SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #902 (70), Tuesday, September 16, 2003
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TITLE: Candidates Complain About Police
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Three candidates in Sunday's gubernatorial elections have complained to police of biased treatment from law-enforcement officers in the run-up to the elections.
 
Representatives of Mikhail Amosov, head of the Yabloko faction in the Legislative Assembly, Sergei Belyayev, former director of Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, and Anna Markova, City Hall vice governor, say city police have acted in favor of presidential envoy to the Northwest Region Valentina Matviyenko, while hindering or detaining other candidates' campaign workers.
 "After this meeting, I became absolutely convinced that the police are behaving obstructively toward all candidates but one," said Olga Pokrovskaya, a member of Amosov's headquarters in a telephone interview Monday. 
 Pokrovskaya added that police had filmed the meeting without asking participants' permission.
 "Among other things I found out [at the meeting] ... was that police on duty at polling stations across the city are to take orders from the head of each polling station. They may force journalists out of polling station, for instance, if they are ordered to," she said.
 Pokrovskaya said there had been at least 10 instances of campaigners being detained, allegedly for breaching election rules. The campaigners had been taken away from mentioned several places, including some near to Narvskaya, Lomonosovskaya, Primorskaya and Vasileostrovskaya metro stations and also on Naberezhnaya Robespyera.
 "On Sept. 5, three men approached our campaigner next to Lomonosovskaya metro station in Nevsky District and demanded that he hand over his leaflets. When he refused, they started beating him up. The police showed up at a time when the men had taken all his leaflets, but they did nothing about the men. The men stole a poster of our candidate, but the police arrested our campaigner," Pokrovskaya said.
 According to local legislation organizers must inform City Hall of any public actions 10 days in advance. They do not require permission from city authorities. 
 Pokrovskaya said Amosov's headquarters had always given the required notice.
 At Friday's meeting, the police had presented a regulation saying campaigners could be detained if they are aged under 18 provided the leaflets they distribute have not information on where copies were printed and candidate paid for them. The regulation also forbids photographs of competing candidates being used in the leaflets, she said.
 "About two weeks ago I saw two boys distributing our leaflets had been detained next to the city court [on Naberezhnaya Reki Fontanki] and all their campaign material had confiscated. Probably it happened because they were too young," said Vladimir Anikeyev, spokesman for Markova.
 City police spokesman Pavel Rayevsky said the complaints were groundless; only 35 criminal proceedings had been opened against all "active" candidates' campaigners since the official campaign started Aug 20.
 "The police doesn't act in interests of just one candidate," Rayevsky said Monday in a telephone interview. "This is a political hullabaloo. There is the Administrative Code ... [And] if agitators disturb pedestrians, for instance, the police has a right to prevent this." 
 Rayevsky refused to name which any candidate's campaigners had been detained. But anonymous sources within the police said cases had been opened against agitators working for Amosov, Belyayev, Markova, Matviyenko and Konstantin Sukhenko, the former Unity faction head at the Legislative Assembly.
 "It would be interesting to know if any pedestrians have complained to the police that they have been disturb by campaigners and why is it that campaginers for certain candidates disturb pedestrians more then others," said Yury Vdovin, representative of St. Petersburg branch of international human rights organization Citizen's Watch on Monday.
 "Interference by the police and the power structures in the election process is a return to the form of the totalitarian, Soviet system, which used all the possible legitimate and illegitimate methods to achieve its goals," he said.
 Matviyenko's headquarters had no comment.

TITLE: Museum Taking on Tyrant With New Exhibition
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: "Comrade Stalin, thank you ... " sounds maybe too positive about one of the 20th century's greatest tyrants to be the title of an exhibition about his life and times, especially in a place like the Museum of the Political History of Russia. 
 
But the people behind the display deny they are biased. 
 "Comrade Stalin, thank you ... " opens on Tuesday to become part of the museum's permanent exhibition. The St. Petersburg museum is the only one to deal with Russian political history since 1917; the nation's only gulag museum is a remote, former prison camp in the Perm region. 
 The exhibition's title is a beginning a line from a popular Stalin-era song, which reads, "Comrade Stalin, thank you for our happy childhood." Those optimistic and cheerful songs of the time - belying the murderous, paranoid nature of the regime - are played over the halls to plunge the audiences into the atmosphere of the era. But the visual part of the exhibition makes quite a contrast to the accompaniment.
 "These 'thank you' words are not at all the reflection of the curators' attitude," said Alexander Smirnov, senior researcher at the museum, and one of the exhibition's creators. "We chose this quotation as the display's title because it has so much of the flavor of the era, which is what we needed."
 The curators' approach is critical, which is not entirely to be expected from a state-run organization. 
 The exhibition documents the evolution of political repression and arbitrary rule from 1917 until Stalin's death in March 1953, ignoring the positive achievements of the period. 
 "There are two parties in Russia now: the Communists and their enemies," reads a poster at the new exhibition, reminding of the regime's aggressive intolerance. Many photographs document mass repression, including the forced exile of intelligentsia in 1922.
 A separate stand is devoted to repression within Stalin's closest circle. Sergei Kirov's field glasses, Iona Yakir's ink-pot, Kliment Voroshilov's cavalry sword, and Sergei Ordzhonikidze's telephone are displayed alongside sentences, verdicts and horrifying NKVD reports. 
 The curators also show what miserable economic conditions people lived in. On display are a variety of ration cards and newspaper reports on implementation of death sentences for even minor theft of state property. 
 "Initially, the newborn Soviet state played on people's enthusiasm and their desire to sacrifice all their time and effort to the new regime," Smirnov said. "But by about 1929 it became clear that emotional motivation alone is not enough."
 The exhibition shows what a Hero of Communist Labor could expect from the state in 1929 in recognition for their efforts - a separate room in a barrack.
 A typical barrack room - as well as a typical kitchen in a communal apartment - have been reconstructed as part of the display. 
 Although the exhibition primarily touches on the principles of repression, with numerous decrees, orders, and politically motivated posters dominating the display, some very personal memorabilia is incorporated in the display.
 On the stand telling the story of forced collectivization, for example, is a hand-written pencil report of a collective farm member, betraying 26 colleagues to the NKVD secret police. One, he writes, is religious, while another one took part in an anti-Soviet meeting in 1918. A few more, he is convinced, were against collective farming. 
 Memorabilia related to the fate of people denounced in such reports are shown on another stand.
 Yelena Kostyusheva, head of the museum's Exhibitions Department, said these items have been the most recent acquisitions.
 "Before perestroika [when the venue was called the Museum of the Great October Socialist Revolution] we barely had anything documenting the lives of victims of the totalitarian regime," she said. "But since the late 1980s, many relatives of victims have been in contact with us to donate things."
 Irina Flige, head of historical branch of Memorial, the major local human rights group engaged in research of political repression of the Soviet era, said she will definitely see the new display.
 "Unfortunately, it is very often in Russia that what is supposed to be a book of remembrance turns out as a KGB achievements report," she said. 
 Many exhibitions on Stalin's rule tended to touch on the mechanisms of death machine and totalitarian regime, rather than on human stories, she said.
 "But only a human story can give you an understanding of what was going on," Flige said. "Decrees and figures can give you knowledge, but knowledge is not enough. The point of such displays is for the people to develop an immunity against totalitarian regime. You need to understand it."
 Little immunity will develop remain unless Russia creates a museum of gulags, she said.
 "The stories have to be as personal and human as possible," she said. "It is all for the people to sense the connection, and it is all for them to develop a desire to stand up against terror in their own lives."
 Stalin's era still causes a mixed reaction in Russians. 
 In Poland last year, the current head of state, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, likened him to the Central Asian despot Tamerlane. But, conceding that Stalin was a dictator, Putin said his role in defeating Nazi Germany was significant and should not be ignored.
 An opinion poll done by the Public Opinion Foundation this year said that 42 percent of Russians associate Stalin with "dictatorship, repression and the Gulag chain of concentration camps." Contrast that to the 32 percent, who associate him with "unequivocal orderliness, industrial rise and the pride of a great empire.
 Another poll by the All-Russian Center for Public Opinion Research shows that 45 percent of St. Petersburgers believe that Stalin played a positive role in history. Almost as many just as much, 38 percent, said his role was negative.
 "The truth is that Stalin, while alive was enormously popular, and not without reason," said Alexander Krauze, secretary on ideological issues of the St. Petersburg office of the Communist Party. "When he was in power, there was no unemployment. He also liquidated illiteracy in the world's largest country."
 But today, even within the Communist party opinions about Stalin and his internal politics vary drastically, he said. 
 "I personally share the view of Winston Churchhill, who pointed that Stalin received a country in bast shoes and the same country developed an H-bomb under his rule," he said. "But there is no unity on that issue. Many Communists renounce Stalin with disgust."

TITLE: Kasyanov Demands More of Investors
AUTHOR: By Alex Fak
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - When is $48.3 billion not enough? When it's the sum total of foreign investment in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, according to Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov.
 
"[This] is not a lot," Kasyanov told Monday's annual meeting of the Foreign Investment Advisory Council, which unites top foreign investors and government officials.
 Kasyanov said that although foreign entities invested $12.7 billion into Russia in the first six months of the year "up 50 percent on the year" more needed to be done to make the country a more attractive place to do business. 
 Urging diversification, Kasyanov said too much of the flow of foreign funds "about half" continues to be concentrated in and around Moscow and in the natural resources sector. Moscow alone attracted 43 percent of all foreign funds that came into the country last year, including 60 percent of all foreign direct investment, according to some estimates.
 Although the government has made little progress on reducing the nation's reliance on oil and gas, the boom in oil revenues from unexpectedly high prices has been a driving force behind domestic investment.
 Still, Kasyanov said more foreign investment was needed to sustain Russia's record economic expansion "the economy grew 6.9 percent in the first eight months of the year" and that the government was taking new measures to attract it, such as improving its customs regime and beefing up intellectual property rights.
 But investors continue to point to rising political tensions ahead of elections as cause for alarm - particularly the standoff between the Kremlin and Yukos, Russia's most valuable company by market capitalization. A major Yukos shareholder, Platon Lebedev, has been held in pre-trial detention since July 2 for allegedly defrauding the state during the privatization of the nation's fertilizer monopoly a decade ago.
 Prior to Lebedev's arrest, Russia enjoyed its first quarter ever when capital inflows exceeded capital outflows. That trend, however, seems to be reversing this quarter, largely due to concerns that the Kremlin may go back on its pledge not to overturn the results of privatization, some analysts say.
 In what could have been a reference to Lebedev's arrest, Kasyanov said the government had been ignoring its investment image to its own detriment, and that from now on it will be a top priority.
 Indeed, much of Monday's meeting centered on image.
 Oil supermajor Royal Dutch/Shell, for example, said government attacks on its $1.16 billion venture with Sibir Energy to develop a field in west Siberia was a wake-up call to foreign investors. The Natural Resources Ministry has threatened to revoke the license to the field if Shell and Sibir for delaying work, while Shell says it's waiting for tax breaks it was promised to be approved.
 Kasyanov said other steps the government has taken or is taking to improve the investment climate include eliminating the 5 percent sales tax and reducing the valued added tax by 10 percent from Jan. 1.
 He also said the government is working on simplifying the tax structure and pushing through banking reforms.
 Another hot subject was what Kasyanov called the "administrative obstacles to investment."
 It is bureaucracy, and the potential to exploit it, that is behind much of the reluctance many foreigners have to doing business here, according to Ernst & Young, a consulting firm and co-chair of the council. 
 In terms of reforms, "the key elements are transparency and accountability - really, corporate governance," said James Turley, chairman of Ernst & Young Global.
 "Investors make decisions on corporations by looking into corporate governance, and countries are no different," he said. "I really encourage [the government] to continue working on transparency."
 Hans Jochum Horn, managing partner for CIS at Ernst & Young and a 13-year veteran of Russia, called administration reform "the biggest hurdle" to attracting investment.
 While the government is concentrating on banking and tax reforms, it is the reforms within the government itself that demand special attention, Horn told The St. Petersburg Times on the sidelines of the conference.
 "When you have a bureaucracy as big as Russia's, then you are doomed to have problems," because too many people can affect the process, he said. "Part of the reform must be to reduce the number of [government] employees."
 He cited customs and construction as two specific problem areas, specifically the number of permits it takes to realize any project.
 The relative lack of foreign direct investment, Horn said, is a clear indication that much more needs to be done.
 Official figures are not yet available for foreign direct investment (FDI), which includes equipment and capital, but by at least one estimate it fell for the third-straight year to $2.42 billion in 2002.
 "For Russia to be serious, anything under $20 billion is far from satisfactory," Horn said. "If administrative issues are solved, I can easily see [FDI] growing by two or three times. But if you have the whole climate really changing positively, I see it going up five to 10 times. We're not talking doubling or tripling ~ we're really talking five or 10 times."

TITLE: Bush Snr. Tours City, Sochi and Moscow
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Old Cold War rivals don't fade away, they just drink tea and crack one-liners together. 
 
After meeting with President Vladimir Putin in Sochi, former U.S. President George Bush flew into Moscow Monday and met with his old sparring partner and partner in ending the Cold War, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
 The two ex-presidents swapped reminiscences of the old days and exchanged views on global politics, but avoided public mention of the upcoming U.S.-Russian summit.
 The former Soviet president received Bush Sr. at his Gorbachev Foundation offices in Moscow, treating the father of U.S. President George W. Bush to tea, Interfax reported.
 George W. Bush is due to host Russian President Vladimir Putin at his Camp David, Maryland retreat on Sept. 26.
 After the reception, Bush joked that he had been "overfed," but would still like to see Gorbachev attend his 80th birthday bash next June, the agency reported. Bush said his meetings with Gorbachev were among the happiest moments of his presidency.
 Gorbachev said he had accepted the invitation, but noted that he would probably decline Bush's offer to celebrate the birthday with a joint parachute jump, in a reference to Bush's emergency bailout from a bomber during World War II. He added that he would rather greet the skydiving Bush with flowers when he landed. 
 Continuing the horseplay, Bush told Gorbachev that he'd rather accept the flowers in person than have the former Soviet leader lay flowers on his grave.
 Bush's wife Barbara and Gorbachev's daughter Irina Virginskaya were present at the reception, Interfax reported.
 Bush, a World War II U.S. Navy pilot, was in St. Petersburg on Friday when he laid a wreath at the monument to the Heroic Defenders of the Fatherland. 
 He was treated to a private concert Saturday by the stars of the Mariinsky Theater, Interfax reported, citing UES chief Anatoly Chubais, who attended the event. Also in attendance were former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, Interfax said.
 In St. Petersburg, Bush participated in a Pepsico corporate meeting.
 Bush was late Monday expected to deliver the keynote speech at a dinner hosted by the Carlyle Group, the capital management giant that is creating a $500 million private equity fund with Alfa Group.

TITLE: Re-Burial of the Mother of Nicholas II Postponed
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The long discussed re-burial in St. Petersburgof Maria Fyodorovna, mother of Nicholas II, the last tsar, which had been scheduled for Sept. 26 has been postponed until at least next year.
 
"The delay had to do with last year's cooling of relationships between Russia and Denmark," said Ivan Artsishevsky, head of state protocol at the St. Petersburg administration's external relations committee, on Monday.
 Tensions rose last year, after the Russian government expressed its dissatisfaction with Denmark that a Chechen Congress was held in that country right after 129 hostages died after Chechen terrorists seized a Moscow during a performance of the musical "Nord-Ost."
 Artsishevsky said Russia and Denmark held negotiations on the re-burial of Maria Fyodorovna last year, and had certain agreements on the matter, but had to postpone the event.
 "I think the re-burial will take place, and we already even have a scenario for the event. Just it will happen later," Artsishevsky said.
 In May 2001, three years after the belated burial of the remains of the Romanovs, Russia's last royal family, President Vladimir Putin approved the re- burial of yet another Romanov - Maria Fyodorovna - whose remains are buried in Denmark, the land of her birth where she is known as Princess Dagmar. 
 During a meeting with then St. Petersburg Governor Vladimir Yakovlev, Putin gave the nod to the re-burial of the last tsar's mother in the Romanov crypt at the Peter and Paul Fortress, next to her husband Alexander III. 
 Maria Fyodorovna was buried in Copenhagen's Roskilde Cathedral in 1928. She was born in 1847 as Maria Sofia Frederick Dagmar, daughter of the Danish king, Christian IX. 
 In 1866, she married Tsarevich Alexander of Russia, converted to the Orthodox faith and changed her name to Maria Fyodorovna Romanova. Together they had six children, among them Nicholas. 
 After her son abdicated the throne in 1917, she escaped from St. Petersburg with her daughter to the Crimea, and in 1919 from there they escaped Russia for England and later Copenhagen. Even in the last hours of her life, she refused to believe that the Bolsheviks had murdered her son and his family. 
 The decision to rebury her remains was initiated by Duke Nikolai Romanov, great grandson of Tsar Nicholas I, who headed the Romanov Dynasty Association in Switzerland. He wrote to both Putin and Yakovlev and met Denmark's Queen Margrethe II. 
 The burial of Maria Fyodorovna - unlike that of Nicholas II, his wife and three of their children - was expected to be a quiet affair, because unlike those murdered by the Bolsheviks there was no controversy as to the identity of her remains. She had stipulated that she be buried in Peter and Paul Fortress with her husband and son. 
 In Nicholas II's case, scientists took painstaking efforts using DNA testing to establish that the bones pulled out of a mine shaft near Yekaterinburg in 1973 were indeed his and those of his wife and three of their five children. 
 With that established, bitter political and religious divisions erupted, and Patriarch Alexy II, head of the Orthodox Church, refused to attend the 1998 burial of the Romanovs, saying he doubted the validity of the DNA tests. Then President Boris Yeltsin also balked at attending, but grudgingly appeared for the funeral. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 However, today some people suggest that if the reburial takes place and Maria's and Alexander's crypts are to be opened in order to complete those plans, then DNA samples should be taken from their remains for direct comparison to the samples of the remains identified as those of Nicholas II.
 Thus, according to John Kendrick, investigative journalist from Canada, who wrote to the St. Petersburg Times, this "would be the one and only chance to compare the putative remains of Nicholas to those of his parents, thereby settling all of those incessant disputes over the original DNA identification." 
 However, Artsishevsky said that he "didn't see any reason for such actions."
 "The probability that they [the DNA tests] are wrong is very small," Artsishevsky said.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Belyayev Excluded
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Leningrad Oblast gubernatorial candidate Yury Belyayev was disqualified from running in the regional elections. An oblast court made the ruling after hearing evidence obtained from law-enforcement agencies that Belyayev's associate Yevgeny Tyulkin distributed vodka to potential voters, Interfax reported Monday.
 The oblast race is now down to eight candidates after the same court upheld the registration of candidate Vadim Gustov, also accused of bribing voters in two separate districts of the Oblast.
 
 
<b>Meat Boss Murdered
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The general director of Kolpino Meat Factory, Sergei Kuznetsov, 61, was shot dead in Kurortny district of St. Petersburg on Sunday morning, St. Petersburg police said.
 Kuznetsov was murdered in the village of Pesochnoye while walking with his wife near the Cancer Scientific and Research Institute, where the businessman arrived to have medical treatment.
 Kuznetsov was apparently shot dead with a rifle with a telegraphic sight from the nearest forest, Interfax reported.
 In May this year, one of the factory's founders Valery Bogdanov survived an attempt upon the life, the agency said.
 The factory is known for producing a widely known brand of pelmeni called "Kolpinskiye," and other meat products.
 
 
<b>Hot Water Cut Off
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The hot water supply to 19,300 residents of Novgorod was cut off Monday because of their failure to pay the municipal water supplier, Interfax reported Monday.
 According to the administration enterprses in the Chudovo district owe power supplier Novgorodenergo 4 million rubles ($330,000) and housing owned by those enterprises have been cut off. 
 Novgorodenergo said it would not restore supplies until the debt was paid, the report said.
 
 
<b>Libel Suit Weighed
 </b>

ST.PETERSBURG (SPT) - St. Petersburg's Vasileostrovsky court on Monday began considering a libel suit against the former St. Petersburg prosecutor Ivan Sydoruk brought by casino operator Mikhail Mirilashvili, Interfax reported. 
 Sydoruk was named prosecutor for the Moscow region on Sept. 3 and neither he nor any representative atteneded the hearing.
 Mirilashvili complains that the prosecutor had "on several occasions made unfounded and unproven declarations that insulted the businessman," the report said. The next hearing is set down for Oct. 8.
 Mirilashvili was sentenced to 12 years hard labor on Aug, 1, Interfax added.
 
 
<b>CEC Head to Visit
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The chairman of the Central Election Commission Alexander Veshnyakov is to visit St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region on Tuesday and Wednesday, Interfax reported.
 Gubernatorial elections are being held in the city and the region this Sunday and Veshnakov will familiarize himself with preparations, the St. Petersburg election committee was quoted as saying. The new GAS-Vybory system is to be tried out in the region for the first time, the report said.
 Veshnyakov had earlier said all court cases concerning candidates in the St. Petersburg election had been completed, meaning that the list of candidates is unlikely to change, the report said.
 
 
 
 



TITLE: FSB's Ingushetia HQ Hit by Truck Bomb
AUTHOR: By Yuri Bagrov
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MAGAS, Ingushetia - A truck laden with explosives blew up Monday outside the Federal Security Service's headquarters in Ingushetia, killing at least two people and injuring at least 25, officials said. 
 
The explosion blew all the windowpanes and ripped part of the roof open, leaving the three-story building severely damaged but still standing. 
 Overturned cars lay crumpled near the pockmarked FSB building in Ingushetia's capital, Magas, and nearby buildings were also damaged, but there was very little rubble. An Associated Press reporter saw at least one dead body inside one of the cars. 
 The force of the blast was so great, said Muslim Dudarov, a man who works in a nearby building, that he was thrown out of his office and into the building's lobby. He said that numerous people were hit by flying glass. 
 The bombing in Ingushetia, which has close ethnic ties to Chechnya and shelters tens of thousands of Chechen refugees, came ahead of a planned Oct. 5 presidential election in Chechnya. The Kremlin has touted the vote as a key step toward peace, but the campaign has been tarnished by accusations of intimidation tactics by supporters of Chechnya's Moscow-appointed acting leader, Akhmad Kadyrov. 
 Officials gave varying casualty tolls. Yury Miroshnichenko, a duty officer at the Emergency Situations Ministry's headquarters for southern Russia, said two people were killed and 32 were wounded, including four people in intensive care. Sergei Ignatchenko, an FSB spokesman in Moscow, said two people were killed and 25 injured. 
 But Yakhiya Khadziyev, a spokesman for the Ingush Interior Ministry, said that three people were killed on the scene. 
 Accounts also differed as to whether the truck had been driven by a suicide bomber or parked outside the building. 
 There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast. Officials called it a terrorist act but did not say who they believed was behind it. 
 Nikolai Khazikov, a federal prosecutor for the North Caucasus region that includes Chechnya and Ingushetia, told NTV television that investigators had established who owns the car but were not releasing a name.
 Mikhail Safonov, the deputy chief of the FSB's Chechnya branch, was in the building at the time of the blast and was injured, Ignatchenko said. His life was not in danger, he said.
 The FSB had been leading the Russian campaign against Chechen rebels but recently handed control over to the Interior Ministry ~ a shift officials called a sign that the situation in Chechnya was becoming more stable. 
 The upcoming presidential election is also being presented as a sign of emerging peace, but critics say that is wishful thinking. Separatist fighters continue to stage daily attacks on federal troops and pro-Moscow police, while civilians accuse the military of arbitrary detentions and killings. 
 Over the past 24 hours, a total of five troops and policemen were killed and 13 wounded in rebel attacks, land mine explosions and clashes, an official in Chechnya's civilian administration said on condition of anonymity. 
 The nation has been on high alert amid fears that rebels would try to stage an attack ahead of the Oct. 5 vote. Two explosive devices were defused near polling stations in the region over the weekend, Itar-Tass reported, citing Interior Ministry officials. 
 A series of suicide bombings and other attacks in and around Chechnya and in Moscow has killed more than 150 people in the past five months. On Aug. 1, a truck packed with explosives rammed through the gates of a military hospital in North Ossetia, which borders Chechnya and Ingushetia, blowing up and killing 50 people.

TITLE: Russia Pushes Iran UN Cooperation
AUTHOR: By Steve Gutterman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: Russian officials urged Iran to abide by a UN nuclear agency resolution that set Oct. 31 as a deadline for Iran to prove it is not seeking to develop atomic weapons, saying Saturday that it is in Tehran's interest to show that its nuclear programs are purely peaceful.
 
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Kislyak also sought to ease tension between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency, saying the resolution passed by its board of governors Friday &quot;is not an ultimatum. It is a serious and respectful call by the agency for cooperation between Iran and the IAEA,&quot; Interfax reported.
 Kislyak said the resolution had &quot;the aim of removing all remaining questions the agency has with regard to the peaceful nuclear programs of Iran-and without putting it off,&quot; Interfax reported. He said, &quot;It is in the interest of Iran to remove these questions and thus confirm the peaceful character of its nuclear programs.&quot;
 Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Yakovenko echoed Kislyak in a statement later Saturday, calling the resolution a &quot;clear, direct but respectful signal to Iran about the need to continue and broaden its cooperation with the agency, to provide for the full transparency of its nuclear program.&quot;
 The diplomats' tone appeared to be aimed at soothing Iran, whose chief delegate Ali Akbar Salehi walked out of Friday's meeting in Vienna and threatened a review of cooperation with the IAEA-suggesting Tehran might doom inspection attempts by reducing or severing ties. Russia, which plays a large role in building the Bushehr nuclear power plant, is considered to have some sway over Iran's decisions on nuclear policy.
 In Iran, Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said late Friday that the IAEA resolution was &quot;immature&quot; and &quot;politically motivated,&quot; the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported Saturday.
 Kharrazi repeated the warning that it would affect Iran's relations with the UN nuclear watchdog. &quot;Naturally, we should now decide about our cooperation&quot; with the IAEA, IRNA quoted him as saying.
 In comments published online Saturday by Der Spiegel, but appeared to have been before the IAEA resolution, Salehi said it was possible Tehran would &quot;completely end cooperation&quot; with the agency and &quot;maybe pull out of the NonProliferation Treaty.&quot;

TITLE: Glazyev Puts Forward His Electoral Bloc
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Popular left-leaning economist and State Duma Deputy Sergei Glazyev assembled his parliamentary-elections vehicle over the weekend by drawing a group of second-tier opposition-minded politicians into a new bloc called Homeland.
 
The bloc, formed by Glazyev's Russian Regions party and about 30 small movements at a congress Sunday, made clear its plans to court the public by attacking the oligarchs who amassed fortunes in the privatizations of the 1990s.
 &quot;A narrow group of self-interested people have the economy in their hands and dictate to us how we should live. The oligarchs are our enemy,&quot; Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Duma's international affairs committee and a presiential envoy, told the 150 delegates at the congress, Agence France Presse reported.
 Delegates gave Rogozin the No. 2 spot on Homeland's federal list, sandwiched between Glazyev at No. 1 and retired Army General Valentin Varennikov at No. 3. Rogozin is best known for hard-line escapades such as angrily defending the war in Chechnya at PACE. Varennikov is a staunch supporter of the revival of the Soviet Union.
 Homeland's federal list also includes former Central Bank head Viktor Gerashchenko, Russian Regions Party co-chairman Oleg Denisov, former Airborne Troops chief Georgy Shpak and former Deputy Sergei Baburin, who heads the nationalist People's Will party.
 While picking hard-liners and left-leaning politicians for its federal list, delegates decided to install Kremlin-connected banker Alexander Lebedev at the top of the bloc's Moscow list. They also agreed to support Lebedev should he decide to run for Moscow mayor.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Protest Blocks Train
 </b>

VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) - Some 20 protesters, angry about new rules for traveling through Lithuania between Russia and Kaliningrad, chained themselves to a Moscow-bound train car Sunday, according to Lithuanian police.
 The demonstrators, from the leftist National Bolshevik Party, were upset about a travel policy Lithuania instituted earlier this year that requires Russians traveling between Russia and its Kaliningrad exclave to have travel documents when passing through Lithuania.
 Lithuania said the new measures were needed because it is slated to join the European Union next year - and must have tighter control of those traveling through the country.
 "We are demanding that Lithuania annul the visa regime on the Kaliningrad railway," the group was quoted by Interfax as stating.
 Police in Vilnius said they used hacksaws to remove the protesters and detained them, but did not say where or for how long.
 
 
<b>District Chief Shot
 </b>

MAKHACHKALA, Dagestan (AP) - Gunmen fired at the car of a district chief in Dagestan on Saturday, severely wounding him and injuring two bodyguards, police said.
 The unidentified gunmen fired at Kizilyurt district administration chief Abdurakhman Gadzhiyev on the outskirts of the district seat, Kizilyurt, and fled the scene in a car, Dagestan Interior Ministry spokesman Abdul Musayev said.
 Gadzhiyev was hospitalized with a serious head wound after the morning attack, which Musayev characterized as an assassination attempt. Two bodyguards suffered leg wounds, Musayev said.
 
 
<b>Avalanche Find
 </b>

VLADIKAVKAZ, North Ossetia (AP) - Relatives have found documents belonging to two men missing since an avalanche crashed down a mountainside in North Ossetia near their campsite a year ago, leaving more 100 people feared dead, authorities said Saturday.
 A son of one of the missing men was digging Friday along with a cousin, to put up a cross at the site where the two men camped out every year.
 He found their passports, pieces of a tent and a gun license belonging to his father's camping companion, they said.
 
 
<b>Aliyev to Return
 </b>

BAKU, Azerbaijan (AP)-President Heidar Aliyev is undergoing a course of rehabilitation and physical therapy in order to prepare for his return to Azerbaijan from the U.S. medical clinic where he has spent nearly six weeks, the state news agency Azertaj reported Saturday.
 Azertaj cited what it said was a statement from the Cleveland Clinic, in Ohio, where Aliyev was flown for further treatment Aug. 6 after nearly a month at a Turkish hospital.
 
 
<b>New Space Chief
 </b>

MOSCOW (SPT) - President Vladimir Putin has decreed to appoint veteran cosmonaut Vasily Tsibliyev head of the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, an official said.
 The Sept. 9 decree also provides for another veteran cosmonaut, Valery Korzun, to become deputy head of the center, an official at the Russian Aviation and Space Agency said.
 Both Tsibliyev, 53, and Korzun, 50, earlier occupied senior posts at this training center.
 Tsibliyev replaces Colonel General Pyotr Klimuk, the head of the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center who turned 60 in June, thus reaching the mandatory retirement age for senior Russian commanders. 



TITLE: Grocery Stores Broaden Remit
AUTHOR: By Andrei Musatov and Anna Shcherbakova
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: The Pyatyorochka chain of grocery stores, which previously limited its presence to major cities, is now eyeing towns in the Leningrad Oblast. Market experts and participants consider this a timely step since the discount chain's format will be appreciated by Oblast consumers.
 According to Feliks Stetoi, vice president for communication and brand policy of the Agrotorg company - the company that owns Pyatyorochka - the Leningrad Oblast already has three stores. Next year the company plans to open stores in eight towns, with one or two stores in each town.
 The cost of building one Pyatyorochka store with 1,000 square meters of space ranges between $550,000 and $600,000, said an expert from the RMS-otsenka firm, who asked to remain anonymous. Stetoi said that the company's success lies mainly in the locations of the stores. &quot;Expanding to the Oblast means taking promising locations.&quot; Stetoi does not doubt that the expansion will be successful since Pyatyorochka caters to low-income consumers.
 According to Alexei Shaskolsky, head of the real estate valuation department of the Institute for Entrepreneurial Issues, Pyatyorochka is taking a logical and predictable step. Agrotorg, Pyatyorochka's managing company, may have been a little late in recognizing that the Leningrad Oblast also has people seeking to save on their grocery bills. &quot;Income is of course lower here than in St. Petersburg, but it is higher in the regional towns than in the villages,&quot; said Shaskolsky. Moreover, he added that Agrotorg has many suppliers in the Oblast who will more easily be able to transport their products to the new stores.
 St. Petersburg's Nakhodka chain, which operates six stores in the Leningrad Oblast, also sees this market as promising. &quot;Income is approaching city levels,&quot; said Alexander Pushkin, sales director for the Temp Pervy company that owns Nakhodka. The chains can count on their regular customers in addition to residents of regional towns. &quot;In the period between May and October a large number of St. Petersburg residents who already recognize the Nakhodka name migrate to the Leningrad Oblast,&quot; said Pushkin. The manager also said that the Nakhodka company is planning to open two more stores in the Oblast in the near future.
 One other St. Petersburg chain, Lenta Cash & Carry, is also pondering expansion into the Oblast. According to Oleg Zherebtsov, the chain's general director, the company is currently considering several plots for possible construction.

TITLE: Local Telephone Operator Expanding Into Moscow
AUTHOR: By Leonid Konik, Alexander Boreiko and Yuri Granovsky
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: St. Petersburg company Petersburg Transit Telecom (PTT) has received 100,000 direct lines in Moscow from Minsvyaz, the Russian communications ministry. The numbers start with a six. This makes PTT the largest alternative telephone service provider in the Russian capital. Only Golden Telecom and MTU-Inform own more direct lines in Moscow. 
 
The Petersburg Transit Telecom company, founded in 2000, is fully owned by the Telecominvest company. PTT has a capacity of 136,000 telephone numbers, of which 70,000 have been sold to direct-line operators.
 There are ten million seven-digit telephone numbers in operation in Moscow, but another six million numbers have been reserved for use. Numbers starting with a zero belong to emergency services, numbers starting with an eight are for intercity calls, while numbers starting with a six were reserved for the Moscow city telephone network (MGTS). Numbers starting with five and occasionally four were used to cover the Moscow region. In order to solve the problem of insufficient telephone coverage, Minsvyaz decided to introduce a new area code, 499, in addition to the existing 095 code.
 Sergei Grigorenko, chief of the Minsvyaz office for information policy, confirmed that PTT had received 100,000 direct telephone numbers in Moscow's so-called sixth million. This puts PTT among the capital's major alternative operators. Globus Telecom and Tsentralny Telegraf possess a similar resource of numbers, while Comstar and Telmos own 70,000 and 60,000 numbers, respectively. Only direct-line market leaders Golden Telecom and MTU-Inform own more numbers.
 Until recently sixth-million numbers were used by MGTS when rebuilding telephone switching stations, meaning that they were temporarily allotted to subscribers of stations under repair. MGTS opposed the transfer of these numbers to alternative operators. However, Minsvyaz decided to share the wealth, leaving MGTS with 140,000 direct lines in the sixth million and granting 100,000 to Petersburg Transit Telecom at the latter company's request. &quot;We are already laying the technical groundwork for bringing PTT on board,&quot; said MGTS deputy general director Semyon Rabovsky.
 As on the St. Petersburg market, PTT will serve as an &quot;operator's operator,&quot; meaning that smaller companies will lease numbers from PTT rather than MGTS. According to Alexander Malygaev, deputy general director of Telekominvest, PTT has not yet finalized its plan for entering the Moscow market. The company may work with other St. Petersburg operators. &quot;There are not very many free telephone numbers in Moscow, and if PTT establishes itself soon and offers attractive rates, then we will be ready to use their services,&quot; said PeterStar general director Viktor Koresh. PeterStar currently buys Moscow telephone numbers from Tsentralny Telegraf.
 Semyon Rabovsky thinks that the new 499 area code will lose interest for alternative operators once the sixth-million numbers are made available. &quot;The decision was made to introduce the new area code because capacity on the 095 area code had been virtually exhausted,&quot; Ryabovsky said. &quot;Moscow will need an estimated 500,000 new telephone numbers by 2007. Now this demand for new numbers is being met by Tsentralny Telegraf and Globus Telecom, and once PTT joins the market, there will be enough numbers available.&quot;

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Power Stations
 </b>

MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - ENEL SpA and a group made up of Fortum Oyj and St. Petersburg-based utility Lenenergo may bid to run a power station in northern Russia, Vedomosti reported Friday, citing unidentified officials and analysts.
 ENEL and Russian management company ESN-Energo plan to make a joint bid for the right to run the Northwest thermal power station, the newspaper said, citing an ENEL announcement.
 Lenenergo General Director Andrei Likhachyov said his company will bid with a foreign partner, Vedomosti reported. He declined to name the company.
 
 
<b>More Tinkoff
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Tinkoff microbrewery will open its fifth restaurant in Nizhny Novgorod on Saturday at a cost of $1.5 million, ABNews reported.
 The company already operates restaurants in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Samara and Novosibirsk featuring the brand-name beer. The new restaurant will have a capacity of 300 seats and will brew 18,000 liters of beer per month.
 The Tinkoff company was created in 1998 in St. Petersburg by Oleg Tinkov, who retains 100 percent ownership. The company is planning to have 20 restaurants spread across Russia by the end of 2005.
 
 
<b>LUKoil Terminal
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The LUKoil terminal in Vysotsk, Leningrad Oblast, will start operating in November, according to Vagit Alikperov, the company president, speaking at a press conference on Friday, Rosbalt reported.
 The first phase of the terminal, costing $150 million, will have a capacity of 3 million tons of oil per year, while by 2004 capacity should jump to 6 million tons.
 In 2004 LUKoil plans to begin construction of the second phase of the terminal, at a cost of $150 million. The launching of the second phase as well as the reconstruction of the Vyborg railway system, will allow transfer of up to 10 million tons of oil.
 The terminal will export oil and gasoline to the United States and European ports of Porvoo (Finland), Gdansk (Poland) and Rotterdam (The Netherlands). 



TITLE: Sistema Has Eyes on MiG Jet Maker
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: When Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov last month put fighter-jet maker RSK MiG on the list of state companies eligible for privatization, it did not go unnoticed by AFK Sistema, which appears eager to snag a stake in the defense giant. 
 
&quot;Yes, we will buy [MiG shares],&quot; the board chairman of the powerful holding, Vladimir Yevtushenkov, told reporters last week &quot;as many as they will give us.&quot;
 Yevtushenkov declined to elaborate, but Sistema, a financial-industrial group with holdings ranging from telecoms to insurance, is seen to have a growing interest in the defense sector after acquiring a controlling stake in helicopter-maker Kamov last year.
 Sistema and MiG already have a working relationship, through their shared control over Kamov, in which MiG manages the 49 percent not owned by Sistema on behalf of the state.
 How strong the lines of communication are between the two, however, is another question entirely, with MiG representatives saying they were unaware of Sistema's interest in becoming a shareholder.
 Vladimir Barkovsky, MiG deputy general director, called any interest on Sistema's part a compliment.
 &quot;It means that we are worthy of interest,&quot; he said late Thursday.
 A spokesman for Industry, Science and Technology Minister Ilya Klebanov said Friday he was not aware of Yevtushenkov's comments from earlier in the week.
 &quot;This is the first time I heard about it,&quot; Andrei Mazurov said by phone.
 Being included on Kasyanov's privatization list also caught MiG by surprise, with government officials rushing to explain that the state would retain its 100 percent stake after the company is transformed from a state unitary enterprise to a shareholding structure.
 Konstantin Makiyenko, deputy head of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, said turning MiG into a shareholding company would serve it better than its current status, and is likely a first step toward private hands.
 If and when MiG gets privatized, Yevtushenko's Sistema is in a prime position to acquire a stake.
 &quot;They have shown themselves well at Kamov,&quot; said Makiyenko.
 Makiyenko also noted that Yevtushenko's interest reflects MiG's improved performance since 1999, when current director Nikolai Nikitin assumed his post. In 2001, MiG landed nearly $1 billion worth of contracts for 36 MiG-29s and last year it ranked second only to state-owned arms selling agency Rosobronexport in exports.
 Many argue that encouraging private investment is the only way for the government to breathe life into the ailing, state-dominated sector.
 During a visit to MiG's new production facility in Lukhovitsy, outside Moscow, State Duma speaker Gennady Seleznyov argued that since 80 percent of the country's companies have shareholder structures, the state should retain control over the remaining one-fifth. 
 &quot;The government simply has to preserve such jewels in its state crown,&quot; Seleznyov said, referring to MiG.
 The $25 million Lukhovitsy assembly shop is set to produce, starting in December, everything from MiG-29 fighters, Ka-60 multi-purpose light helicopters and four-seater Ilyushins, to the Tupolev Tu-334 short-range plane, on which MiG is relying to keep the company afloat commercially. 
 The Tu-334 is to be certified by the end of this year and move into mass production in 2004. Two airlines, Atlant-Soyuz and Aerofrakht, have together ordered a total of 10 aircraft. 
 Another 25 such planes are being negotiated for No. 3 airline Pulkovo, amid heated debate over whether this airplane has a future at home, where airlines are increasingly looking toward leasing Airbuses and Boeings.
 
 <i>
Staff writer Simon Ostrovsky contributed to this report. </i>

TITLE: Minister Hits Out at GSM-Operator Merger
AUTHOR: By Simon Ostrovsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Anti-Monopoly Minister Ilya Yuzhanov said Monday that allowing a merger between any two of Russia's three largest GSM operators would be &quot;sheer lunacy.&quot;
 
Reports that rival operators Vimpelcom and Megafon might seek to merge their operations surfaced last month after Alfa Group, a major shareholder in No. 2 Vimpelcom, bought a 25.1 percent blocking stake in No. 3 Megafon.
 &quot;[We] will never approve a merger of two of the three national GSM operators,&quot; Yuzhanov said without elaborating, according to Gazeta.ru.
 Norwegian telecom Telenor, which like Alfa owns a blocking stake in Vimpelcom, seemed eager at the prospect of taking on top operator MTS via a tie-up between Vimpelcom and Megafon when its shareholders enthusiastically approved Alfa's acquisition of the Megafon stake.
 However, Megafon's major shareholders, Finnish-Swedish TeliaSonera and St. Petersburg-based Telecominvest, were less enthusiastic about a major competitor coming on board, saying they disapproved of Alfa's acquisition of Megafon stakeholder CT Mobile.
 TeliaSonera and Telecominvest own 35.6 percent and 31.3 percent of Megafon, respectively. 
 Yuzhanov's remarks were in sharp contrast to those of Communications Minister Leonid Reiman, a former Telecominvest executive who said last week that he saw no barriers to a merger. He qualified the remark by saying a third national operator would need to be introduced to keep the fast-growing sector competitive.
 TeliaSonera, Telecominvest and Megafon all declined to comment, and Alfa's telecommunications wing, Alfa Eko, could not be reached.
 Analysts said it was far from certain if Alfa indeed is pushing for a merger, suggesting that instead the company may have bought the Megafon stake as a barganing chip for when the government decides to sell another chunk of state telecoms holding Svyazinvest. 
 The state's 75 percent stake in Svyazinvest is listed on the official privatization plan for this year, but Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref said Monday that the government would not sell any of its remaining shares in the company until 2005 at the earliest.
 &quot;First we need to settle the fate of Svyazinvest and the process of restructuring. Right now this isn't a very lucrative deal for Russia and it is not very attractive to investors,&quot; news agencies quoted him as saying. &quot;We should spend 2004 deciding Svyazinvest's ultimate fate.&quot;

TITLE: Foreign Oil Majors To Bid on Top Russia Duo
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW - Shares in top oil producer Yukos neared an all-time high on Monday amid growing signs that U.S. companies are preparing to invest $11 billion or more in the company.
 
Both ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco are expected to submit rival preliminary bids this week for a 25 percent stake in YukosSibneft, the company that will be formed later this year when Yukos completes its merger with Sibneft, according to the Wall Street Journal.
 The world's major oil companies covet Russia as one of the few places in the world in which large oil reserves are up for sale, particularly as oil prices remain high and Middle East tensions throw doubts on future supplies from that region.
 The head of Yukos, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, raised expectations of a deal in July when he said he was in talks with Exxon, Chevron, Royal Dutch/Shell and France's Total on a number of issues.
 Banking sources familiar with the situation said that any concrete offer was probably a long way off.
 Speculation that ChevronTexaco would take a stake have been around for some weeks and on Monday the San Francisco-based company's CEO, David O'Reilly, told the Financial Times that he saw Russia as an improving investment prospect.
 &quot;The former Soviet Union and Russia are areas where there is oil and gas. These are areas of opportunity for us,&quot; he said. 
 O'Reilly's remarks came as news reports said that Chevron had divested its majority stake in a Kazakhstan joint venture to turn its attention to Russia.
 Dow Jones quoted the news agency Kazakhstan Today as reporting that Chevron had sold its 65 percent share in the project to develop the North Buzachi oil field in western Kazakhstan to China National Petroleum Corp. for an undisclosed price. A Chevron spokesman, however, said talks were still ongoing.
 Nonetheless, the report added to speculation that Chevron was building up a war chest, helping to push Yukos shares nearly 3 percent higher to $15.08 on the RTS, near an all-time high.
 ChevronTexaco declined to comment, as did Exxon's office in Moscow.
 If Yukos strikes such a deal, it would be by far the largest foreign investment in a Russian company, eclipsing the $7.7 billion Britain's BP invested in a joint venture with oil producer TNK, a deal that was completed last week.
 However, analysts said U.S. oil companies face a number of difficult issues in taking a significant stake in YukosSibneft.
 The expected transaction could be overshadowed by a row between Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man, and the Kremlin. In July one of his key allies was arrested on charges of theft of state property.
 The Wall Street Journal said that Khodorkovsky started to look for a powerful foreign partner to better protect his firm in April and May, when he understood he was running into trouble with the Kremlin.
 UFG brokerage said, however, it doubted that U.S. majors would act soon to buy a stake in YukosSibneft.
 &quot;Our view is that it is likely that such a deal will happen, although not before the YukosSibneft merger has been completed,&quot; UFG said. <i>(Reuters, SPT) </i>

TITLE: Kasyanov Blasts Preparations
AUTHOR: By Alla Startseva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov lashed out Thursday at the &quot;irresponsibility&quot; of regional and municipal leaders who have failed to prepare for the coming winter.
 
&quot;Local leaders are responsible for winter preparations, but the federal government has been forced to discuss the question,&quot; Kasyanov told a Cabinet session dedicated to winter preparations before briefing the president on the subject later Thursday.
 Kasyanov gave the Cabinet a week to find additional funds and take steps to avoid a catastrophe.
 With parliamentary and presidential elections just a few months away, the government is paying closer attention than usual to an issue that is growing more fraught as the nation's decrepit heating network ages.
 Winter arrives in October in some of the worst prepared regions, such as Kamchatka and the Koryak district, which Kasyanov said were &quot;only 10 percent ready.&quot; Once the rivers freeze, goods and supplies cannot be shipped in.
 &quot;In most regions the level of responsibility of the municipal authorities is too low, as is their financial ability,&quot; Kasyanov said.
 The State Construction Committee, or Gosstroi, said Thursday that on average, fuel oil and coal stocks for boilers needed to heat homes were only half of what they should be to meet the demands of winter.
 Deputy Prime Minister and former St. Petersburg Governor Vladimir Yakovlev, whom Putin brought in at the end of June to oversee the housing sector and winter preparations, reported &quot;plenty of problems&quot; to Thursday's Cabinet meeting.
 While on average the country is 80 percent prepared, better than at this time last year, Yakovlev said that Ulyanovsk, the northern regions of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk and the Siberian regions of Altai, Tuva and Chita, among others, face serious problems this winter.
 Last week, Yakovlev declared the far eastern Kamchatka region bankrupt, criticizing its administration for its &quot;catastrophic lack of preparation for the winter season.&quot;
 The last-minute funds that the Cabinet scrapes together will come on top of 5.5 billion rubles ($180 million) that the government added this spring to the regular annual subsidy to poor regions for purchasing fuel and repairing the power and heat infrastructure.
 Yakovlev said that by Sept. 1 the housing and communal sector was owed 204.2 billion rubles, mostly by budget-funded organizations, federal and local governments, and in turn owed 296.6 billion rubles ($9.67 billion), mostly to its suppliers Unified Energy Systems and Gazprom.
 He said that there would be no &quot;ungrounded write-offs&quot; of the debts, adding that Gosstroi, together with the Finance Ministry, would find a solution.
 The Cabinet meeting came on the same day that Russian Communal Services celebrated its 100th day of existence by announcing a $700 million plan to overhaul the long-neglected housing sector over the next five years.
 RCS was founded by UES and some of the most powerful financial and industrial groups in the country, such as Interros, Gazprombank and Renova.
 In the first quarter of 2004, RCS will draw up an investment plan for the year.
 UES Deputy CEO and RCS board chairman Mikhail Abyzov said that RCS expects sales of around $1 billion in its first year of operations, cornering 8 percent of the market.
 RCS has set up regional affiliates in 20 regions and signed cooperation agreements with 27 regional and municipal governments. It is negotiating with another 37 of the country's 89 regions.
 &quot;Talk that RCS might become a monopoly is groundless,&quot; Yakovlev said after the Cabinet meeting, Interfax reported.
 &quot;The more private companies we manage to get involved in the housing sector, the better the services will be and the better it will be for the population,&quot; he said.

TITLE: Ministry Announces New Entrepreneur Rules
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Beginning next year, foreigners and 14-year-olds can register on their own as entrepreneurs, Sergei Dukanov, head of the Tax Ministry's registration and record-keeping department, said Thursday.
 
An amendment to the state registration law that comes into effect from Jan. 1, 2004, will allow foreigners and minors over the age of 14 to register as individual entrepreneurs without setting up a legal entity.
 Dukanov said minors must have the written consent of their parents or guardians, who would bear responsibility for their children's actions, while foreigners must have either a valid residence permit or visa.
 The amendments will require a company officer to sign registration documents, rather than a Russian citizen authorized with power of attorney.
 Labor Minister Alexander Pochinok commented on the idea of child entrepreneurs by saying that children learn business through board games. &quot;The most important thing is to explain to children that money is not everything in life, so they don't become obsessed with money. Today children sometimes work illegally. It will be better if they work legally, earned their money legally and learned to pay taxes from a young age,&quot; said Pochinok.
 A different opinion was expressed by Tatyana Mikheyeva, manager of a children's rights project with the Novye Perspektivy foundation. &quot;Fourteen is too early,&quot; said Mikheyeva. &quot;At this age a child should be receiving an education and not earning a living or supporting a family.&quot; Work should be taught, she argued, as long as business is only part of the education process. &quot;The state should take the lead in supervision by organizing summer camps, youth job centers and NGOs.&quot;

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Industrial Output Up
 </b>

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Industrial output rose 5.5 percent in August year on year and 6.6 percent in the first eight months of 2003, Deputy Economic Development and Trade Minister Arkady Dvorkovich said Thursday.
 Industrial production rose by 3.8 percent in the January-August period of 2002. Industrial output powered ahead 7.5 percent month on month in July, putting the year on year rise at 7.1 percent.
 Dvorkovich also told reporters that industrial output was up 0.2 percent last month from July. The State Statistics Committee is expected to release its industrial output data for August early next week.
 Industrial sector growth is considered to be a key driver behind a 6.9 percent rise in the country's gross domestic product in the first eight months of 2003, although industry has grown from a low base in the same period of 2002.
 
 
<b>UES Makes Proposal
 </b>

MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - Unified Energy Systems has proposed an investment program totaling 29.23 billion rubles ($953.05 million) for next year, Interfax reported, citing papers for a board meeting.
 UES submitted the draft program to government agencies for approval this week, Interfax said. The news service did not say where it got the documents.
 The government will review the proposals Nov. 20, Interfax reported. It will discuss the prices UES can charge customers for electricity this month, the news service said.
 
 
<b>Investment Planned
 </b>

SINGAPORE (Bloomberg)-Kuwait Foreign Petroleum Exploration Co., a unit of Kuwait's state oil company, said it plans to invest in oil and gas fields in India and Russia.
 Kuwait Foreign Petroleum is planning to buy three oil and gas fields in three countries this year, Abdulsameee Al-Bahbahani, chairman of Kuwait Foreign Petroleum's unit in Pakistan, said during an oil and gas conference in Singapore.
 He declined to say whether the planned acquisitions are only in India and Russia.
 "We are approaching them [India] for some opportunities and we are approaching Russia and the former Soviet Union," Al-Bahbahani said.
 
 
<b>S&amp;P Rates Gazprom
 </b>

LONDON (Reuters) - Ratings agency Standard and Poor's said Thursday that it had rated Gazprom's $5 billion notes program at B+, saying the rating was held back by an adverse pricing regime in Russia.
 Relying on Ukraine for access to export markets was also holding back ratings S&amp;P said.
 "Any future ratings upgrade of Gazprom will depend on improvements in domestic price conditions and the company's efforts to spread out debt maturities and reduce its short-term financial obligations," S&amp;P said.
 Gazprom plans to increase its borrowing by $710 million this year by selling eurobonds, ruble bonds and raising $435 million through loans, Vedomosti reported, citing an unidentified official at the company.
 
 
<b>Coffee Imports Rise
 </b>

MOSCOW (SPT) - Coffee bean imports in January-July rose 44.1 percent on the year to around 19,500 metric tons, according to data from the State Customs Committee quoted by Prime-Tass.
 Coffee bean imports have been on the rise since posting a 5 percent annual increase in 2001. Last year, Russia's coffee bean imports were up 17.6 percent on the year to 25,618 tons.
 The biggest coffee supplier is Vietnam, followed by Indonesia and India. Around 60 percent of the coffee sold domestically is instant coffee imports.
 
 
<b>Shipments To Increase
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Container traffic will grow 25 percent to 30 percent per year within the next five to six years, Transport Minister Sergei Frank said at a Eurasian conference on transport in St. Petersburg on Thursday.
 Frank said that cargo-shipment time inside Russia will decrease by 20 percent by 2020, while international shipment time will be reduced by 40 percent, according to a Prime-Tass agency report. 



TITLE: Prince's Visit Shows Importance of Russia-Saudi Links
AUTHOR: By Alexander Shumilin
TEXT: Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud's three-day visit to Moscow this month made headlines across the globe. And rightly so. Diplomatic relations between Russia and Saudi Arabia were restored in 1990, but Prince Abdullah's visit was the first by a Saudi ruler since 1932 and a strong indicator of improving relations between the two countries. The potential significance of increased Russian-Saudi cooperation is enormous.
 
They are, after all, the world's top two producers and exporters of oil. Saudi Arabia's enormous influence in the Muslim world also makes it a desirable strategic partner. If Russia and Saudi Arabia join forces, their alliance would have a major impact on world energy markets as well as on geopolitical relations between the northern and southern hemispheres, or in religious terms, between the Christian and Muslim worlds.
 The visit of Prince Abdullah, de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia since his half-brother King Fahd suffered a stroke in 1995, takes on additional significance in light of continued tensions between the Saudi Arabia and the United States. The United States has long viewed Saudi Arabia as an important strategic partner in the Middle East, and it is the largest importer of Saudi oil. But of late, relations have chilled amidst U.S. accusations that the Saudis are sponsors of international terrorism. The arrival of Saudi Arabia's de facto leader in Moscow has therefore been seen as evidence of the beginning of a Saudi realignment.
 Such speculation is probably justified, but it remains to be seen how far this realignment will go. After all, the Saudis have been putting all their eggs in one basket, so to speak, for some time. Saudi investments and bank deposits in the United States are estimated at $400 billion to $600 billion, and this situation will not change overnight.
 As Prince Abdullah visited Moscow, the U.S. media were firing off a salvo aimed at discrediting Saudi Arabia and the monarchy. The Christian Science Monitor and Time magazine ran reviews of Gerald Posner's recently released bestseller, &quot;Why America Slept.&quot; What is America supposed to have slept through? The ostensible transformation of its trusted ally Saudi Arabia into a bulwark of terrorism.
 Now the United States must try not to &quot;sleep through&quot; a likely exodus of Saudi capital.
 On Aug. 15, 600 relatives of those who died in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington filed a series of lawsuits in U.S. courts against three Saudi princes, eight Muslim charities and a number of Saudi companies, accusing them of financing al-Qaida. Total damages sought in the lawsuits amount to tens of billions of dollars, and it is possible that Saudi assets in the United States could be frozen if the courts rule in favor of the victims' families. According to reports in the Western press, Saudi oligarchs have already begun to pull their money out of the United States, though officially the Saudis deny this, dismissing the lawsuits as groundless.
 Optimists in Russia believe that if things go well Saudi Arabia could redirect some $200 billion into the Russian economy in the near future. While such investment would be welcome, these are still early days. During Prince Abdullah's visit, the two countries agreed to work together to stabilize world crude markets. They also agreed to simplify the process of creating joint venture companies in the oil and gas sector. Yet to date the only Russian company to strike a deal with the Saudis is Stroitransgaz, the pipeline building affiliate of gas monopoly Gazprom, which set up a venture with construction company Saudi Oger Ltd. to jointly bid to provide services for state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco.
 A leading role in promoting Russian-Saudi cooperation will be played by the Russian Chamber of Commerce, headed by Arab specialist Yevgeny Primakov. In late January, the chamber took a delegation of some three dozen Russian businessmen to an economic forum in the Saudi city of Jeddah. The delegation consisted of representatives from the Agriculture Ministry, Vneshekonombank, AFK Sistema, Stroitransgaz, the Urals Mining and Metals Co. and the Baltic Construction Co. financial group, among others. Meetings were held with Saudi businessmen and top officials from the Saudi Chamber of Commerce.
 The business climate will only improve as Riyadh tries to shake off charges of supporting terrorism. On the eve of Prince Abdullah's visit, Saudi Arabia's top Muslim clerics issued a religious ruling, or fatwa, condemning terrorism. The ruling rejects the notion of jihad widely used by Islamist extremists to justify their crimes.
 The Council of Senior Clerics ruled that practices such as bombing and murder are &quot;serious criminal acts&quot; that violate sharia law. &quot;These acts have nothing to do with jihad for the sake of God,&quot; said the council, which is headed by the kingdom's highest religious authority, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul-Aziz al-Sheikh. The ruling can be seen as a gesture of goodwill toward countries such as Russia, which have been shaken by terrorist attacks in recent years. During Prince Abdullah's visit, the two sides built on this goodwill, agreeing to form a joint working group on combatting terrorism.
 It is premature to speak of a budding &quot;strategic partnership&quot; between Russia and Saudi Arabia, however. The energy sector may unite Moscow and Riyadh, but it also divides them. Russia reiterated last week that it had no intention of joining OPEC any time soon. What's more, Russian oil producers like LUKoil have big plans for expansion into the U.S. market, where they compete directly with the Saudis. According to U.S. Department of Energy figures, Russian oil exports to the U.S. soared to 424,000 barrels per day in June, a record jump that catapulted Russia into the top six exporters on the U.S. market, joining Saudi Arabia, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela and Nigeria.
 For now, Moscow is maneuvering carefully between Riyadh and Washington. The potential windfall that could come from closer economic ties with Saudi Arabia is like a mirage in the desert, luring some Russian companies and frightening others. Moscow's strategic partnership with the United States, on the other hand, is much more than a mirage. It extends beyond the energy sector to geopolitics, including the war on terrorism.
 There is no question that preserving this partnership is more important to Russia's national interests than developing ties with the Saudis. Yet as regards the summit between presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush later this month, Prince Abdullah's visit should actually strengthen Moscow's position. This was, after all, a positive step toward improving relations with moderate Arab countries and stepping up cooperation with them in combatting Muslim extremism.
 And a step in that direction will not go unnoticed in Washington.
 
 <i>
Alexander Shumilin is director of the Center for the Analysis of Middle East Conflicts and editor of www.mideast.ru </i>

TITLE: The Inspiring Tales of Small-Scale Aid
AUTHOR: By David Ignatius
PUBLISHER: The Washington Post
TEXT: GENEVA - As trade negotiators were gathering for this week's meeting of the World Trade Organization in Cancun, I had a chance to talk with several dozen activists from around the world who are finding innovative ways to help poor farmers join the global economy.
 
It's lucky these folks are pushing so hard in their villages back home. Because if they wait for the wealthy countries that dominate the WTO to agree on ways to alleviate rural poverty, their crops will turn to dust. Sadly, rich farmers in Europe and America seem determined to hold on to their subsidies, even if that adds to the misery of poor farmers in India, Kenya or Brazil.
 The activists were in Switzerland to receive awards as &quot;social entrepreneurs&quot; from a foundation created by Klaus Schwab, the major-domo of the annual World Economic Forum in Davos. Since the world seems short on good news these days, I want to share the stories of several people I met. Their creativity and commitment in fighting poverty was inspiring - there's no other word.
 Take Joe Madiath, who for the past 24 years has run a rural development program called Gram Vikas in the Indian state of Orissa on the Bay of Bengal. The area is one of the poorest in the country, with more than 40 percent of its people living below the poverty line.
 Madiath posits a formula for dealing with rural poverty: To keep people on the land, you must improve their health, which means improving their water supply, which means improving their waste disposal, which means building toilets.
 So Madiath has built toilets for about 12,000 families in 120 villages. His goal is to stretch that to 100,000 families and 1,000 villages by the time he retires in 2010. His project works, he says, because he insists that villagers share the cost by contributing about $20 per family and that no family in the village be excluded because they're from the wrong tribe or caste.
 &quot;We are not building toilets, we are building dignity,&quot; Madiath told me. He said that since his group organized the 120 villages, not one family has migrated to the city.
 A similar self-help philosophy guides Ismael Ferreira, who runs the Small Farmers Association in his home region of Bahia in northeastern Brazil. The area is so dry that the only crop that grows easily there is a cactus-like plant called sisal, whose fibers can make rope or thread.
 Ferreira, whose father was a sisal farmer, decided to make do with what they had. He started a carpet factory to weave sisal thread into products that could be sold in global markets. The operation now has annual revenues of about $7 million and employs about 650 families. &quot;I want to prove that it is possible to live in this region,&quot; he told me through an interpreter.
 Farmers can stay on their land only if they make money, notes Martin Fisher, co-founder of a group in East Africa called ApproTEC. A Stanford-trained PhD in engineering, he went to Africa in the 1980s and decided that the best way to fight rural poverty was to build simple, cheap machines - &quot;appropriate technology&quot; - that could help people earn some cash.
 Fisher showed me several of the sturdy, hand-powered machines his group has designed: a $38 pump that can irrigate a small, one-acre plot, allowing a farmer to plant several cash crops and make an annual profit of $1,200; a $490 block press that can make building blocks from soil and a bit of cement and earn someone about $10 a day; a $510 hay baler that will allow farmers to feed livestock through the dry season and can earn them a profit of up to $50 a day.
 &quot;The thing that's important to a poor person anywhere in the world is money,&quot; Fisher says. As the global economy accelerates, the old ways of subsistence farming have become a kind of slow death.
 To make money, people need loans so they can start small businesses. Gisele Yitamben says she started her Association for the Support of Women Entrepreneurs in Cameroon in 1989 after she concluded that women in Africa had no access to credit. In the years since, she has worked with more than 5,000 women, opened a four-story resource center in the city of Douala and is about to start a radio station that will provide information about health and education.
 What these activists have in common is that they are working, village by village, to connect some of the world's poorest people to the global economy. I suspect that the argument made by protesters in Cancun that globalization is the enemy would strike most of these poor villagers as ludicrous. What they want is a piece of the action.

TITLE: Kafkaesque Justice
AUTHOR: By Matt Bivens
TEXT: Back when the Kremlin's security services were bringing treason and espionage charges against a mild-mannered environmentalist, I used to shake my head and think, &quot;Only in Russia.&quot; Alexander Nikitin's crime was to care enough about the health and safety of Russians that he wrote about the Northern Fleet's carelessness with nuclear waste. The security services declared his writings had violated never-published &quot;secret decrees.&quot; How secret? So secret that the very prosecutors bringing the case against Nikitin admitted that they themselves had been unable to see or read them.
 
Nikitin was acquitted, eventually, by the Supreme Court. And I returned to my home in America, where the state is less Kafkaesque. Or so I thought. Then my president announced that he could solemnly, if informally, claim to be &quot;at war&quot; with something as vague as &quot;terror&quot; - and then, on that grounds, lock people up without trials or lawyers or explanations. Forever.
 Recently, top U.S. military officials announced we're thinking that maybe we'll release three children, aged 13 to 15, that we've been holding in our camp for &quot;enemy combatants&quot; in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. These children were picked up in Afghanistan - where they fought, the government now says against their will, for the Taliban - and shipped to the legal Twilight Zone of Cuba's southern coast. There, they were interrogated and denied access to family or lawyers, denied even an understanding of what would happen next. 
 We still, incredibly, don't even know who is in Camp Delta. (We do know the camp is being expanded.) One rumored prisoner is an American Muslim preacher, Juma al-Dosari, who passed through Lackawanna, New York, a couple of years ago preaching a militant approach to Islam. Al-Dosari had fought the Serbs in Bosnia. His tales of bravery and jihad impressed six local boys born and raised in that small town. A second American who'd also fought in Bosnia, one Kamal Derwish, also intrigued the six young men.
 Today, the U.S. government says Juma al-Dosari and Kamal Derwish were al-Qaida recruiters - and leaders of a sleeper cell of six young Lackawanna terrorists. Naturally, the &quot;Lackawanna Six&quot; defense sought to interview those two al-Qaida recruiters. Al-Dosari is widely reported to be held in Guantanamo, but the government is all wide-eyed innocence about that. &quot;Juma?&quot; shrugged a U.S. attorney, when The Washington Post asked after him. &quot;I don't know anyone named Juma.&quot;
 As to Derwish, he was killed in December when a CIA-operated drone aircraft fired an anti-tank missile at a car in remote Yemen. The CIA said the six people in the car included an al-Qaida leader, and also Derwish, a U.S. citizen. To keep things neat, Derwish was officially labeled an &quot;enemy combatant&quot; - posthumously.
 So one of the Lackawanna cell's al-Qaida recruiters seems to have been &quot;disappeared&quot; by the Pentagon, while the other has been incinerated by the CIA. That would seem to weaken the government's case, right? Especially since no evidence was ever presented that these six knuckleheads planned or discussed any sort of terror attack. All we know is that they took a pre-Sept. 11, 2001, trip to Afghanistan, where they got to play at shooting AK-47s, hear about atrocities against Chechens and Bosnian Muslims, and watch radical propaganda tapes. One of them also cried a lot, apparently, and all of them whined about the food. In other words: They indulged in the Muslim equivalent of a kooky American survivalist camp. Which was stupid of them. But so far, none of this justifies President George W. Bush's statement upon their arrest: &quot;One by one, we're hunting the killers down.&quot;
 Then again, maybe they really were six killers. We'll never know, and here's why: Guantanamo. Defense attorneys say the federal government implicitly threatened to toss all six of them into a secret military prison without trial. Terrified, they all pleaded out, and accepted prison terms of six to nine years.
 &quot;The defendants believed that if they didn't plead guilty, they'd end up in a black hole forever,&quot; said Neal Sonnett, chairman of the American Bar Association's Task Force on Treatment of Enemy Combatants. &quot;There's little difference between beating someone over the head and making a threat like that.&quot;
 But Guantanamo's &quot;enemy combatants&quot; were picked up in places like Afghanistan. Surely it's not true that an American citizen can be plucked off the street of his home town and &quot;disappeared&quot; by the government. Can bureaucrats like Attorney General John Ashcroft simply take you off to break rocks indefinitely without ever charging you with a crime, or presenting real evidence against you? Without ever letting you appear before a judge? Without letting you talk to anyone else, ever again?
 Nah. That's the kind of thing that happens in the old Soviet Russia - not in America. Right? Well, consider U.S. citizen Jose Padilla: arrested by the FBI in Chicago in May 2002, declared by Ashcroft at a June 2002 press conference in Moscow to be an &quot;enemy combatant,&quot; and hauled off to a Pentagon brig in South Carolina. Padilla has an ugly criminal record, but the basis for his indefinite detention without trial is a mere six-page statement by a Pentagon official, Michael Mobbs. The statement, based on &quot;multiple intelligence sources,&quot; asserts that Padilla has associated with &quot;al-Qaidites&quot; and was in the &quot;initial planning stages&quot; of maybe someday detonating a &quot;dirty bomb&quot; somewhere.
 But The Washington Post reports: &quot;Mobbs's own footnotes conceded that the government's 'confidential sources' probably were not 'completely candid,' that one source subsequently recanted and another was being treated with drugs, and that their information may have been an attempt to mislead interrogators.&quot; Sounds like a case of Pentagon &quot;intelligence&quot; hyping not-necessarily-existent WMD.
 &quot;Someone who's a confirmed liar and someone else who's on drugs and one of the two has recanted,&quot; snorts one of Padilla's lawyers. &quot;You really think someone should be locked up for a year in solitary confinement based on that?
 &quot;What we're asking for Mr. Padilla,&quot; the lawyer continued, &quot;is something I consider a very core American value: A guy's entitled to his day in court. ... We don't just throw people in jail because we think or believe they're bad.&quot; Don't we?
 
 <i>Matt Bivens, a former editor of The St. Petersburg Times, writes for The Nation. [www.thenation.com] </i>

TITLE: Can Media Cover the Elections?
TEXT: The draconian restrictions placed on the media's election coverage, which came into force this summer, have been coming under increasing fire from various quarters as the autumn election season gets under way. And rightly so.
 
Under new regulations, the media are not allowed to provide any kind of &quot;commentary&quot; when covering the State Duma elections or any other election campaign. Furthermore, the official definition of &quot;campaigning&quot; is so broad that just about any newspaper article, TV report, etc. on an election could be interpreted as &quot;campaigning,&quot; and it is illegal for media organizations to engage in &quot;campaigning&quot; unless it is paid for out of the campaign funds of a party or candidate. Two violations by a media organization in an election campaign and it can be shut down for the duration of the campaign.
 In short, if one takes the new regulations literally then the whole of the Russian media might just as well pack their bags and go on vacation until the Duma elections are over (or, to be on the safe side, until next year's presidential election is over as well).
 President Vladimir Putin and Kremlin-controlled Channel One and Rossia offered their own interpretation of the regulations, in the context of the St. Petersburg gubernatorial election taking place later this month, when the president demonstratively endorsed the Kremlin's candidate, Valentina Matviyenko, in a meeting that was copiously broadcast to the nation on the two channels.
 In doing so, they rode roughshod over the new restrictions. However, neither the CEC nor the St. Petersburg election commission seems in any great rush to punish any of the offending parties. And this is perhaps not surprising. Presumably, the Kremlin did not shepherd the new legislation through parliament in order for it to trip up the president or silence two of the Kremlin's most important propaganda organs.
 While judgment must be suspended until the St. Petersburg election commission pronounces on this particular incident, the legitimate concern is that the new regulations are really targeted at intimidating those media outlets that the Kremlin does not control, and ensuring that they exercise a strict policy of self-censorship. Whether this is indeed the case will become increasingly apparent as the Duma campaign progresses.
 The new regulations certainly seem to pave the way for a particularly heavy-handed form of &quot;managed democracy.&quot; The so-called law on the basic guarantees of voters' rights, which contains the restrictive regulations on media coverage, fails abjectly to provide voters with any such guarantees-not only that, it is a fundamental erosion of their rights as enshrined in the Constitution. 


TITLE: Campaign In Chechnya Is Near Endgame
TEXT: The presidential election campaign in Chechnya has at times looked more like a military campaign. But now the endgame is near.
 
Last week, one more bastion of opposition to Kremlin-appointed Chechen leader Akhmad Kadyrov fell, when soldiers from his personal security force seized the Grozny radio and television company created in March by Bislan Gantamirov, the republic's press minister until his dismissal on Sept. 3. The station was shut down along with eight Chechen newspapers.
 Gantamirov is an old Russian ally. He served as mayor of Grozny and as deputy prime minister in the government of Doku Zavgayev before being convicted of embezzling $2 million earmarked for reconstruction in Chechnya. He was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison in 1998, but freed a year later. Naturally, he feels a certain antagonism toward Kadyrov, Russia's new ally, who called for jihad against Russia back in the days when Gantamirov was siphoning off money from the federal budget.
 The outcome of the Oct. 5 presidential election is not in doubt. Victory will go not to the candidate with the most money, but to the one with the most friends in high places and the most guns. Kadyrov is better connected and armed than anyone. The recent skirmish near Avturami made clear that his security service is the only force in Chechnya capable of taking on the rebels successfully.
 Russia has fallen into a trap in Chechnya. In the endgame to come, every move will lead to checkmate. This no-win situation has come about because Russia applied the rules of socialist realism to the Chechen presidency. The election was meant to prove that everything in the republic is hunky-dory. But war is a difficult thing to keep under wraps
 What is this election for? To legitimize the new regime in the eyes of the world community? The seizure of the Grozny television company alone was enough to rob the future president of legitimacy. There's no need for observers at the polling stations.
 Did Kadyrov's men take over the television station? Yes, they did. And in that case, there can be no talk of a free and fair election.
 Why is Moscow trying so hard, anyway? For Kadyrov's sake? The problem is that the more the Kremlin bolsters his authority, the more independent he becomes. Then again, he can't be hung out to dry. What if he leads his men into the mountains?
 Will a Kadyrov victory strengthen authority in the region? What authority? The state in Chechnya is a mechanism for redirecting federal budget funds from those in power to those in the mountains.
 Kadyrov doesn't control Chechnya. The Kremlin doesn't control Chechnya. Chechnya is controlled by men with machine guns whose control extends only as far as the range of their weapons.
 There's another unsavory side to all this. A battle for power is raging within the Kremlin, and the combatants are driven by motives no more pure than those of Gantamirov and Kadyrov. It is said that Kadyrov is protected by Alexander Voloshin, the head of the presidential administration. The <i>siloviki</i> tried to counter Kadyrov by installing Mikhail Babich as Chechen prime minister, but the plan blew up in their faces. Any problems with Kadyrov will deal a blow to the faction in the Kremlin that opposes the siloviki. And problems are pretty much inevitable: the Kremlin has already supported two Chechen leaders loyal to Moscow: Dzhokhar Dudayev in 1991 and Aslan Maskhadov in 1996.
 
 <i>Yulia Latynina is a presenter of &quot;24&quot; on RenTV. </i>

TITLE: Chris Floyd's Global Eye
TEXT: <b>Last Rights
 </b>Once again, the dispiriting spectacle of the American media in full campaign cry is upon us, as coverage of the 2004 presidential race begins in earnest. But this time around, the usual inanities, inaccuracies and insipidities have a more melancholy flavor, an almost elegiac feel. It's like watching priests of a dead cult, vacantly enacting their rituals in a ruined temple whose gods have been broken, desecrated and cast down.
 
The difference from past campaigns lies in the media mandarins' sad belief that there will actually be a genuine, open, presidential election in November 2004. This childlike faith stems, of course, from their equally fallacious conviction that the United States did not suffer a coup d'etat in December 2000 at the hands of an extremist faction of elites.
 Although the installation of second-place finisher George W. Bush was engineered in a wholly unprecedented and unconstitutional manner - from the illegal purging of more than 90,000 eligible, predominantly black voters from the Florida rolls by Jeb Bush to the violent mobs of Republican congressional staffers paid by George Bush to break up the vote recounts in Miami to the threats of military insurrection muttered by Bush Family factotum General Norman Schwarzkopf to the use of Republican-paid ex-CIA operatives to &quot;correct&quot; 15,000 Florida absentee ballots to the Supreme Court ruling that unlawfully halted the Florida recount by citing a totally fictitious deadline for final tallies, down to the congressional session that officially &quot;ratified&quot; the election result, held in an half-empty chamber lacking the legally required quorum - America's media leaders insist there was no coup because power was transferred &quot;without tanks in the streets.&quot;
 But of course, a classic coup is &quot;not necessarily assisted by either the intervention of the masses or, to any significant degree, by military-type force.&quot; It's an inside job, carried out by factions within the elite. Who says? The man who literally wrote the book on the subject: right-wing guru - and Pentagon advisor - Edward Luttwak.
 In 1968, Luttwak penned &quot;Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook,&quot; which could be the text of the 2000 Bush campaign, as John Dee reports in Lumpen magazine. Drawing on the extensive experience of the CIA in such pranks, Luttwak says that &quot;a coup consists of the infiltration of a small but critical segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder.&quot; True coupsters &quot;<i>want to seize power within the present system</i>&quot; [his italics], then use the existing lines of authority and habits of obedience inherent in legitimate government to advance their own illegitimate aims.
 Propaganda and false patriotism are key coup ingredients. Luttwak says a coup's &quot;information campaign&quot; must &quot;reassure the general public by dispelling fears that the coup is inspired by extremist elements, and to persuade particular groups that the coup is not a threat to them. The first aim will be achieved by manipulating national symbols and by asserting our belief in the prevailing pieties.&quot; United we stand!
 Meanwhile, Luttwak explains, opponents of the coup must be painted as isolated cranks, &quot;a few misguided or dangerous individuals,&quot; unable to &quot;move on&quot; and accept the wonderful new reality. Reports of opposition must be &quot;withheld&quot; whenever possible; failing that, they must be marginalized and belittled, because &quot;news of any resistance against us would act as a powerful stimulant to further resistance by breaking down this feeling of isolation.&quot;
 We know that Bush never reads any book that doesn't have pictures of goats in it, but it's clear that Dick Cheney has had a well-thumbed copy of Luttwak's handbook in his back pocket for years. The 2000 coup was carried out along Luttwakian lines by a small group of ideologues and elitists - the latter drawn largely from the energy and defense industries - seeking to advance their illegitimate aim of global domination by military force and control of the world's energy resources.
 These objectives were no secret. Since 1992, Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and a gaggle of other dominionists now in power aired their plans publicly via a web of corporate-funded pressure groups. These documents - including their chilling call in September 2000 for a &quot;new Pearl Harbor&quot; to shock Americans into supporting rapacious dominion schemes - provided a blueprint that the coup-makers have followed with remarkable fidelity. The truth was there for anyone to see. But it was ignored by the dim-witted, well-wadded corporate media - whose owners, drooling over Bush promises of mega-mergers and deregulation, were easily persuaded that the takeover &quot;was not a threat to them.&quot;
 It's dangerously naive to believe that such a gang, coming to power in such a fashion, will allow a legitimate electoral contest to take place next year. They have too much to lose. They haven't expended so much effort - and so many thousands of innocent lives - to build this vast engine of repression and profit only to turn it over to Howard Dean or John Kerry, just because the stupid American people say so.
 So yes, there will be an &quot;election&quot; - with conventions, debates, ads, voting, the whole schmeer. But as Josef Stalin once said: &quot;It's not the votes that count, it's who counts the votes.&quot; And in 2004, most votes will be &quot;counted&quot; by paperless, unverifiable, eminently hackable computer systems, privately owned and secretly programmed by Bush supporters from the Religious Right and the military-intelligence complex.
 Again, this is no &quot;conspiracy theory&quot;; it's all out in the open - for anyone who cares to look. Next week, we'll do just that. Stay tuned. 
 
 <i>
For annotational references, see the Opinion section at www.sptimesrussia.com </i>

TITLE: Engineer Preserving the Voices of Writers for All Time
AUTHOR: By Rebecca Reich
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - The voices running through Sergei Filippov's head don't bother him much, because he can turn them on and off whenever he likes. What's more, when he is tired of one voice, all he has to do is scroll through his mental table of contents and pick out another. But ask him to perform his voices out loud, and you're in for a surprise. Filippov is a powerful mimic, and the voices he imitates belong to the most famous Russian writers of the 20th century.
 
As sound engineer of the State Literary Museum's Department of Audio Recordings, Filippov probably knows how some of Russia's greatest writers sounded better than anyone else. Grabbing two rough objects from a shelf in his studio, he scraped them together to imitate background noise and thundered out the verses of revolution-era poet Sergei Yesenin in such a loud imitation of the author that the dozen cuckoo clocks on the walls started rattling in their cases.
 The audio archive where Filippov works numbers nearly 10,000 cylinders, records and reels, and includes rare recordings of poetry readings by long-ago greats such as Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova and Alexander Blok. Most of those recordings have already been transferred from record to magnetic tape, but even tape deteriorates over time. &quot;My main job is to take the recording from tape to digital form,&quot; Filippov said. &quot;Once I've done that, I've saved it from destruction.&quot;
 From morning until night, Filippov, 42, painstakingly chips away at the staticky recordings in a hot underground studio draped in billowing parachute curtains and wall-to-wall landscape paintings near Patriarch's Ponds. Dressed in nothing but shorts and an open wool vest, he has a self-deprecating sense of humor and a startling laugh. Filippov is a relic of the literary scene of the 1970s: a time when people devoted themselves to the arts and rarely, if ever, got anything in return.
 With a trickling budget from the Culture Ministry and a fairly specialized sphere of interest, Filippov's work is archival, not commercial. The handful of employees of the audio archive has never succeeded in selling its recordings to a wider audience. Not that it hasn't occurred to them. Last year, the audio archive put out its first compact disc, a selection of rare audio recordings by Lev Tolstoy from the dawn of the 20th century.
 Sound recording came to Russia shortly after Thomas Edison's invention of the cylinder phonograph in 1877. To popularize his invention, Edison sent representatives around the world to record famous people's voices. According to Lev Shilov, head of the audio archive for the last 40 years, the first person to be recorded in Russia was probably the tsar, but those recordings did not survive.
 Nearly as famous as the tsar, however, was Tolstoy, author of &quot;War and Peace&quot; and &quot;Anna Karenina&quot; and founder of a populist religious movement that was quickly gathering steam. In 1895, an Edison representative came to Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's estate, to record the author's voice. Those recordings were taken over the border to Berlin, where they lay in an archive until they were brought back to the Soviet Union after World War II.
 In 1908, Edison sent Tolstoy a phonograph of his own. Normally suspicious of new-fangled inventions, Tolstoy was so enamored of the gift that he reportedly dragged it outside and commanded the villagers of Yasnaya Polyana to dance.
 Tolstoy also turned the phonograph into an alternate form of telecommunication by recording his responses to letters on wax cylinders and sending them off in the mail. Behind the veil of static on the audio archive's new compact disc, the shaky voice of the 80-year-old can clearly be heard: &quot;Pass along my greetings to your family,&quot; he dictated to Tatyana Kuzminskaya in March of 1908. &quot;I'm sorry that this letter is so short. I'm speaking into a phonograph. I'm tired because I work all the time and I'm not entirely healthy.&quot;
 The new compact disc also includes Tolstoy's final recordings, made in French, English and German for the Periodical Press Society just a year before his death in 1910.
 Despite the tremor in his voice, Tolstoy's severe religious views come through just as sharply as they do on paper: &quot;That the object of life is self-perfection-the perfection perfecting, of course, immortal souls. That this is the only object of man's life is seen to be correct by the fact alone that every other object is senseless in view of death,&quot; he says in English on the new disc. Soon after Tolstoy's death, according to Shilov, records of his voice were being sold at the exorbitant price of 3 rubles and played at public movie theaters.
 With the revolution in 1917, audio recording was transformed into a tool of the mass media. &quot;The first musical recording in the Soviet Union was of the Internationale,&quot; the communist anthem, Shilov said. &quot;It's actually a touching recording. The musicians make a lot of mistakes because they don't know the notes yet.&quot;
 But for the State Literary Museum's audio archive, the critical moment came in 1919, when linguist Sergei Bernstein helped found the Institute of the Living Word and began recording poets such as Mandelstam, Blok, Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilyov and Vladimir Mayakovsky to study how they read. Today, these recordings are the pride of the audio archive's collection.
 Unlike the Tolstoy recordings, which were played only several times before being put back in their cases, the later recordings are thick with static and scratches. Transferring them to digital form, Filippov tries to weed out the static from the voice without reducing the poet to a robotic monotone.
 &quot;The trick is to take out the bad and leave in the good. That's what you need a musical ear for,&quot; he said.
 But early sound technicians also made other recordings that Filippov will never get to repair. As the Stalinist purges heated up in the 1930s, many of the writers that Bernstein had recorded were deemed dangerous to the state. The Institute of the Living Word was disbanded and the cylinders consigned for several years to a storehouse in Leningrad.
 In addition, certain speeches known to have been recorded are curiously missing from official archives. Most notable among them is the speech that writer Isaac Babel gave at the first congress of the Writers' Union in 1934. In view of Babel's arrest and death several years later, the recording's disappearance seems more than accidental.
 &quot;I wouldn't be surprised if those recordings suddenly turned up in the KGB archives,&quot; Filippov said. Recordings of repressed writers Marina Tsvetayeva and Mikhail Bulgakov have also long since disappeared. According to Shilov, though, it is equally possible that Babel's speech was recorded on a less durable medium and later thrown out.
 Growing up during World War II in the Writers' Union colony of Peredelkino, just outside of Moscow, Shilov was surrounded by many of Russia's most famous literary figures and began recording their voices before he was made director of the new department of audio recordings in 1963. Famous subjects included the elderly Akhmatova, literary critic and children's book writer Kornei Chukovsky and dissident author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. And when the phonograph celebrated its 100-year anniversary in 1977, Shilov folded a selection of the archive's rarest clips, from Tolstoy to Mayakovsky, into a commemorative record.
 Compared to the conditions in which Shilov worked back then, the sound restoring business has certainly improved. Transferring the old recordings to digital instead of magnetic format makes cleaning up the sound much easier, for instance.
 But the archive has also suffered in the last decade. Before 1991, the Soviet Union had only one record company, Melodia, which would automatically send its recordings to several state libraries, much as U.S. publishers send their books to the Library of Congress. Shilov's audio archive often ordered copies of these recordings from the recipient libraries. But now that the recording business has split up into countless commercial firms, Filippov and Shilov have to make the rounds of the poetry readings on their own, microphone in hand.
 Money is also a big concern. The machines that Filippov uses are practically museum pieces, and the audio archive receives only enough cash from the Culture Ministry to support small salaries for its employees. Of the 3,500 rubles ($117) that Filippov makes a month, significant sums go to buying materials. &quot;In Soviet times, we used to ask radio stations to donate their old equipment for free,&quot; he said. &quot;Now, we can't do that anymore, so half of the equipment is mine. I bought it.&quot;
 For the most part, Filippov digitizes his reels off a 1960s-era Hungarian machine hooked up to a sound board and computer. But the rest of Filippov's studio is a graveyard of different machines, from an enormous Soviet studio recorder dating back to 1951 to a Dnepr-5 reel-to-reel that Akhmatova used several years later.
 Even more pressing is the precarious state of the recordings themselves. Until very recently, the archive was kept in two of the basement rooms where Filippov now works. Located in a residential building, the underground collection was subject to the repairs and disrepairs of those who lived upstairs. When chess champion Anatoly Karpov built himself an apartment on the top floor of the building, the rusty old pipes in the basement began to burst, flooding the archive with boiling water on a regular basis.
 Conditions are better now that the recordings have been moved to a different building, said Vladimir Kozlov, the archivist. But with the wooden closets hanging open in the musty archive rooms, the recordings are still exposed to dangerous elements. Many of the wax cylinders are covered with layers of mold, and, without any money to control the temperature, Kozlov sometimes resorts to medieval methods.
 &quot;We need to maintain a specific temperature, a specific humidity. Of course, sometimes we set up buckets of water, but it's not enough.&quot;
 In view of these shortages, Kozlov would have liked the new compact discs to rake a little cash into the archive's coffers. &quot;In principle, we'd like to sell them and make some money and buy new equipment,&quot; he said.
 Despite their novelty, though, the Tolstoy recordings have not exactly topped the charts. Half of the 1,000 discs that the archive printed were given to the gift shop at the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow. The other half, earmarked for the gift shop at Yasnaya Polyana, remain in storage because of a dispute between the directors of the estate and the Moscow museum.
 Fortunately, Filippov said, making money is the last thing from his mind as he sits in his studio, hour after hour, cutting out fuzz from the magnetic reels. &quot;As soon as I start doing commercial things, I get distracted from my work,&quot; he said, comparing himself to artists Franz Schubert and Vincent Van Gogh, also famous for being bad salesmen.
 Known for spending as much as a month on five minutes of sound, Filippov is determined to digitize the entire collection before it falls apart. But if he had the chance to slowly remaster one writer's voice from the original cylinders, he has little doubt as to whose he would choose. &quot;I would do all of Tolstoy over again. All two hours of sound,&quot; he said. &quot;But it would take me a lifetime.&quot;

TITLE: 'The Man in Black,' Johnny Cash, Dies at 71
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NASHVILLE, Tennessee - Johnny Cash, whose rugged voice championed the downtrodden and reached across generations, died Friday and was to be buried Monday just north of here.
 
His legacy will survive as long as there's music, friends and fellow musicians say.
 Cash, &quot;The Man in Black,&quot; died Friday from diabetes that resulted in respiratory failure.
 &quot;I don't see any stars on the horizon that are like Johnny Cash,&quot; friend and country music singer Glen Campbell said. &quot;He was so unique. I miss him.&quot;
 In his songs, Cash crafted a persona as a dignified, resilient voice for the common man - but there was always a dark edge.
 One of the most haunting couplets in popular music comes from &quot;Folsom Prison Blues,&quot; which went to No. 4 on the country charts in 1956: &quot;I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.&quot;
 Forty seven years later, Cash's arresting video for &quot;Hurt&quot; was nominated for six MTV Video Music Awards, winning one.
 &quot;He is the patron saint of every kid with a guitar,&quot; said singer-songwriter Tom Waits. &quot;Songwriters learn how to write songs from listening to each other. He's like a wise old tree full of songs. I spent many days under his branches.&quot;
 His lined face fit well with his voice, which was limited in range but used to great effect to sing about prisoners, heartaches and tales of everyday life.
 As news of his death spread, musicians praised Cash for his independent, rebellious streak that made him a powerful influence in country, rock, folk and gospel music.
 &quot;When I went to Nashville 40 years ago to record my first country song, Johnny was a welcoming figure and became a lifelong friend,&quot; Ray Charles said. &quot;He made a giant contribution to music, not just country style.&quot;
 Cash had been released from the hospital Tuesday after a two-week stay for treatment of a stomach ailment. 
 Cash said in his self-titled 1997 autobiography that he tried to speak for &quot;voices that were ignored or even suppressed in the entertainment media, not to mention the political and educational establishments.&quot;
 Cash, who won 11 Grammy Awards, was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1980 and inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992.
 In his 1971 hit &quot;Man in Black,&quot; Cash said his black clothing symbolized the world's downtrodden people.
 &quot;Everybody was wearing rhinestones, all those sparkle clothes and cowboy boots,&quot; he said in 1986. &quot;I decided to wear a black shirt and pants and see if I could get by with it. I did and I've worn black clothes ever since.&quot;

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Zimbabwe Paper Shuts
 </b>

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) - Zimbabwe's only independent daily newspaper failed to publish Saturday after armed police raided its offices and the Supreme Court declared the publication in violation of a new media law.
 The closure of the Daily News comes amid a government crackdown on dissent as Zimbabwe struggles with an economic collapse and international isolation. President Robert Mugabe pushed through a passage of severe new security laws last year allowing the government to ban public gatherings, and his opponents have been attacked and arrested.
 
 
<b>Scrapers Sink Shanghai
 </b>

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Shanghai is limiting the number of new skyscrapers being built because it is gradually sinking under the weight of thousands of tall buildings, the state media reported.
 The situation is particularly bad in the Lujiazui financial district, along the Huangpu River in the district of Pudong, which has a high concentration of tall buildings and is sinking between 1.2-1.5 centimeters a year as a result.
 The city has about 3,000 buildings with 18 floors or more, and another 2,000 high-rise buildings are either under construction or in the planning stage, according to the paper. 
 
 
<b>Beatles Sue Apple
 </b>

LONDON/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The Beatles management company said Friday it is seeking a court injunction against Apple Computer Inc., insisting the computer maker's iTunes online music store breaches the band's trademark.
 Apple Corps., the company formed in 1968 by the Fab Four to manage its business interests and serve as the band's music label, issued a brief statement Friday saying it had filed court papers in a London High Court in July .
 "Specifically, [the] complaint is made over the use by Apple Computer of the word 'Apple' and apple logos in conjunction with its new application for downloading pre-recorded music from the Internet," the statement said.
 
 
<b>Paper Hacker Gets Bail 
 </b>

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A 22-year-old California man charged with hacking into the New York Times computer network was allowed to remain free Friday on bail terms requiring him to live with his parents and restricting his computer use to such things as e-mail and job searches.
 Adrian Lamo, who turned himself in to federal authorities in Sacramento, California on Tuesday, appeared briefly in Manhattan federal court.
 Lamo, who has won praise from some companies for locating and helping fix security holes in corporate networks, is charged in a two-count criminal complaint. 
 
 
<b>Harrison Guitar Sold 
 </b>

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The guitar played by George Harrison at the Beatles' last concert in 1969 fetched $434,750 in a Hollywood auction conducted live and online Saturday.
 The guitar, a custom-made Fender Rosewood Telecaster, was used by Harrison during the filming of the Beatles' movie "Let it Be."
 Harrison played it on Jan. 30, 1969 when the Beatles performed on the rooftop of Apple Records in London, the last time the group played together. 



TITLE: Powell Sees Iraqi 'Winds of Freedom'
AUTHOR: By George Gedda
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAGHDAD - Secretary of State Colin Powell, becoming the highest ranking U.S. official to visit Iraq since the ouster of Saddam Hussein, said Sunday he is convinced &quot;the winds of freedom are blowing&quot; across the country but acknowledged the possibility that terrorists are trying to sabotage the process toward self-rule.
 
Powell spent 12 hours in talks with the team of American officials guiding Iraq in the postwar period and with the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.
 He also attended a Baghdad City Council meeting, met with Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari and joined the U.S. administrator for Iraq, Paul Bremer, at a joint news conference.
 Powell described impressive moves toward self-government and seemed invigorated by what he heard as he made his rounds.
 &quot;There is vibrancy to this effort, a vibrancy that I attribute to the winds of freedom that are now blowing through this land,&quot; he said after the city council meeting.
 Powell's day began with a flight from Kuwait aboard a C-130 cargo plane, and ended with a dinner with a leading Baghdad-based Shiite cleric.
 He said the United States is committed to having Iraqis run their government, but wants to cede power after a &quot;deliberative process&quot; rather than the early transfer advocated by some fellow members of the UN Security Council. France has pressed for seating a provisional government within a month.
 &quot;We are not hanging on for the sake of hanging on, Powell said at the news conference with Bremer. 
 &quot;We are hanging on because it's necessary to stay with this task until a new government has been created, a responsible government. 
 &quot;The worst thing that could happen is for us to push this process too quickly, before the capacity for governance is there and the basis for legitimacy is there, and see it fail.&quot;
 Powell called attention to the appointment of an interim Iraqi Cabinet with 25 ministers, steps toward creation of an independent judiciary and general Arab acceptance of Zebari as a legitimate Iraqi representative even though Iraqi still lacks an authentic government.
 Powell acknowledged that the security situation remains challenging, with a major new threat coming from &quot;terrorists who are trying to infiltrate into the country for the purpose of disrupting this whole process.&quot; The U.S. military can handle this problem, he said.
 The attacks on American occupying forces, an almost daily occurrence in Iraq, continued when a roadside bomb hit a convoy in the city of Fallujah, killing a U.S. soldier and injuring three others, the military said.
 Some 155 soldiers have died in Iraq since U.S. President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat on May 1. 
 In Washington, Vice President Dick Cheney hinted that the administration would seek more money next year than the additional $87 billion already requested to pay mainly for postwar costs in Iraq.

TITLE: Libya Offered Chance As Sanctions Lifted
AUTHOR: By Paul Garwood
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CAIRO, Egypt - The United Nation's lifting of sanctions on Libya - long branded a sponsor of terrorism - gives the country a chance to boost its oil industry, improve its human rights record and return to the international fold.
 
People danced in the streets of Tripoli after the UN Security Council voted Friday to lift the 11-year-old embargo on arms sales and flights to Libya.
 But the deputy U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, James Cunningham, said Friday that the U.S. sanctions on Libya would remain &quot;in full force.&quot;
 Amnesty International welcomed the UN move, but urged Libya to clean up its human rights record. Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi tolerates no serious opposition, and Amnesty has accused his regime of holding hundreds of political prisoners.
 &quot;We are hoping the return of Libya to the international community will engender an improvement in the human rights situation in that country,&quot; Amnesty spokeswoman Nicole Choueiry said.
 The UN action was mostly symbolic because the sanctions had already been suspended.
 The UN sanctions were imposed in 1992 to force Tripoli to surrender two Libyans indicted for the 1988 bombing of a U.S. Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, Scotland.
 The council suspended the sanctions after the two men were delivered for trial in 1999. It abolished them Friday after Libya agreed to compensate families of the Lockerbie victims and to provide additional payments to relatives of those killed in a 1989 bombing of a French airliner.
 America abstained on Friday's Security Council vote, saying it objected to Libya's human rights violations and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
 France also abstained.
 Henry Schuler, a former diplomat and executive for a U.S. oil company who spent 30 years working in Libya, said Gadhafi appears to have restored his international credibility simply by handing over millions of dollars.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Killing Arafat 'Option'
 </b>

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) - The second-ranking official in the Israeli government said Sunday that killing Yasser Arafat is an option, as thousands of Palestinians took to the streets across the West Bank and Gaza Strip promising to protect their leader.
 Israel blames Arafat for blocking peace efforts and preventing a crackdown against militants who have continued to carry out suicide bombings.
 Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Sunday that killing Arafat is a possibility - along with expelling him or keeping him in a siege that would "isolate him from the world." 
 
 
<b>Cardinal Sin Retires 
 </b>

VATICAN CITY - Cardinal Jaime Sin, who helped lead peaceful revolts that ousted two Philippine presidents, retired Monday as archbishop of Manila, the Vatican said.
 Pope John Paul II accepted Sin's resignation submitted for reason of age. He turned 75, the normal retirement age for bishops, on Aug. 31.
 Sin played an influential role in the "people power" uprising that led to the ouster of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. He also led large street protests that led to the ouster of President Joseph Estrada over alleged corruption and misrule two years ago.
 
 
<b>Madonna's Book Out
 </b>

LONDON (Reuters) - Pop icon Madonna, embarking on yet another career twist, Monday launched her first children's book, with a print run of more than 1 million copies around the world.
 "The English Roses," a moralistic tale about the pitfalls of envy, was released in 30 languages and more than 100 countries with all the worldwide hype normally associated with the latest Harry Potter saga.
 Critics decided Monday that the story was a more than passable effort by a first-time kids' writer.
 
 
<b>Ozone Hole at Largest 
 </b>

LONDON (Reuters) - The gaping, man-made hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica has hit record proportions for this time of year and could get bigger still within the next few days, a leading scientist said Friday.
 At just short of 28 million square kilometers, the hole is a fraction under the absolute record of 28.5 million, but it has historically peaked in the second week in September and therefore could theoretically grow further, British Antarctic Survey scientist Jonathan Shanklin said.
 "It was the largest it has ever been during August, and we are waiting to see what happens over the next few days," Shanklin said. 
 
 
<b>J-Lo, Affleck Split
 </b>

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -- Hollywood celebrity couple Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck have split, at least temporarily, sources close to Affleck said on Sunday.
 The pair were seen on Friday in the Los Angeles area boarding planes to different cities, after postponing weekend wedding plans due to a media frenzy, said the sources, who wished to remain anonymous.
 The sources said that sometime last week Affleck called close associates telling them that he and Lopez had broken up. On Saturday, Affleck was spotted gambling and sunning himself without Lopez at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, they said.
 Meanwhile, sources said that Lopez on Friday flew to her Miami residence and had made plans to head to Canada where she is filming a new movie with Richard Gere.
 It was not certain if the break-up would be permanent, the sources said. 



TITLE: Lewis Keeps Word, Sets Rushing Record
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BALTIMORE - The Baltimore Ravens gave Jamal Lewis the football, as promised, and he delivered on a pledge in setting a single-game NFL record with 295 yards rushing. 
 
Lewis' incredible performance, which included two touchdowns, led Baltimore past the Cleveland Browns 33-13 Sunday. 
 He would have had a third score and surpassed 300 yards if not for a holding penalty on Marcus Robinson during a 60-yard run in the first half. 
 &quot;On a day like today, I can't regret anything,&quot; said Lewis, who averaged a whopping 9.8 yards on his 30 carries. &quot;It was beautiful.&quot; 
 Lewis ran for an 82-yard touchdown on the second play from scrimmage, added a 63-yard touchdown in the fourth quarter and broke the record with a 3-yard run with 6:55 left. 
 He shattered the single-game mark held by Corey Dillon of Cincinnati, who ran for 278 yards on Oct. 22, 2000, against Denver. 
 During a phone call with Cleveland linebacker Andra Davis earlier in the week, Lewis said he would break the record if given 30 carries - twice as many as one week earlier in a 34-15 loss to Pittsburgh. 
 &quot;Andra told me he wanted me to get the ball 30 times. I told him if I get the ball 30 times it's going to be a career day,&quot; Lewis said. &quot;I'm not going to say I predicted it. It was lucky.&quot; 
 Lewis, who missed the entire 2001 season with a torn knee ligament, had 100 yards by his second carry Sunday and was at 180 yards by halftime. 
 &quot;I was going in at halftime when [Ravens tackle] Jonathan Ogden said, `Let's go get it. We can get 300 yards,&quot;' Lewis said. 
 Said Ogden: &quot;I figured if he broke the record we'd get the win.&quot; 
 The Ravens (1-1) spoke all week about the importance of using Lewis more, especially since the tailback shredded Cleveland for 187 yards in a game last October. 
 The Browns knew he was coming, but were powerless against him. 
 &quot;This is the most disgusting feeling I ever had in my life,&quot; Browns safety Earl Little said. &quot;He said what he said, and then he did it. It's in the history books.&quot;
 After the Browns (0-2) cut a 13-point deficit to 16-13, Lewis' 63-yard TD run gave Baltimore a 10-point cushion with 14:49 remaining. 
 &quot;They didn't get quiet until the end of the fourth quarter,&quot; Lewis said of the Browns. &quot;Andra told me, 'I can't say anything else.' He was congratulating me as we were playing. He showed me much respect.&quot; 
 Matt Stover kicked a field goal with 1:58 left for Baltimore and Ed Reed returned an interception 54 yards for a touchdown on the final play. 
 Lewis' heroics overshadowed a stout performance by the Baltimore defense, which limited Cleveland to one first down in the first half while taking a 16-3 lead. 
 Lewis also helped the Ravens overcome another poor showing by rookie quarterback Kyle Boller, who hurt his knee and was replaced by Chris Redman in the third quarter. Boller went 7-for-17 for 78 yards and an interception. 
 &quot;I got bumped on the left knee a little bit,&quot; Boller said. &quot;It would be nice to hit some more throws, but when you have a running back running like that, it takes the pressure off you.&quot; 
 Redman fumbled on his first play, losing the ball while cocking his arm to pass. The Browns recovered and scored their first touchdown of the season on a 4-yard pass from Kelly Holcomb to Kevin Johnson. 
 Minutes later, Lewis took off on his 63-yard run. 
 Baltimore's 343 yards rushing was a franchise record, and the most the Browns ever allowed. 
 &quot;This could be a wake-up call,&quot; Cleveland tackle Gerald Warren said. &quot;The defense has to stay strong, stick together and not let this move us back. We have to block it out and not focus on this game.&quot; 
 Lewis set the tone on the game's second play, following an excellent downfield block by Travis Taylor on his 82-yard score. 
 Later in the first quarter, Baltimore linebacker Ray Lewis recovered a fumble by William Green, who had gone 234 carries without losing the ball. That set up a field goal by Stover for a 10-0 lead. 
 Stover kicked a 40-yarder to make it 13-0, and Phil Dawson kicked a field goal for the Browns after Boller threw an interception. 
 Long-range kicker Wade Richey then made a franchise-record 56-yarder, giving the Ravens a 13-point halftime lead.
 
 <strong>
Carolina 12, Tampa Bay 9.</strong> With Tampa Bay lining up to kick an extra point with no time on the clock, the Carolina Panthers easily could have hung their heads and accepted defeat. The Buccaneers knew they wouldn't. 
 
&quot;It's never over. We fight to the end,&quot; Carolina defensive tackle Brentson Buckner said after Kris Jenkins blocked what would have been a game-winning conversion by Martin Gramatica. That set the stage for the Panthers to beat the Super Bowl champions 12-9 in overtime Sunday. 
 John Kasay's fourth field goal, a 47-yarder with 3:28 remaining in the extra period, capped a wild final few minutes. 
 The Bucs had tied it with no time left in regulation on Keenan McCardell's 6-yard reception. Considering Gramatica never missed an extra point in his career (129 attempts), the conversion seemed a formality. 
 Jenkins had other ideas. 
 &quot;I went in and blocked it. I don't think it was rocket science or anything,&quot; said Jenkins, who also knocked down a 38-yard field goal try in the second quarter. &quot;It was now or never. We didn't have a choice. Somebody had to get it.&quot; 
 Stephen Davis rushed for 142 yards and Kasay also kicked field goals of 28, 35 and 20 yards for Carolina (2-0), which set up Kasay's game-winner with Steve Smith's 52-yard punt return to the Tampa Bay 40. 
 Six days after opening the season with a dominating 17-0 victory over Philadelphia in a rematch of last season's NFC championship game, the Bucs (1-1) looked flat. They self-destructed with frequent mistakes, including 17 penalties for 168 yards. 
 &quot;We all ate some humble pie today,&quot; Bucs defensive end Simeon Rice said. &quot;We've got to put everything in front of us, understand what it is. It's just one game.&quot; 
 
 <i>
(For other results, see Scorecard.) </i>

TITLE: Dementiyeva Downs Rubin To Claim Title in Indonesia
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: NUSA DUA, Indonesia -Second seed Yelena Dementiyeva took an unexpected victory by making easy work of top seed Chanda Rubin 6-2, 6-1 in the singles final of the WTA tournament.
 
Dementiyeva, who was defeated by Rubin at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, played aggressively throughout the 68-minute match, a marked change from her usual style of only picking up speed in the later sets.
 Rubin played hard, but only managed to score her first point after being three games down in the first set.
 She fought for and won another point to close the gap at 2-3 after three deuces, but after that her defense quickly crumbled in the face of relentless attacks from the Russian player.
 The second set followed the same pattern, with Dementiyeva mercilessly pounding the American, only allowing her to score one point after two deuces. The Russian clinched the second set 6-1 to pocket the $35,000 winner's prize.
 &quot;This is my best match of the year ... I am usually a slow starter, but today I did it from the beginning,&quot; a grinning Dementiyeva told reporters after her victory.
 She also said that she enjoyed playing in Bali, a destination still recovering from the crippling blow dealt by a deadly bomb blast in October last year that killed 202 people, mostly foreign tourists.
 &quot;I will come back. Either for tennis or for vacation,&quot; she said.
 Rubin, who took the $19,000 second prize, was more reserved, telling journalists: &quot;Yelena is really improving.&quot;
 In Costa Do Sauipe, Brazil, Sjeng Schalken downed top-seeded Rainer Schuettler 6-2, 6-4 on Sunday to win the Brasil Open for his third title this season. 
 Schuettler, playing his first final since the Australian Open in January, lost for the third straight time this season to Schalken, a Wimbledon and U.S. Open quarterfinalist this year. Schuettler ousted defending champion Gustavo Kuerten in the semifinals. 
 Schalken, seeded second, won his ninth career title. The Dutchman's previous titles this year came on clay and grass. The Brazilian tournament was on hardcourt. 
 Schalken broke the German in the third and seventh games of the first set. Schuettler tried to rally in the second set by slicing his shots but Schalken remained in command.
 
 
q 
 

 
COMPTON, California - A 24-year-old man was arrested in the investigation of the fatal shooting of the sister of tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department announced early Monday. 
 
The suspect was identified as Aaron Michael Hammer, 24. He was jailed without bail, said sheriff's Deputy Richard Pena. 
 The deputy didn't say what led to Hammer's arrest or when he was taken into custody. However, he said homicide detectives were still seeking the public's assistance in gathering information about the killing of Yetunde Price, who was shot in the chest early Sunday about a mile from the tennis courts where her sisters first rose to prominence. 
 Price was shot in the chest after an alleged dispute in this Los Angeles suburb, which has long been notorious for street gangs and violence. 
 
 <i>(AFP, AP, Reuters) </i>

TITLE: Mariners Sink, Miss Shot At Wild-Card Lead in AL
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SEATTLE - The Seattle Mariners missed a great opportunity. They knew it, too. 
 
Tim Salmon hit a run-scoring single and Scott Spiezio followed with an RBI double in the eighth inning to give the Anaheim Angels a 2-1 victory, denying the Mariners a chance to take over the AL wild-card lead Sunday. 
 &quot;It's tough,&quot; said Seattle starter Ryan Franklin, who threw 7 2/3 strong innings. &quot;That's all I can say. It's tough.&quot; 
 Seattle came close to tying it in the ninth, putting a runner on third with one out. But Mike Cameron struck out looking against Troy Percival and Randy Winn popped up to end it. 
 &quot;I thought maybe it was down a little bit,&quot; Cameron said, recalling the third strike. &quot;Then again, when it's like 97 [miles per hour, 155 kilometers per hour], who knows?&quot; 
 &quot;We had a chance in the ninth, with a man on and less than two outs. We just couldn't get him in,&quot; manager Bob Melvin said. 
 The Mariners remained a half-game behind Boston for the wild card. The Red Sox lost to Chicago. 
 &quot;Any loss this time of year is frustrating, especially in the position we're in,&quot; catcher Dan Wilson said. &quot;We just need to keep working. We need to stay positive. Things will get better.&quot; 
 Cameron put the Mariners ahead 1-0 with a solo home run in the second off Kevin Gregg (2-0). It appeared the lead would stand the way Franklin (9-13) was throwing, holding the Angels to three hits through seven innings. 
 &quot;He pitched great. He really did,&quot; Melvin said. &quot;He's done that several times, a bunch of times, this year. He pitched great today. It's too bad we can't score a few more runs.&quot; 
 But in the eighth, David Eckstein doubled. With first base open, Melvin had Franklin intentionally walk Garret Anderson, who at that point was 10-for-24 lifetime against the right-hander. 
 Melvin chose to play the percentages against Salmon, who was 4-for-23 against Franklin, rather than go to the bullpen. Salmon singled, and Eckstein scored when right fielder Ichiro Suzuki's throw to the plate was off the mark. 
 It spoiled another strong performance by Franklin. He placed one down and away, a tough location to hit, but Salmon connected. 
 Franklin was replaced by Rafael Soriano, and Spiezio got a clean hit that darted past Gold Glove first baseman John Olerud down the line. 
 Percival worked the ninth for this 33rd save in 36 opportunities. It was his fourth save against the Mariners this season and the 20th of his career. 
 Gregg threw seven innings, allowing one run on three hits with three walks and two strikeouts. 
 
 <strong>
Chicago White Sox 7, Boston 2.</strong>Mark Buehrle pitched seven strong innings as the White Sox won 7-2 Sunday. Chicago took two of three at Fenway Park, limiting the top offense in the major leagues to 19 hits in the series. 
 
Buehrle (13-13) didn't have his best stuff, relying more on a strong sinker than a mediocre cutter and slider. But he started pitching with a 2-0 lead following Roberto Alomar's double off John Burkett (10-8) and Carlos Lee's 30th homer. 
 Buehrle was solid when he needed to be as Boston got leadoff hits in five of his seven innings. And he didn't have to face Nomar Garciaparra, who missed the game with the flu. 
 But with Chicago ahead 5-2 with no outs in the sixth and two on, Buehrle got David Ortiz to ground into a double play. 
 Buehrle allowed two runs and seven hits, and Damaso Marte worked two innings for his 11th save in 18 chances. 
 
 <i>(For other results, see Scorecard.) </i>

TITLE: Paper: Man. U. on Three Buyers' Shopping Lists
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: LONDON - Three unidentified billionaires have made separate inquiries into bidding for Premiership champion Manchester United, Britian's Observer newspaper said on Sunday, citing unnamed senior club figures.
 
The front-page report said the Russian, European and Middle Eastern entrepreneurs each sought advice from bankers on the cost of the club, which has a market capitalization of Pound436 million, and if existing shareholders would sell.
 United said it had had no takeover approaches.
 &quot;We have had no approaches and the story is pure speculation,&quot; spokesman Paddy Harverson said on Saturday.
 The Observer said that the trio are said to be &quot;around as rich if not richer&quot; than Roman Abramovich, who bought Chelsea in July. The paper said it understood one bidder is a Russian oligarch, another is a Middle Eastern billionaire and the third is European. 
 Soccer analyst Vinay Bedi of London brokerage Brewin Dolphin said in July that any bid for United would be complicated by the club's complex cross shareholdings.
 The Observer said the trio had been told that it would cost about Pound600 million ($962 million) to buy United, that many of the club's existing biggest shareholders would sell if the price was right, and that United could be even more profitable. 
 The Russian alone, the paper said, is said to be worth around Pound5 billion, while the other two would similarly have no trouble finding the Pound600 million analysts believe would secure ownership of United.
 
 <i>(Reuters, SPT) </i>