an uncomfortable impression that we were being hurried.
 Finally, the menu did not - as far as I could see - list the rate for conditional units, which, at 35 rubles, turned out to be closer to the euro than the more usual U.S. dollar, generating a larger bill than we anticipated. On top of the Kir Imperial farrago, I was left feeling slightly stiffed. Maybe Sedmoi Gost's regular clientele does not need to think about money issues, but it would be nice of the restaurant to be a bit more sensitive to those of us who do. (Another illustration: the wine list starts at 21 u.e. and goes up to 260 u.e. We chose a bottle for 29 u.e. - although it came to 30 u.e. on our bill - but only after persuading the maitre d' that we didn't want to go up to 37 u.e. for a different bottle that he recommended. It also took a couple of minutes to convince him that we didn't want whisky afterward.)
 Quibbles aside, if you are unable to afford to eat there regularly, Sedmoi Gost would be a great place to go for a special occasion or a celebratory meal. The restaurant's little idiosyncracy is that the seventh guest to arrive each day gets a special menu from which to order. That incentive should keep many people coming back for more.
 
 <i>
Sedmoi Gost. 3 Millionaya Ulitsa. Tel.: 325-7132. Open daily, 11 a.m. until the last customer leaves. Menu in Russian and English. Credit cards accepted. Dinner for three, with alcohol: 5,967.50 rubles (170.50 u.e.) </i>

TITLE: hamburg ballet set for debut
AUTHOR: By Kevin Ng
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The final third of this year's Stars of the White Nights festival at the Mariinsky Theater is being turned over to ballet, and the dance fest kicks off on Tuesday with the first of a week of performances by the Hamburg Ballet, directed by illustrious U.S.-born choreographer John Neumeier.
 
Since taking over as the Hamburg Ballet's artistic director in 1973 at the young age of 31, Neumeier has single-handedly built up a large diverse repertory of ballets for the company. Neumeier is an exceptionally prolific choreographer and, on average, the Hamburg Ballet stages two premieres every season. His ballets are extremely diverse in style and cover a wide range. In addition, Neumeier is one of the few living choreographers who has a flair for creating full-length dramatic ballets. His narrative ballets have tackled plays by Shakespeare (&quot;Hamlet&quot; and &quot;A Midsummer Night's Dream&quot;), Chekhov (&quot;The Seagull&quot;), and Ibsen (&quot;Peer Gynt&quot;). He has also created many abstract ballets set to music by Mahler, Bach, Bernstein and other composers.
 Neumeier is in demand throughout the world, and has worked with many companies, including the Paris Opera Ballet and the Royal Danish Ballet. Although the Hamburg Ballet's season next week will be its first visit to Russia, Neumeier is no stranger to the country - or to the Mariinsky. In 2001, the Mariinsky Ballet put on a full evening of three of his ballets, including a creation, &quot;Sounds of Empty Pages,&quot; that was a requiem to Russian composer Alfred Schnittke. Neumeier was, in fact, the first foreign choreographer to create a ballet at the Mariinsky Theater for nearly a century, since the great French choreographer Marius Petipa created his last ballet there in 1903. This program, which was very enthusiastically received, won Neumeier a prestigious Golden Mask Award in 2002.
 Discussing the other two, abstract ballets in that Mariinsky program, Neumeier said, &quot;For me there can be no abstract dance. For me even a work like 'Spring and Fall' or 'Now and Then' takes its drama from the tension in the music. For me, dance is always something which demonstrates the relationships, the contacts, contrasts, and tension between people.&quot;
 Recalling his experience when working in the Mariinsky Theater in 2001, Neumeier said in an interview this year, &quot;It's very hard, but inspiring, work with the dancers, particularly at the soloist level, because it was they whom I touched the most in terms of trying to educate them in a new movement style, and a new movement concept - that dance is not just a fairy tale, that dance has to do with something about you and your world, that it's a form of expressing the emotions and the fears that you might have. And this was very touching to see how they could react to that idea.&quot;
 Neumeier's most recent masterpiece, &quot;Nijinsky&quot;, which has toured to great acclaim in Paris and Hong Kong earlier this year, will open the Hamburg Ballet's season at the Mariinsky. Created in 2000 on the 50th anniversary of the death of Vaslav Nijinsky, the legendary star who has been dubbed as the &quot;God of the Dance,&quot; this was Neumeier's tribute to this greatest male dancer of the first half of the 20th century, who was a soloist at the Mariinsky before joining Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.
 This ballet is very complex, and it took me more than one viewing to fully grasp all the details. It is not a straightforward narrative ballet, but rather a series of tableaux highlighting the significant private and public events in the life of this fascinating multi-faceted character - a dance legend, a bisexual lover, and a visionary choreographer, who subsequently descends into schizophrenia. His complicated relationships with his wife Romola, his lover and mentor Diaghilev, as well as with his sister, Bronislava, are very skilfully illustrated in Neumeier's choreography. The first half, which commences with a soiree in a hotel in St. Moritz in 1919 at which Nijinsky danced in public for the last time, includes many quotations from Nijinsky's famous roles, and culminates in his unexpected marriage to Romola. The second half of the ballet depicts Nijinsky's schizophrenia and briefly alludes to his seminal ballet &quot;The Rite of Spring&quot; which aptly presages the First World War in the following year.
 The second Neumeier ballet showing in St. Petersburg is &quot;The Seagull,&quot; which premiered in June 2002. It will be interesting to see the Russian audience's reaction to Neumeier's ballet adaptation of Chekhov's novel, and the complex relationships of the characters depicted in Neumeier's choreography will be enthralling to watch.
 &quot;When I did 'The Seagull' Heather Jurgensen, for whom I created the role of Nina, was very important in establishing my direction,&quot; Neumeier said.
 Ending the season will be an early Neumeier ballet, &quot;The Lady of the Camellias,&quot; created in 1978. Neumeier's version has stretched the novel of the same name by Alexandre Dumas fils into three acts, enhanced by the lavish and glittering costumes designed by Jurgen Rose. The ballet commences with a prologue that takes place after Marguerite's death, when the contents of her luxurious Paris apartment are auctioned. The next three acts are a flashback to her past as narrated by her lover, Armand, who is grief-stricken in the auction.
 In Act 1, Armand meets Marguerite for the first time during a ballet performance of &quot;Manon&quot; in Paris. This 'ballet within a ballet' concept is a clever device used by Neumeier, who sets up Manon as a mirror image of Marguerite, thereby adding a psychological layer into the ballet, as well as another welcome duet for a second couple.
 &quot;I use systems of playing with time, e.g. the introduction of Manon Lescaut and Des Grieux into my ballet 'Camellias' in order to give the main characters a double dimension,&quot; he expleined. &quot;This is because you cannot speak in dance except in the present tense; there is no step which can say what somebody did yesterday or what I will do tomorrow. So you have to find ways of dealing with this. Dance is not there to give us information like a newspaper; it is there to speak of other levels.&quot;
 So which of his company's young talent should St. Petersburg audiences watch out for?
 &quot;For instance, Alexandre Riabko, who will be dancing Nijinsky in the second cast,&quot; Neumeier said. &quot;There is Helene Bouchet, who is a silver medal winner in the Varna competition. There is also Arsen Megrabian who was a gold medal winner in Varna, he'll dance the Rose in 'Nijinsky.'&quot;
 
The Varna International Ballet Competition is a prestigious competition held every two years in the Bulgarian Black Sea resort. It was last held in 2002.
 
One of the senior principal dancers who will be prominently cast is Anna Polikarpova, a former soloist of the Mariinsky Ballet who joined the Hamburg Ballet in 1992. Polikarpova will be in the first cast of all the three ballets - as Nijinsky's wife, Romola, as Marguerite in &quot;The Lady of the Camellias,&quot; and as Arkadina in &quot;The Seagull.&quot; It will, no doubt, be a happy home-coming for her.
 However, Neumeier's concern has always been his whole company instead of one or two stars.
 &quot;And for me, because of my democratic feelings towards the company, I don't want to favor one person. For me, the ensemble is the star of the company, and I like very much to become interested in different people,&quot; he said. &quot;In the beginning Jiri Bubenicek danced Nijinsky, but since then Alexandre Riabko has done this role, and I find him extraordinary also.&quot;
 Besides his amazing creativity, Neumeier's noteworthy achievement has been to forge a unique identity for his company wholly in tune with his own choreographic style.
 &quot;My concept is to have an ensemble with different colors, and to let myself as creator be fascinated by different colors at different times,&quot; he said. &quot;I would like to keep the whole company fed, occupied, and continue to develop them.&quot;
 
 <i>
Links: www.hamburgballett.de; wn.mariinsky.ru</i>

TITLE: the word's worth
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy <i>
TEXT: <i>Zagovor</i>: spell, charm, hex, curse.
 I was on business in the United States last week just in time for all the hoopla over the release of the fifth Harry Potter book. Luckily, I was able to elbow some of the 6-year-olds out of the way and grab a copy before they sold out. Even more luckily, my neighbor on the flight home was a companionable and bilingual 14-year-old with a copy of her own and lots of opinions about Harry Potter, magic and Russia. We decided that if Harry didn't make at least a short visit to Russia by Book Seven, we'd petition that he and his entire Hogwarts class do post-graduate work in Russian village magic. A richer magical tradition is hard to find anywhere on earth.
 
Harry and his friends are <i>volshebniki</i> - wizards - a benign term for magicians of the Disney variety. But workers of magic are many in Russia. There are <i>vedmy</i> (witches); <i>kudesniki</i> (warlocks, those who cast spells); <i>kolduny</i> (wizards of a darker nature); <i>koshchei</i> (a cannibal wizard of a very dark nature indeed); <i>chernoknizhnik</i> (a black magician, literally &quot;he who uses the black book&quot;); <i>gadalka</i> (fortuneteller); <i>volkhv</i> (shaman); <i>sheptun</i> (spell caster, literally &quot;whisperer&quot;); <i>otgadchik/otgadchitsa</i> (a guesser, a person who finds lost or stolen possessions). Not to mention the garden-variety <i>znakhari</i> - healers - who today are herbalists or holistic healers, but once were magic healers in Russia of old. <i>Urozhenets</i> refers to a &quot;born healer,&quot; i.e., one who received teachings from a parent or older relative. Today, this is often called <i>potomstvenny mag</i> (hereditary magician) or <i>potomstvennaya predskasatelnitsa</i> (hereditary seer).
 Another word in today's papers is <i>yasnovidyashchy</i> (seer, clairvoyant, &quot;all-seeing&quot;) as in <i>Kak vernut muzha i sokhranit semyu? Yasnovidyashchaya Yuliya pomozhet!</i> (How can you get your husband back and save your marriage? All-seeing Yuliya will help!) Someone who has ESP or other supernatural powers (but cannot necessarily heal or cast spells) is <i>ekstrasens</i>.
 As well as seeing the future, what these magical folks did (and sometimes still do) is either make trouble or make trouble go away. There are dozens of ways to spoil an occasion. For example, <i>klad</i> is a special bundle of bones, hair and other magical ingredients that is guaranteed to ruin a new marriage. <i>Zalom, zakrutka</i> and <i>zavertka</i> are &quot;twists&quot; of hay that ruin a farmer's crops. <i>Otnos</i> is a hex that has been misdirected to the wrong person. <i>Otvoroty</i> are special spells for ending romantic attraction.
 The easiest way to make trouble is to &quot;cast the evil eye&quot; - <i>sglazit</i>. Up in the north, novices didn't even bother with glances: <i>On dumu podumal i krova sosedei</i> <i>sdokhla</i>. (He thought an evil thought and the neighbors' cow keeled over.) Luckily there are ways to make trouble go away. You can protect someone from spells, improve a fortune or end a curse or hex. <i>Zagovory</i> are spells of all kinds. An old book of &quot;healings&quot; offers everything <i>zagovor ot beshenoi sobaki</i> (a spell against rabid dogs) to <i>zagovor protiv muzhskogo besseliya</i> (a spell against impotence).
 Much of magic was designed to attract the right husband (or wife) and keep him (or her) happy and home. <i>Privoroty</i> are love charms, which might be intensified by a love potion: <i>lyubovnoye zele, privorotnoye sredstvo</i>. You can care for your loved one by casting an <i>obereg</i>, or a protective charm (from the word <i>berech</i>, to care). And if you want to find out how your spell is working, you can ask your local witch for <i>kostochka-nevidimka </i>- an invisibility bone that allows you to observe your loved ones or enemies unseen.
 Who needs fiction for magic when you live in Russia?
 
 <i>
Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter. </i>

TITLE: jazz fest gets fortress jumping
AUTHOR: By Aliona Bocharova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Better known historically as a formidable prison and, now, a collection of museums, the Peter and Paul Fortress took on a new role as a jazz-festival venue last weekend.
 
The inaugural Peter and Paul Jazz Festival brought together international and local jazz stars, and provided a shot in the arm to the popularity of jazz in the city.
 &quot;Our main aim was to combine cultural significance with spectacular vividness and safety, and general egalitarianism with a high-society party,&quot; the festival's general director, Dmitry Milkov, said. &quot;The Avignon Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and other festivals were taken as examples, because they also combine contemporary culture and arts with historical places.&quot;
 The festival's three stages were spread around the fortress, with an elite chillout in the yard of the Commandant's House, the main stage by Kronverksky Bridge and a smaller stage - mainly hosting DJs playing jazz-influenced electronica - on the beach west of the fortress.
 The festival kicked off Friday evening with classy mainstream jazz from pianist and composer Andrei Kondakov, the festival's music director, followed by the crazy, avant-pop rhythms of U.S. musician Chico Freeman, who got the main-stage crowd dancing. By the time the Igor Butman Quartet - led by the Russian-U.S. saxophonist of the same name - introduced quasi-legendary trumpeter Randy Brecker, the audience was relaxed and letting its emotions take over.
 &quot;I heard a tape of the Brecker Brothers [the band formed by Randy and his brother Michael], but it's so exciting to see him live,&quot; said Slava Suprun of local jazz band Tirami Su. 
 &quot;I remember Randy Brecker's gig a few years ago at the Lensoviet Palace of Culture,&quot; added Suprun's friend and fellow musician Dmitry Leikin. &quot;It was a blast.&quot;
 Many musicians and jazz fans said they appreciated the broad range of music being played - including some pieces written specially for the festival - while others said they just liked the atmosphere.
 &quot;It's a completely new audience for a jazz festival,&quot; said double-bassist Vladimir Volkov, best known for his avant-garde group Volkovtrio.
 &quot;I feel the audience is a bit more distant than at most jazz gigs, but that may just be because it's an open-air event.&quot;
 Volkov played with Strings on Fire, formed specially for the festival, as well as Interjazz, an all-star line-up also featuring Kondakov, Olivier Ker Ourio and Christian Scheuber.
 &quot;Today's Strings on Fire line-up was playing together for the first time,&quot; Volkov said. &quot;Our Hungarian violinist couldn't get here, so the music had a distinctly Bulgarian flavor, because we had two musicians from there.&quot;
 Despite his reservations, Volkov was pleased with the festival, and especially the choice of location.
 &quot;The Peter and Paul Fortress was always sacred to me, as my dad used to work in a Soviet newspaper called 'Na Strazhe Rodiny' ['On Guard for the Fatherland'], which was based in the fortress, so I spent a lot of time exploring the place as a kid.&quot;
 With musicians, audience members - and even Culture Ministry representatives, according to Milkov - all satisfied, organizers said they had achieved what they set out to do.
 &quot;We're proud that all the key musicians we said would play actually came to the festival, and that the weather got better over the two days,&quot; Milkov said, adding that the organizers now plan to run a few, smaller events during the next year.
 However, Milkov said, not everything went smoothly.
 &quot;The level of service in the VIP Atrium Hall was not exactly VIP, with a lack of chairs and a chipped floor and walls,&quot; he said. &quot;Also, a helicopter landed unexpectedly on the grounds of the fortress, knocking over and breaking a few Heineken beer fridges.&quot;
 Felix Naroditsky, the festival's art director and owner of local jazz club JFC, said the organizers, OSB Group, which claims to be the city's first &quot;creative-industries&quot; group, were happy with the outcome of the festival.
 &quot;The festival was a pilot project for OSB Group,&quot; he said. &quot;Before we start telling other people what to do, we have to prove what we can do ourselves.&quot;

TITLE: arnie's new film? somebody terminate it
AUTHOR: By A. O. Scott
PUBLISHER: New York Times Service
TEXT: In &quot;Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,&quot; just as in &quot;T2&quot; a dozen years ago, the original T-1 killer cyborg from the future, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, does battle on the streets of Los Angeles with an updated, sleeker, deadlier model. Last time, you may recall, it was the T-1000, played with metallic sangfroid by Robert Patrick. Now, in an apparent concession to the turbo-feminist lad-mag action-movie times, the state-of-the-art killer cyborg from the future is the T-X, who touches down on Rodeo Drive in the arresting and unclothed form of Kristanna Loken, and who goes about her subsequent business in a red leather pantsuit and a silver Lexus coupe.
 
The old-model Terminator, delivering his weary one-liners in that familiar Austro-Californian monotone, has his hands full with this limber, ruthless new machine, who has been sent back in time, as Schwarzenegger was in the first &quot;Terminator&quot; movie, to kill off the future leaders of human resistance to machine tyranny. 
 This movie must struggle with its own potential obsolescence. The first installment in the franchise, directed by James Cameron and starring Linda Hamilton along with Schwarzenegger, is nearly 20 years old; its sequel was released when the first George Bush was in the White House. The rapid evolution of special-effects technology since then, and the concurrent spread of multi-sequel blockbuster franchises, give those influential pictures a decidedly antique aura. 
 In part because of the example of &quot;Terminator 2,&quot; which was a pioneer in the use of computer-animated imagery in a live-action setting, sci-fi action movies have become ever more visually elaborate - and also more pretentious. Next to the baroque postmodern pseudo-sophistication of the &quot;Matrix&quot; movies, which similarly explore the fate of humanity under threat of machine dominance, the new &quot;Terminator&quot; has a lumbering, literal-minded old-style feel. 
 Which is not, on balance, such a bad thing. Cameron has long since ascended from action auteur to king of the world, leaving his dueling robots and their human prey in the hands of Jonathan Mostow. Mostow's previous film was &quot;U-571,&quot; a highly competent exercise in that squarest of all action subgenres, the submarine movie. And if he lacks Cameron's unusual gift for finding human drama amid all the explosions, chases and collisions, Mostow does at least film the explosions, chases and collisions with professionalism and something like wit.
 Though not, it must be said, with brevity. On my way into the screening room I was heartened to hear that the movie's running time was a relatively brisk 109 minutes. But the first big highway screech-and-bang sequence - a big-wheeled menage a trois with the good Terminator in a fire engine, the bad Terminatrix behind the wheel of a construction crane and the poor human afterthoughts in a swaybacked Toyota Tundra - felt at least that long. 
 Afterward, if your auditory nerves have not sustained permanent damage, you will hear some necessary explanations, which complete the epic voice-over of the opening scenes. The heroic resistance of Sarah Connor (Hamilton) in &quot;T2&quot; did not prevent the apocalyptic ascent of the techno overlords, but only postponed it. Now, Sarah's son, John (Nick Stahl), the prophesied leader of the human resistance, is living &quot;off the grid,&quot; haunted by nightmarish visions of global catastrophe.
 His designated love interest, played by Claire Danes, is Kate Brewster - or, as she is marvelously described in the Warner Brothers press kit, &quot;unsuspecting veterinarian Kate Brewster.&quot; Unsuspecting has a disposable fiance, who is quickly disposed of, and a military dad (just like Jennifer Connelly in &quot;The Hulk&quot;), who is in charge of the high-tech weapons system that will soon take over the world, wipe out most of the human race and send killer cyborgs from the future to deal with the remnant. Unless, of course, Veterinarian and her future husband - as opposed to her disposable fiance - can prevent all of this from happening.
 I won't give away the ending. But even if I did, it wouldn't be the end of the world. For all the hype and the inevitable (and most likely short-term) box office bonanza, &quot;Terminator 3&quot; is essentially a B movie, content to be loud, dumb and obvious, and to leave the Great Ideas to bona fide public intellectuals like Keanu Reeves and the Hulk. Schwarzenegger, whose main contribution to American culture has been inspiring wicked parodies on &quot;Saturday Night Live&quot; and &quot;The Simpsons,&quot; acts (if you can call it that) with his usual leaden whimsy, manifesting the gift for uttering hard-to-forget, meaningless catchphrases that is most likely the wellspring of his blossoming reported desire to seek elective office in California.
 This Terminator professes not to recall ever having said &quot;hasta la vista, baby,&quot; but he does let fly with gems like &quot;I'm back,&quot; &quot;She'll be back,&quot; and &quot;My database does not encompass the dynamics of human pair-bonding.&quot; He also says, &quot;You're terminated&quot; to his robot rival, perhaps testing out a slogan intended for poor Gray Davis. But that's the next sequel. 
 
 <i>
&quot;Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines&quot; is currently showing at various cinemas. See Screens for details. </i>

TITLE: Berlusconi Sparks Fury Over 'Nazi' Jibe
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: BERLIN - Germany's chancellor demanded an apology Thursday from Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi for saying that a German member of the European parliament would make a good Nazi concentration camp guard in a movie.
 
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, in remarks to parliament in Berlin, said that the comparison was &quot;completely unacceptable.&quot;
 &quot;I expect the Italian premier to formally apologize for this unacceptable comparison,&quot; Schroeder said.
 The German chancellor, a Social Democrat, made his comments at the start of a scheduled speech on economic reform in the Bundestag. Many lawmakers applauded, though some conservatives did not.
 The German government was infuriated by Berlusconi's jibe. It was directed at a Social Democratic member of the European Parliament during an appearance on Wednesday to mark the start of Italy's six-month presidency of the European Union. The German government called in the Italian ambassador to Schroeder's office to explain the comments.
 Berlusconi made the remarks in a debate in the European Parliament in Strasbourg after a speech presenting Italy's priorities for its six-month presidency of the European Union, which began on Tuesday.
 During a question-and-answer session, the European parliamentarian, Martin Schulz, referred to the Italian leader's use of an immunity law to avoid bribery charges in an Italian court.
 &quot;Mr. Schulz, I know there is a producer in Italy who is making a film on the Nazi concentration camps. I will suggest you for the role of kapo,&quot; Berlusconi snapped back. &quot;You'd be perfect.&quot;
 The German word <i>kapo</i> is often taken to mean a concentration camp guard drawn from amongst the prisoners.
 He later said that he did not mean to offend German feelings, but he declined to retract the comment or apologize.
 Robin Cook, a former British foreign secretary who heads a grouping of European left-leaning parties, also urged Berlusconi to apologize. He said that he was appalled that an EU president &quot;should cause such offense and revive conflicts which the rest of us long put behind us.&quot;
 &quot;The whole point of the European ideal is to get away from crude national stereotyping,&quot; Cook said.
 Within hours, the uproar in the European Parliament led to tit-for-tat diplomatic complaints in Berlin and Rome.
 Schroeder's office called in Italy's ambassador to Germany, Silvio Fagiolo, to protest Berlusconi's comment.
 In Rome, the Italian Foreign Ministry responded in kind, summoning the German ambassador in Rome, Klaus Neubert, to say that Schulz's comments &quot;constituted a grave, unacceptable offense to the dignity&quot; of Berlusconi and all Italian and European institutions.
 But a ministry statement also said that undersecretary Giuseppe Baldocci told Neubert that Berlusconi's comments &quot;certainly weren't intended to offend the German people or hurt their sensibility,&quot; and that the premier &quot;was sorry that his response was interpreted differently by some.&quot;
 Members of Schroeder's party railed against Berlusconi.
 &quot;In relation to the countless people who fell victim to the dictatorship of the National Socialists, including many Social Democrats, there can be no irony,&quot; said Olaf Scholz, the secretary-general of Schroeder's party said on Wednesday.
 On Thursday, the German media slammed the comments, stirring the row with some strong remarks of their own.
 The respected heavyweight daily, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, said that the slur threatened rocky times ahead for Europe.
 &quot;If the coming months are characterized by crashing, sweeping attacks and zealous hate campaigns, it's going to be difficult to complete the work Europe has ahead of it,&quot; it said.
 
 <i>(Reuters, AP) </i>

TITLE: Bush Steps Up Calls For Liberian President's Resignation
AUTHOR: By Matt Kelley
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - U.S. President George W. Bush has stepped up U.S. pressure on Liberia's president to resign while holding off on a decision on possibly sending peacekeeping troops to the troubled African nation.
 
As foreign leaders called on Bush to send U.S. troops to the country, which was founded by freed American slaves, the president sharply denounced Liberian leader Charles Taylor from a White House podium on Wednesday.
 &quot;One thing has to happen: Mr. Taylor needs to leave the country,&quot; Bush said. &quot;In order for there to be peace and stability in Liberia, Charles Taylor needs to leave now.&quot;
 But Bush and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Wednesday that they had not decided whether to send peacekeepers to the West African nation, as UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and other world leaders have been urging. Annan has said that he would like to see the United States lead a multinational peacekeeping force in Liberia, which has been wracked by months of fighting between forces loyal to Taylor and rebel groups trying to oust him.
 Taylor has refused to leave office. A UN-backed court in neighboring Sierra Leone has indicted Taylor for crimes against humanity for his backing of rebels in that country whose signature atrocities included hacking off their victims' limbs.
 Taylor told CBS Radio on Wednesday that U.S. troops would be welcomed inside the country, that he would be willing to leave Liberia in about three months and called for the United Nations war crimes charges against him to be dropped.
 I'm not sure if &quot;asking the democratically elected president to leave is the solution, but I will leave,&quot; he said.
 &quot;Of course,&quot; Taylor added later, &quot;that is subject to hearing what President Bush has to say.&quot;
 Speaking with reporters on Wednesday, Bush lamented the suffering and unrest in Liberia but stopped short of saying he would send troops.
 &quot;We're exploring all options,&quot; Bush said. The president will visit Africa, but not Liberia, next week.
 He said Powell was working with the United Nations to determine the best way to keep a cease-fire in place.
 Adding to the pressure on Wednesday, the Congressional Black Caucus also called on Powell to persuade the White House to intervene quickly.
 &quot;As President Bush prepares to visit the continent of Africa, it is imperative that he announce our intervention immediately so we can begin to end the misery in Liberia,&quot; said Rep. Donald Payne, D-N.J., spokesman for the caucus.
 Among the open questions is how many troops West African countries would be willing to provide as peacekeepers, Powell said.
 A senior U.S. official said that the discussions centered on sorting out military and political issues. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the talks had not reached a point where Bush could decide on whether to dispatch American troops.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Bush Talks Tough
 </b>

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President George W. Bush had a tough message on Wednesday for Iraqi militants attacking U.S. troops- "Bring them on"- and said the U.S. military presence could deal with the attackers.
 Bush spoke in the face of increasing U.S. concern about the rising casualty toll. At least 23 service personnel have been killed since Bush declared major combat operations over on May 1.
 "There are some who feel like that conditions are such that they can attack us there," Bush told reporters at the White House. "My answer is: Bring them on. We have the force necessary to deal with the situation."
 
 
<b>Violence in Israel
 </b>

JERUSALEM (AP) - Israeli troops killed a militant and Palestinians fired shells at an Israeli settlement in Gaza, the first violence since Palestinian security took control of Bethlehem in the latest step along the "road map" plan to end 33 months of fighting.
 The militant was killed while trying to escape arrest in the West Bank city of Qalqiliya early on Thursday and another man was captured, the Israeli army said. Both were with the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, which is linked to the ruling Fatah movement, and were said to be armed.
 Palestinian security sources said that the arrested man was Ibrahim Mansour, leader of the Brigades in Qalqiliya. Mahmoud Shawer, his assistant, was slain.
 The killing came shortly after four anti-tank shells landed in Kfar Darom, an isolated Israeli settlement in central Gaza now in Palestinian hands after an Israeli pullout on Sunday.
 This led Israel to close a main road linking Gaza City to the rest of the Gaza Strip that was opened Monday after the Palestinians were given control of the area. Opening it was a key Palestinian demand.
 
 
<b>Powell Talks Not Tough
 </b>

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell backed away from intervention in Iranian politics on Wednesday, saying that Washington should stay away from what he called a "family fight" between reformists and conservatives.
 Powell also reminded listeners in a radio interview that President Mohammad Khatami won elections and said that Iranian rulers might make concessions to the protest movement.
 The Bush administration annoyed the Iranian government last month by coming out strongly in support of student protests against Iran's clerical rulers. The protests included harsh criticism of Khatami, a moderate, as well as the conservative clerics who have blocked his attempts at reform.
 
 
<b>Amazon Forest Help
 </b>

BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) - Brazil announced measures to fight Amazon deforestation on Wednesday, days after researchers warned that development projects were destroying the rain forest at an increasing rate.
 Environment Minister Marina Silva said the government will give Brazil's environmental protection agency Ibama $7 million to help it crack down on illegal deforestation by loggers and farmers.
 The government will also create a working group with the participation of 11 ministries to develop effective long-term measures to stop deforestation.
 The government is requiring that all infrastructure and land reform projects take environmental aspects into account to avoid further deforestation, said Ciro Gomes, minister of national integration. 



TITLE: Serena Williams Blasts Into Another Final
AUTHOR: By Steven Wine
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WIMBLEDON, England - Swinging so hard she lost an earring, Serena Williams won her rematch against Justine Henin-Hardenne and advanced Thursday to the Wimbledon final. 
 
With the 6-3, 6-2 victory, Williams avenged her traumatic loss to Henin-Hardenne in the French Open semifinals four weeks ago. 
 French fans jeered Williams and cheered her mistakes, but the Centre Court crowd at Wimbledon had only applause for the defending champion. She'll play for another title Saturday against her sister Venus, who beat Kim Clijsters 4-6, 6-3, 6-1 in the last match on Centre Court on Thursday. 
 &quot;I'm just happy to be in the final of Wimbledon again,&quot; Williams said. &quot;I've been able to realize at the French that you can't always make it to the finals. Now that I'm back, it's definitely exciting.&quot; 
 If Williams needed any other motivation against Henin-Hardenne, there was this: A loss would have ended her one-year reign atop the rankings, with Clijsters overtaking her for No. 1. 
 In men's play, No. 5-seeded Andy Roddick advanced to his second Grand Slam final this year by beating unseeded Jonas Bjorkman 6-4, 6-2, 6-4. Roddick's opponent Friday will be No. 4 Roger Federer, who defeated No. 8 Sjeng Schalken 6-3, 6-4, 6-4. 
 No. 10 Tim Henman came up short in his bid to become the first Englishman to win Wimbledon since 1936. In the completion of a match suspended in the fourth set Wednesday because of rain, Henman lost to No. 13 Sebastien Grosjean 7-6 (10-8), 3-6, 6-3, 6-4. 
 Grosjean will play unseeded Mark Philippoussis, who hit 34 aces to rally past Alexander Popp 4-6, 4-6, 6-3, 6-3, 8-6.
 Their match also took two days. 
 More showers Thursday delayed the start of play for 2 1/2 hours, but when it finally began, Williams was ready.
 She came out hitting so ferociously that by the second game the huge hoop earring on her left ear was gone - albeit only temporarily. 
 The force of her strokes sometimes sent her airborne, and several times she let out a jubilant shriek after winning a point. 
 &quot;I played really well today,&quot; Williams said. &quot;I was really focused. I had to be.&quot; 
 Williams accused Henin-Hardenne of cheating in their Paris match by requesting a timeout and then failing to acknowledge it. Fans booed Williams when she brusquely shook hands with the Belgian following the upset. 
 This time a victorious Williams greeted Henin-Hardenne at the net with a grin, a firm handshake and a conciliatory pat on the shoulder. 
 &quot;I think she's a good player, I think she's a nice girl and I have no hard feelings,&quot; Williams said. 
 Said Henin-Hardenne: &quot;We're just two players, and we all want the same thing - winning a lot of matches. We don't have a problem between each other.&quot; 
 Despite Williams' aggressive shotmaking, her play was remarkably error-free. The rallies were often long and vigorous, as the speedy Henin-Hardenne kept chasing down shots that would elude most players. 
 But Williams' power took a toll. One long exchange early in the second set left Henin-Hardenne panting, and she then double faulted to lose the game. 
 And when Henin-Hardenne tried coming to the net, Williams repeatedly passed her, often on the run. 
 &quot;Serena played a good match,&quot; Henin-Hardenne said. &quot;I didn't play my best tennis for sure. I was getting nervous a little bit at the beginning of the match, and she deserved it.&quot; 
 In Henin-Hardenne's first two service game, Williams had six break points and converted two as she took a 4-0 lead. 
 They played 22 minutes before Henin-Hardenne won a game. Then she won two more to make it 4-3. 
 When Williams slammed a winner to finish off one 18-stroke exchange, she screamed, &quot;C'mon!&quot; She let out an emotional yelp when she broke for a 5-3 lead, then held serve, closing out the set when Henin-Hardenne sailed an errant forehand to end a 13-shot rally. 
 Williams fell into a love-40 hole serving in the second game of the final set, then dug out by winning five consecutive points, the last with a leaping overhead winner again accompanied by a yelp. 
 She easily held serve from there and broke for a 5-2 lead, screaming &quot;Yes!&quot; as Henin-Hardenne's lob flew long on break point.
 A service winner on match point gave Williams the victory and a chance to play for her sixth Grand Slam title. 
 Meanwhile, Roddick hit 13 aces against Bjorkman, lost his serve just once and has won 76 of 79 service games in the tournament.
 Roddick's only previous Grand Slam semifinal berth came at the Australian Open in January.

TITLE: Vancouver Chosen To Host Winter Olympics in 2010
AUTHOR: By Stephen Wilson
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PRAGUE, Czech Republic - With the Olympics heading to Canada for 2010, let the race begin for the next big prize - the 2012 Summer Games. 
 
Vancouver, British Columbia, was selected Wednesday to host the Winter Olympics, bringing the games to the scenic Pacific coast city and the majestic ski slopes of Whistler. 
 The IOC picked Vancouver's &quot;Sea to Sky Games&quot; over Pyeongchang, South Korea, and Salzburg, Austria, sending the Olympics back to Canada for the first time since 1988. 
 The result wasn't a surprise; Vancouver had been the longtime favorite. What was unexpected was the voting pattern and margin of victory. 
 Pyeongchang, the least known of the three bidders and long considered the outsider, came within three votes of winning in the first round of the secret ballot and two votes in the second. 
 &quot;It was a photo finish,&quot; Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien said. &quot;But winning is winning.&quot; 
 Pyeongchang led with 51 votes in the first round, short of a winning majority of 54, while Vancouver had 40 and Salzburg 16. With Salzburg eliminated, Vancouver then defeated Pyeongchang 56-53. 
 The election wasn't without intrigue - four members didn't vote in the first round and three in the second, which could have swung the result the other way. The IOC said it was unsure why. 
 &quot;In the land of the IOC, 56-53 is a landslide,&quot; Canadian IOC member Dick Pound told ecstatic Vancouver boosters at a victory party late Wednesday night. 
 Vancouver was a top pick on technical merits alone. A recent IOC report gave Vancouver the best overall review, with high marks for its plans for sports venues, housing and financing.
 Canada's understated campaign focused on the technical strengths of its proposal, with most indoor venues in Vancouver and ski and sliding events at Whistler. 
 &quot;Obviously the best bid won,&quot; International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge said. &quot;The games are not just venues, bricks and mortar. You need expertise, you need democracy, you need a stable economy, you need champions. Vancouver had all that.&quot; 
 Canada has hosted two previous Olympics - the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal and 1988 Winter Games in Calgary, Alberta. 
 As Canada rejoiced, many IOC members began looking ahead to the high-profile 2012 contest. New York, London, Paris, Madrid and Moscow are among the declared contenders so far in what IOC officials have described as a &quot;dream team&quot; lineup. 
 Awarding the 2010 Games to North America helps Europe's chances for 2012 - at the possible expense of New York. Some members say back-to-back games in North America are unlikely. 
 The 2012 scenario played a role in Vancouver's victory. 
 &quot;It's not complicated,&quot; said Italian member Mario Pescante, head of the European Olympic Committees. &quot;With five countries interested in the summer games, the majority of European IOC members preferred to have games outside Europe. This is a very political vote in view of the summer games.&quot; 
 Rogge disputed any 2010-2012 trade-off, citing consecutive games in Europe in 2004 (Athens, summer) and 2006 (Turin, winter). 
 &quot;There have been many other examples,&quot; he said. &quot;This so-called continental rotation, we don't believe in that.&quot; 
 New York bid officials said they didn't believe Vancouver's selection would hurt the city's chances. 
 Other 2012 candidates include Leipzig, Germany; Istanbul, Turkey; Havana, Cuba; and either Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo, Brazil. The IOC will select the winner in 2005. But first, the IOC will have to cut the contenders to a short list of four or five next year. 
 &quot;Can you can imagine how hard it's going to be trying to cut those nine cities to four?&quot; Pound said.

TITLE: Alomar Helps Chi Sox to Win
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CHICAGO - Roberto Alomar scored the winning run in his White Sox debut, trotting home on Frank Thomas' second homer of the game to lift Chicago over the Minnesota Twins 8-6 in 12 innings Wednesday night. 
 
Pinch-hitter Paul Konerko hit a tying, solo homer with two outs in the 11th for the White Sox. Then in the 12th, Alomar walked with one out and Thomas homered with two outs. 
 &quot;It is great when you are playing the game for something, that's why you play the game of baseball, you try to win and you try to get to the pennant,&quot; Alomar said. 
 &quot;Now that we are playing for something I think it is a lot of fun,&quot; he said. 
 Alomar went 1-for-5 in the leadoff spot, a day after the White Sox got the 12-time All-Star second baseman from the New York Mets for three minor leaguers. 
 Alomar dropped Torii Hunter's line drive in the third inning, resulting in an error. But he made a nice backhanded stab and flip on Corey Koskie's grounder to start a double play in the ninth. 
 Carl Everett, obtained Tuesday night from Texas for minor leaguers, was 0-for-4 for Chicago. 
 Thomas praised White Sox general manager Ken Williams. 
 &quot;That was awesome. Kenny went out and made two very big moves and showed he's serious about winning,&quot; Thomas said. &quot;I'm 35. You never know when you're going to get another chance. I'm definitely going to go out and give everything I've got the rest of the season. There's no easy outs in this lineup now.&quot; 
 The resurgent White Sox completed a three-game sweep, winning for the sixth time in seven games and reaching the .500 mark at 42-42. Minnesota has lost five of seven. 
 Eddie Guardado (1-3) walked Alomar in the 12th and one batter later, Thomas ended an 11-pitch at-bat with a two-run homer to left. 
 &quot;I gave him everything I got,&quot; said Guardado. &quot;He kept on fouling everything I had. When you face a good hitter like him, things like that that happen.&quot; 
 Billy Koch (5-4) pitched the 12th to get the victory. 
 Luis Rivas hit a two-out triple in the Twins' 11th, with the ball sailing over Everett's head in center field. Bobby Kielty followed with his fourth hit, an RBI single that made it 6-5. 
 Konerko's shot off Guardado made it 6-all. It was Konerko's first career pinch-hit homer, and the first for the White Sox this season. 
 &quot;The bad thing about the whole thing is I let my team down because we battled today like crazy,&quot; Guardado said. 
 
 <strong>
Atlanta 2, Florida 1.</strong> Another impressive performance by rookie left-hander Dontrelle Willis wasn't enough for the Florida Marlins on Wednesday night. 
 
Willis yielded just one run in eight innings, but Rafael Furcal's opposite-field homer off Armando Almanza leading off the 13th inning helped the Atlanta Braves avoid a three-game sweep with a 2-1 win. 
 &quot;That was the best pitch I saw all night,&quot; Furcal said. &quot;I know we played a lot of innings, but we just needed one run to win it.&quot; 
 The way Willis pitched, one more also would have been enough for the Marlins. 
 Florida's hitters had given Willis an average of only two runs support in each of his last four home appearances, all victories. The offense - which scored 20 runs on Tuesday and was averaging 10.6 runs in its last five games - couldn't deliver again Wednesday. 
 Florida's lone run came in the fourth, on Mike Lowell's 26th homer of the year. 
 &quot;The guy pitched a hell of a game for us and we couldn't get the job done,&quot; Marlins center fielder Juan Pierre said. &quot;That's baseball. We couldn't muster any runs. It's frustrating.&quot; 
 Gary Sheffield had three hits for the Braves, who managed just three runs in 30 innings in this series against Florida before Furcal connected off Almanza (4-5) for his 11th homer of the season. 
 &quot;You knew it was going to end with somebody popping one out of the ballpark,&quot; Marlins manager Jack McKeon said. &quot;You could almost figure it. I didn't expect a little guy to hit one over the right-field fence, though.&quot; 
 Kevin Gryboski (5-3) earned the win in relief. John Smoltz, the sixth Atlanta pitcher, allowed a leadoff single to Luis Castillo in the 13th but got the final three outs for his 30th save. Castillo had three hits for Florida, which was trying to sweep a three-game series from Atlanta for the first time since September 1996. 
 &quot;We followed our script, winning two out of three,&quot; McKeon said. &quot;Can't complain about that. Can't be a hog.&quot; 
 
 <i>
(For other results, see Scorecard.) </i>

TITLE: Armstrong Plays Cool As Destiny Beckons
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: PARIS - Lance Armstrong looks poised to make Tour de France history, but still insists he will tackle the world's biggest cycling race as &quot;just another Tour.&quot; 
 
Business as usual for the Texan would mean a fifth victory, a feat only achieved by four men in the past, in the race starting on Saturday. 
 &quot;For me, like for the other riders at the start, it's just another Tour,&quot; Armstrong said in a recent interview. 
 &quot;I know I have a chance to emulate [five times winners] Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Indurain, but we'll think about the legend in due course,&quot; he added. 
 A fifth victory in succession would put him on a par with Spaniard Indurain, the only man with five straight wins. 
 While Tour fans and spectators will celebrate its 100th anniversary in countless events, exhibitions and shows around the caravan, the race will be not be a celebration for most riders. 
 Armstrong has always believed the Tour to be a tricky event to master and a crash, sickness or a technical incident can never be ruled out in the 20 stages and 3,247 kilometers of the race. 
 &quot;When I saw the itinerary in October, I told myself it would be more difficult to make a difference because there are fewer finishes at the top of a mountain and also shorter time trials,&quot; he said. 
 Armstrong is sticking with the teammates that last year helped him move within one victory of a record-tying fifth straight Tour de France title. 
 The only change to the U.S. Postal Service's lineup announced this week is Manuel Beltran, a Spaniard expected to assist Armstrong in the leg-crushing seven mountain stages. Beltran replaces Benoit Joachim of Luxembourg. 
 In his autobiography, &quot;It's Not About the Bike,&quot; Armstrong explains how teammates are crucial to his success. On windy days or up steep climbs, they stay in front, shielding and sucking him along in their drafts. 
 They chase down riders who try to surge off ahead and protect the team leader from the jostling that goes on in the &quot;peloton,&quot; or pack. 
 &quot;Every team needs guys who are sprinters, guys who are climbers, guys willing to do the dirty work,&quot; Armstrong wrote. &quot;You don't win a road race all on your own.&quot; 
 Two Postal Service team members - George Hincapie and Floyd Landis - overcame injuries and illness to make this Tour's roster. 
 Landis, 27, from San Diego, broke a hip falling during a training ride in January near his southern California home. Hincapie, a South Carolinian who turned 30 last Sunday, missed many of the early season races with a severe respiratory infection. 
 In a statement announcing the roster, team sporting director Johan Bruyneel said: &quot;I'm confident that this year's team is our strongest possible lineup.&quot; 
 The other members of the &quot;Blue Train,&quot; the nickname given to the Postal Service team because of their blue uniforms and single determination, are Vyacheslav Ekimov of Russia, Pavel Padrnos of the Czech Republic, Colombian rider Victor Hugo Pena and three Spaniards, Jose Beltran, Jose Luis Rubiera and Roberto Heras. 
 They &quot;have the experience and proved at the Dauphine that they are ready for the job,&quot; Bruyneel said. 
 
 <i>(Reuters, AP) </i>