SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #904 (72), Tuesday, September 23, 2003
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TITLE: Elections Set To Go to Second Round
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Kremlin-backed candidate Valentina Matviyenko did not get enough votes to win the gubernatorial race in the first round, garnering just 48.61 percent in the Sunday poll, the City Election Commission reported Monday.
 
Matviyenko, the presidential envoy to the Northwest Region, needed more than 50 percent of votes to win outright. 
 She now faces second-placed Anna Markova, vice governor of the city, who had received 15.89 percent of votes after 99.53 percent of polling stations had returned their results.
 The second round is scheduled for Oct. 5.
 Third place went to "against all candidates," with 10.97 percent.
 Nine candidates took part in the election, which recorded a low turnout of 28.99 percent, about two thirds of the turnout in the 2000 gubernatorial elections. 
 The next best polling candidates were Sergei Belyayev, former head of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, with 8.1 percent, Mikhail Amosov, head of the Yabloko faction in the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, with 7.06 percent, and Legislative Assembly member Konstantin Sukhenko, with 5.13 percent. Other candidates got less then 1 percent of votes cast.
 Markova said Monday she and most candidates who recieved a significant number of votes, such as Sukhenko and Amosov, would form a coalition to defeat Matviyenko. 
 Financing this campaign is in doubt because her funds are exhausted, she added.
 "In the face of all the resources the candidate No. 1 had, we have done what seemed to be impossible ... I have zero money left in my account," Markova said at an impromptu briefing at the City Election Commission headquarters early Monday morning.
 "After the draft results were announced and it became clear we're going to face a second round, I shook hands with Sukhenko. Then I warily shook hands with Amosov [a bitter critic of City Hall] ... and we couldn't stop shaking hands," Markova said.
 Matviyenko did not comment on the results on Sunday night, nor did she show up at any of three media centers during the night.
 "In the conditions we've been working in, we were ready for such a development," Matviyenko said at a news conference on Monday afternoon, referring to a second round. 
 "We didn't fall into confusion, but reviewed the situation in a real and philosophical way. It would be a good result to get 50 percent when nine candidates are competing," she said.
 She added that up to 2 million copies of "false and compromising materials" in relation to her or her relatives "had been taken daily from the city."
 "All the candidates worked against me," she said. "They didn't talk about their programs, but just worked against me. If we had used administrative resources, it would have been not that hard to make the missing 1.4 percent to win. We did not do it."
 Matviyenko said she had had a telephone conversation with President Vladimir Putin on Monday morning. He was pleased with the results, she said.
 Matviyenko emphasized that she would not be pursuing any coalition with other candidates to persuade their voters to vote for her.
 "I am a tolerant person by nature, but don't take any ultimatums. I won't negotiate any conditions, but I am ready for negotiations if no conditions are imposed ... [Alexei] Timofeyev and [Oleg] Titov have congratulated me. They are our future young politicians," she said.
 Timofeyev and Titov gained 0.87 percent and 0.74 percent of votes cast, respectively.
 According to local election law, if a vote against all the candidates is higher then a vote for either of the two candidates in the second round, the elections are considered invalid. If that happens, the next elections should take place within a year while an acting governor, appointed by a previous governor, runs City Hall.
 Governor Vladimir Yakovlev appointed his deputy Alexander Beglov to head City Hall after he left St. Petersburg on June 16 to work as deputy prime minister responsible for municipal housing services.
 Whether a second round would be held was still in the balance on Sunday evening. 
 The Agency for Social Research announced results of exit polls conducted among 5,000 voters from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. in most of the polling stations around the city. While the election commission reported an extremely low turnout of about 20 percent by the afternoon, Matviyenko was getting just slightly more then 50 percent, with a margin of error of 1.5 percent.
 "The weather is good," Nikolai Konkin, spokesman for the Central Election Commission, said Sunday. 
 "The difference is that the last gubernatorial elections took place in May, but now it is September, the time when people harvest what they planted in the spring," he said. "And there is less the time to conduct elections. Last time the polling stations had been working until 10:00 p.m. Now it is until 8:00 p.m. only," he said.
 "In the morning all these pensioners and people with Soviet mentality went to vote. They are very disciplined and they like the authorities," Leonid Kesselman, a political analyst at the sociology department of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said Sunday.
 "The fact that the weather is good - mushroom picking, and so on - and the belief that everything has been decided for the city in advance played its role for the low turn out," he said.
 Tatyana Protasenko, a senior researcher for Sociology Department at the Russian Academy of Sciences, said it was very difficult to conduct exit polls on the gubernatorial elections.
 "This time many people refused to tell us who they voted for. This is unusual. We suspect that this is because people felt embarrassed to say they voted for Matviyenko," Protasenko said.
 Konkin said there had been almost no serous violations registered, except that six people conducting exit polls for the Agency for Social Research were detained by police at a polling station on Moskovsky Prospect because the officers mistakenly thought they were breaking election law.
 "It is quite typical that our law enforcers don't know the law," he said.
 According to the police, quoted by Interfax on Sunday, the surveyors had been working at a distance of less then 50 meters from polling stations, which is prohibited by election law, but the sociologists said they know the law and did not break it. The police also said they detained two people trying to bribe voters by one of the polling station.
 Roman Mogilevsky, head of the Agency for Social Research, said police told him they had had no instructions about permitting pollsters to conduct exit polls.
 "We can conduct surveys without having a license, and we don't have to inform any authorities about it. We informed the city election commission just in case," Mogilevsky said Sunday at a briefing.
 "I told one major that it might be easier to just arrest everybody in the city to solve all the problems and he replied they have enough cells to do so. We were both joking, but I'd say that these things are not really funny," he said.
 The pollsters were released shortly after information about the police breaking the law was spread around the city by information agencies and television.
 City Prosecutor Nikolai Vinnichenko said police had prevented ballots from being stolen by voters in the Central and Primorsky districts. 
 "Some citizens came to a polling station under the influence of alcohol," Interfax quoted him saying Sunday.
 The city Prosecutor's Office opened five criminal cases in relation to the election campaign for lying and attempts to bribe voters.
 Meanwhile, Markova branded the elections a parody, saying that Vinnichenko had said there were few violations, but that candidates' headquarters had sent more than 5,000 complaints to the City Election Commission. Observers from her headquarters were allowed into the polling stations only after 6p.m., two hours before the voting was finished. 
 But Tatyana Dorutina, of the St. Petersburg League of Voters, said the elections showed authorities can break the law whenever they want to. She cited the support Putin had shown for Matviyenko that was screened on federal television channels 2 1/2 weeks before the elections.
 "This was allowed to be done by the president. Putin has signed the law himself and had broke it himself," Dorutina said in a telephone interview Sunday.
 "There were more than enough of law violations during this campaign. We have filed two complaints to the City Election Commission against two candidates, Belyayev and Matviyenko. Belyayev was using a sexist advertisement, and [Vadim] Tyulpanov [the speaker of the Legislative Assembly] called for the public to support Matviyenko," she said, "We haven't received any answer and it's understandable. If Putin breaks the law what would anybody say about some Tyulpanov."
 
 


TITLE: Serdyukov Holds On To Power In Oblast
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: With 936 out of 973 polling stations returned, Leningrad Oblast Governor Valery Serdyukov had more than 50 percent of the vote in the oblast's gubernatorial election, meaning a second round will not have to be held. 
 
Serdyukov defeated former deputy prime minister Vadim Gustov, who himself served as oblast governor from 1996 until 1998. Gustov first lost to Serdyukov during the previous gubernatorial elections in 1999.
 The Leningrad Oblast Elections Commission reported Monday that Serdyukov led with 56.53 percent of the vote. Gustov was a distant second with 25.54 percent. A total of 7.7 percent voted against all candidates.
 Turnout was 29.46 percent of the 1.3 million eligible voters - down 10.5 percentage points from the previous election, the commission said. 
 In 1999, Serdyukov won with with 30.33 percent of the vote, while Gustov finished second with 22.57 percent. Turnout was 40.25 percent.
 Serduykov and Gustov left four other competitors for the oblast's top post very far behind. Pensioner Yury Terentyev received 1.96 percent of the vote; Leningrad Oblast parliament deputy Mikhail Vodopyanov had 1.37 percent; St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly lawmaker Vladimir Belozerskikh won 1.11 percent; and the general director of security enterprise SVA, Alexander Smirnov, received 1.03 percent.
 Tatyana Protasenko, a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, attributed Serdyukov's win to "the effect of being governor" and the general similarity between the programs of Serdyukov and Gustov.
 "If an incumbent governor isn't very irritating, people always prefer them to the other candidates. Serdyukov's rating has always been somewhere between 45 percent and 60 percent," she said. "Similarly, if former Governor Vladimir Yakovlev was running in St. Petersburg, he would stand a very good chance for re-election. Many people appreciate even minor stability and are simply afraid that a new person would try to enrich themselves and those around them."
 During his abbreviated tenure as governor from 1996 to 1998, Gustov won praise from foreign investors for a business-friendly tax regime he instituted. Such automotive giants as Ford and Caterpillar decided to pass up on St. Petersburg for the Leningrad region. 
 During Serdyukov's rule, the Leningrad Oblast has improved its tax regime, one of Russia's most investor-friendly, creating jobs by drawing more foreign companies, like Philip Morris and Kraft Foods.
 "Gustov lost because he couldn't develop an alternative concept for the region," Protasenko said. "He suggested the people change a person, not a new policy. That was his major mistake."
 Gustov disagreed. 
 "Serdyukov won because he was using administrative resources a lot," Gustov told reporters Monday. "But I am not discouraged, and will analyze the results of the campaign." 
 Vladimir Zhuravlyov, head of the Leningrad Oblast Electoral Commission said several major violations were registered during the vote Sunday.
 Several cases of vote-buying were reported in Priozersk and Sosnovo. In Vsevolozhsk and Morozovka in the Vsevolozhsk region, several people were stopped trying to sneak from the polling station with blank ballots. Several people have been detained. Slantsy police detained a woman accused of buying votes of at least 20 people.
 "These violations can't lead to cancellation of the vote but legal investigation will be launched," Zhuravlev said.
 The campaign itself was dirty enough to make at least one candidate leave the race. 
 Zalina Medoyeva, a member of the Union of Right Forces party, dropped out of the race Friday, two days before the voting for the oblast's top job began. Medoyeva said the region's electoral process was rampant with violations and she refused to run when "dirty technology is being used by at least five candidates and vote-buying is widespread."
 "A bottle of vodka, or up to 400 rubles per vote, and the deal is done," Medoyeva said. "I can't compete in such circumstances."
 In contrast to the situation in St. Petersburg, none of the candidates in the oblast had a strong backing from the Kremlin, although Serdyukov was supported by the pro-presidential United Russia. 
 Sergei Markov, director of Moscow-based Institute for Political Research, said the Kremlin wasn't backing anyone in the oblast because the outcome wont have much resonance on federal level in principle.
 "Despite frequent talks about unification between St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast, the issue is out of the question at the moment," Markov said. "When such a procedure is set up on federal level to be used in a number of regions, then the Kremlin will take a closer look at the Leningrad Oblast."
 But Protasenko said during that in the last five to seven years, the Leningrad Oblast has been a tasty morsel for another reason - financial. 
 "With three oil terminals under construction and an enormous investment potential the region is a very important sphere of influence," Protasenko said. "When Duma deputy Galina Starovoitova was slain in November 1998, I linked the murder with her interest in the Leningrad Oblast. Sociological research was showing she would have a strong chance to get the region's top job."

TITLE: German Veterans Come for Church Dedication
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: About 500 German war veterans and relatives of those who died in the Second World War attended the handing over of a restored Orthodox church beside what is to become the largest German war cemetery in the world in the village of Sologubovka, 80 kilometers southeast of St. Petersburg, on Saturday.
 
Many grey-haired men and women, who traveled to Sologubovka all the way from Germany, could not hold back their tears when getting to the spot, which is intended to be a "unique symbol of Russian-German reconciliation."
 For many Russians, the atrocities committed and suffering caused by the Germany army, which invaded Russia in 1941, before being smashed by the Red Army and pursued to defeat in Berlin, are unforgiveable. 
 The area around the city could be expected to be particularly hostile given the huge price in human lives paid during the 900-day siege of Leningrad that cost the lives of more than 700,000 people, many of whom died of starvation.
 The Soviet Union did not bury many of its own soldiers, and made no provision for graves for German soldiers on its soil.
 However, in 1992 the Russian government finally allowed the exhumation of German soldiers as part of putting the hostilities of wars behind it and the united Germany. 
 "This Russian church was restored using the donations of private German citizens, and we thought this project could serve for further German-Russian understanding and reconciliation," said Fritz Kirchmeier, spokesman for the German nongovernmental People's Commission of German War Graves.
 "While preserving the memory of the victims of that war and its violence, we are making a contribution to the mutual understanding and reconciliation between our nations," said German ambassador to Russia Hans-Friedrich von Ploetz, who spoke at the ceremony.
 The Sologubovka cemetery was opened in 2000 under the initiative of the commission. To date the remains of about 32,000 German soldiers have been buried in Sologubovka. The cemetery can take the remains of up to 80,000.
 The area around Sologubovka, called the Sinyavin Heights, was the scene of some of the toughest battles of the Second World War.
 "I had some of the worst times of my life here," said veteran Hans Mueller, holding back his tears. "In a matter of one day in September 1943, I lost a large number of my comrades here."
 "I was 20 at that time, when we were sent to the area of Shapki village, close to here, to relieve the 21st division. However, by the time we got there, the 21st division was no more, and we were short of bullers and of soldiers. But the senior officer gave us an order to attack the Russians. So, I had to literally go on attack over the bodies of my friends, who were just shot dead," Mueller said.
 "These were terrible times. All these heights were blackened from shelling, and the sky was red from fires," he said. "And now I'm looking for the names of my comrades here."
 Some 21,000 names of those whose remains have been identified are engraved on the cemetery's granite tombstones.
 Every year, special Russian-German search groups, mainly young people, uncover the remains of up to 10,000 German soldiers and bury them in the cemetery, Kirchmeier said.
 Therefore, many German veterans and relatives of soldiers who died in Russia were scanning the lists of the deceased on the gravestones.
 In addition, the church that underwent a three-year, $1.75-million restoration will have the combined function of being a museum, dedicated to all German victims of the war in Russia. The museum displays books with the names of 800,000 German soldiers, who died in former Soviet Union.
 A German woman, who didn't want to be identified, said she came to Sologubovka because her father served in this area, and though he died somewhere in Latvia, she "wanted to see the places, which her father saw, and see what Russian people are like."
 A number of Russian people, mainly residents of Sologubovka, also came to the ceremony, and the elderly shared the grief with the Germans who came.
 "I don't have any anger inside," said Lyubov Fedotova, 57, whose father served on the Sinyavin Heights.
 "I think, that war was caused not by German people, but by their government. My father used to tell me that there were both good and bad people among German soldiers, and that many of them didn't want to be in that war, but they had to obey orders," she said.
 Vera Antonova, 80, who was taken prisoner, said two German doctors had saved her leg rather than have it amputated.
 "It's O.K. that we have this cemetery here. Soviet soldiers are also buried in Germany. We should be friends," Antonova said.
 The museum's stands tell the stories of German soldiers, who died in Russia.
 Before the war, Erich Voigt used to play at the theater of his hometown and was an excellent pianist, though he couldn't read music, his daughter Gisela August wrote in an account of her father's life.
 "When the war began he was convinced he was doing the right thing by being a soldier -- but only at the beginning," she wrote. "You could perceive from the letters from Stalingrad how he changed his mind, as he realized the lunacy of the war."
 Voigt died in the Rudnia prisoner-of-war camp outside Stalingrad on April 18, 1943.


TITLE: Kommersant: Political Lesson in the Cards
AUTHOR: By Anna Dolgov
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - A game of cards can now become a quick lesson of who's who in Washington with the release of a new deck that looks an awful lot like the United States' own deck of most-wanted Iraqi leaders.
 
"The United Cards of America's" creators, the Kommersant newspaper and NTV's "Namedni" news program, acknowledge that they were inspired by the Iraq deck but insist that their set is mostly for educational purposes.
 The deck of 36 playing cards - complete with pictures and brief commentaries of prominent U.S. figures - is also a lot more amusing. 
 Among the cards are George W. Bush ("USA President since 2001, convinced that God has a plan for him"); Don Evans ("commerce secretary, drank with Bush Jr. until July 6, 1986"); and Laura Bush ("the wife of Bush, Jr., made husband quit drinking"). 
 Also included are Joshua Bolten ("White House budget director, a stingy guardian of people's money"); Andrew Card ("White House chief of staff, 'filters' the president's interlocutors"); John Snow ("secretary of treasury, the 'salesman' of George Bush's economic ideas"); and Colin Powell ("secretary of state, a living embodiment of the 'American dream'"). 
 "This is a kind of entertaining 'Americanology,'" Leonid Parfyonov, the anchor of "Namedni," said in a telephone interview.
 While joking about the quirks of their leaders is a national pastime and most Russians can easily name who's who in Moscow, their knowledge of U.S. politicians is generally limited to what they hear on dry newscasts. The cards, along with reports by Kommersant and "Namedni" this month, are aimed at providing background information that news reports usually skip, Kommersant said.
 The breakdown into suits follows certain guidelines: The hearts are the "family" (which includes Bush's relatives and close friends), the diamonds are "moderates," the clubs are "careerists," and the spades are "neo-conservatives."
 The division is, of course, somewhat arbitrary, said the head of Kommersant's foreign policy department, Azer Mursaliyev, who came up with the idea in the first place. 
 "And the cards themselves are basically arbitrary - this is not a political science class, after all," he said. "Serious 'Americanologists' may say that this is absolutely wrong, that the key figures are absolutely different.
 "But we didn't have the goal of providing material for the Foreign Intelligence Service. Our goal was to educate our readers a little bit."
 Each Monday this month Kommersant is publishing profiles of those featured in each of the suits, while "Namedni" is reporting about the figures in its Sunday broadcasts. The release of the cards (which cost about 180 rubles) was timed to coincide with a peak in interest in U.S. affairs this month. The interest is partly due to the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks and President Vladimir Putin's planned meeting with Bush at Camp David this week. 
 "Our readers will have a chance to look at the cards and see, 'He [Putin] met with so-and-so, and who is this person? Oh, a seven,'" Mursaliyev said. 
 The cards also aimed to reflect growing U.S. influence in world affairs, Kommersant wrote in a recent article. Bush "has become the most powerful man on Earth, and his entourage, effectively, has become the world government," it said. 
 He may be the "most powerful man on Earth," but in the suit of hearts, Bush is only a jack. The ace is his father, former President George Bush, while the king is the Reverend Franklin Graham ("preacher and missionary, the president's holy father"), and the queen is his wife, Laura Bush.
 "In the Bush family, Bush Sr. is naturally the senior, and Bush Jr. himself has always said that," Mursaliyev explained. "Then the holy father, who obviously can't come below [the president], and the queen is naturally the wife - after all we couldn't make President Bush the queen. And therefore, he is the jack."
 The diamonds - "moderates" - include Powell, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage ("the most undiplomatic diplomat") and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (no commentary).
 The clubs - the "careerists" and "the necessary element of any administration," according to Kommersant - include Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan ("the second most-powerful man in the world"), Karl Rove ("the president's adviser, George Bush Jr.'s political guru"), and Karen Hughes ("the president's former adviser, will come back at the next election"). 
 U.S. Ambassador to Russia Alexander Vershbow is also there - a seven of clubs, just above FBI Director Robert Mueller. Asked whether he liked his picture on the card, Vershbow said Tuesday, "The one in Kommersant was even worse." 
 Beyond that, the U.S. Embassy would not comment on the cards, said spokesman Tom Leary. 
 The spades - or "neo-conservatives" - include Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ("the face of the struggle with terrorism") and his wife, Lynne Cheney ("an advocate of conservative values"). 
 "We didn't want to depart too far from reality," Parfyonov said. 
 "Looking from Moscow, the top powers in America do seem to consist of four clearly separable vectors."
 The term "family" draws a clear parallel with former President Boris Yeltsin's inner circle, the influential group of relatives and advisers that has been described by the same word.
 "Just the fact that it's George Bush the Junior is evidence that in America there's also a 'family,'" Parfyonov said. 
 In any other way, the deck is just a set of cards. Decks of 36 cards - without jokers - are common in Russia.
 "In nothing except the illustrations does it differ from an ordinary deck of playing cards," Kommersant wrote. "And it can be used not only for enlightenment and educational purposes but also for its original purpose."
 Would-be students or players can buy the cards in Moscow at the Biblio-Globus bookstore on Lubyanka, Dom Knigi on Novy Arbat, or the Moskva bookstore on Tverskaya Ulitsa.

TITLE: What Do Women Want? Their Representatives in the State Duma
AUTHOR: By Francesca Mereu
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Whatever the political make-up of the new State Duma, one result is already virtually a shoo-in: Women deputies will be in a tiny minority, just as they have been in all three elections since Soviet rule ended in 1991.
 
And of the small number of women in Parliament, only two - Irina Khakamada, the co-leader of the Union of Right Forces party, and Communist deputy Svetlana Savitskaya, the first woman to walk in space - made the top five in their parties' lists this time around. 
 Of the parties to declare their lists, a slight increase in women's representation can be observed: Yabloko, the Union of Right Forces and the Communists each have two women in their federal top 10. 
 But overall, political analysts do not hold out much hope for a significant increase in women's representation in the new Duma.
 "I don't think the situation is going to change," said Vladimir Pribylovsky, the head of the Panorama think tank. "You'll have the same number of women in the Duma that you have now - no more than 10 percent." 
 In fact, the percentage of women deputies has been steadily falling. Fourteen percent of deputies in the 1993 chamber were women, but this figure shrank to 10 percent in 1995 and just 8 percent in 1999. 
 Out of 450 members of the current Duma, a mere 35 are women. 
 Women's representation in the Federation Council is even slimmer - just seven out of 178 members, or 4 percent.
 Apart from Valentina Matviyenko, the St. Petersburg gubernatorial candidate and former presidential envoy, the country's next most prominent women politician is probably Irina Khakamada, the SPS co-leader. 
 But even Khakamada, who takes second place on the party's list this year, said that life in the Duma is not easy for women.
 "The bureaucracy is the ruling class - and traditionally this is represented by men," she said. "For women it is very difficult to overcome all the obstacles to get into politics." 
 She said that for women's rights to improve, the country needs to develop its civil society and democratic structures further.
 A former associate professor of macroeconomics at Moscow State University, Khakamada is responsible for SPS initiatives aimed at developing small and medium-sized businesses - and has been a staunch supporter of small business since the early days of perestroika.
 In 1993, she launched her own political party, called Common Cause, and was elected to the Duma. She later joined the SPS bloc and was given third place in its 1999 Duma list after Sergey Kiriyenko and Boris Nemtsov.
 For Maria Arbatova, an outspoken feminist who became famous as a regular guest on "Ya Sama", or "Myself," one of the country's first television talk shows, the reason for the low number of women in parliament is "very simple. Women did not have and do not have money," she said.
 Arbatova, who failed to get elected to the Duma in 1999 when she ran on the Union of Right Forces ballot, is the co-chair of the Human Rights party. In this election her party has joined forces with the Party of Life, headed by Sergei Mironov, the Chairman of the Federation Council.
 "The new Russian political elite was born in a very specific way. [During perestroika], while women were waiting in line for food, men carved the country into pieces," Arbatova says.
 The low percentage of women in the Duma is a reflection of the structure of Russia society in general, she said.
 In support of her claim, Arbatova cites figures from Goskomstat, the government statistics agency, which show that men own 92 percent of private property. 
 "This [percentage] is very similar to what we have in the Duma," Arbatova said. 
 Yelena Yershova, the president of the Consortium of Women's NGOs and a member of the government's Commission on Human Rights, went further. 
 She said the reason so few women make it into the Duma is linked to the "patriarchal structure" of Russian society. "Our male deputies are chauvinist and do not allow women to get into the Duma," she said.
 Yershova advocates introducing quotas for women deputies. The quota issue was raised by women's organizations in the mid-1990s, and in 1997 Russian women's rights groups proposed that a minimum of 30 percent of places in parliament and in government structures be reserved for women. 
 But the proposal, introduced as an amendment to a bill on elections, was voted down in the second reading. 
 In the debate Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the nationalist Liberal Democratic party, made his views clear on quotas for women deputies in typically blunt fashion. 
 "Russian women do not want [political] power, but a husband with a good salary," he said. 
 Yegor Ligachyov, a Communist deputy, disagreed with Zhirinovsky's viewpoint, but thinks a law on quotas would be useless. "We can approve a law that gives 40 or whatever percent to women, but it would be absurd," he said. "Voters would not think about the quotas, and they are the ones who decide the destiny of a candidate."
 But Vitaly Lednik, a Unity faction deputy, supports quotas, which he says are necessary to get laws on women's rights passed. "The few women we have in the Duma are very active, but if they raise a problem that is strictly related to their gender they cannot do anything," he said.
 The quota idea was one revived from the Soviet era, when women had reserved places in the rubber-stamp Soviet legislature - 30 percent in the Supreme Soviet and between 40 and 50 percent at lower levels. 
 But the real power structure, the Communist party, remained overwhelmingly male-dominated. In the late 1980s, as legislative bodies began to acquire real power under perestroika, the quota system was abolished. In the Congress of People's Deputies elected in 1990, women won less than 6 percent of seats. 
 Alexandra Buratayeva, a former ORT news presenter who in 1999 ran for the pro-Kremlin Unity faction from her native Kalmyk republic, is the deputy head of the Duma Committee for International Affairs.
 Buratayeva said she swapped journalism for politics because she wanted to do something "to change the life of the country." She said a lot of women are afraid of going into politics because they think that the Duma is a rough place to work. "Journalists should write about not only when deputies fight or swear - which is very rare - but also about the positive side of our work there," she said.
 According to Yershova, the only political victory Russian women achieved in the past decade was in April 2002, when a law was passed guaranteeing equal rights and opportunities for women.
 The law, an initiative by the Consortium of Women's NGOs, included practical measures aimed at gender equality, but not the idea of quotas. 
 "It's not the solution to our problems, but it is a small step forward," said Aleftina Fedulova, the president of the Women of Russia movement.

TITLE: Putin Attends United Russia Meet as 'Sign of Gratitude'
AUTHOR: By Francesca Mereu
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin made an unannounced appearance at United Russia's congress on Saturday and left no doubt that the party is his choice to win the Dec. 7 parliamentary elections.
 
He said he had voted for the party in the last elections, in 1999, when he was prime minister and that he did not regret it. United Russia, he said, "was able to create a group of centrists in the Duma that backed, without any exaggeration, the government position concerning Russia's development."
 Putin, who is seeking re-election himself next year, said he chose to attend the congress as a "sign of gratitude" for the party's support over the years.
 The election field has been muddied by the emergence of several other smaller Kremlin-supported parties, but Putin's appearance Saturday made clear that United Russia is still his favored one.
 The congress was held in the Hall of Columns, located next to the Duma and best known as the place where Stalin-era show trials were held and where Stalin's body lay in state.
 As expected, United Russia chose Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov to lead its federal list, followed by Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu, Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov and Tatarstan President Mintimer Shaimiyev. 
 United Russia, the biggest faction in the State Duma with more than 140 of the 450 seats, was set up in February 2002 when Fatherland-All Russia merged with Unity. The two had been rivals in the 1999 campaign, when the Kremlin created Unity to oppose Fatherland-All Russia, whose leaders included Luzhkov and Shaimiyev.
 Fatherland-All Russia's strength lay in the regions, and the inclusion of Luzhkov and Shaimiyev in United Russia's top four, together with the party's decision last month to formally change its name to Fatherland United Russia, reflects the influence governors are seen to have in pulling in votes in their regions.
 United Russia now has 28 governors on its federal party list, Gryzlov said Saturday.
 United Russia has nearly always supported Kremlin initiatives in the Duma, which Putin acknowledged.
 "Thanks to our joint efforts, we have managed to create both political and economic stability. For the first time in many years, we no longer have hanging over our head the constant threat of a new economic crisis and cataclysms," Putin said in a speech interrupted by applause and shown at length on both state television channels.
 In wishing the party luck in the election, the president emphasized the importance to him of having "a majority of responsible politicians" in the Duma and expressed the hope that he would be able to count on them in the next Duma as well.
 He said the Duma should work toward the long-term goals that he had named in last May's state of the nation address: doubling gross domestic product, defeating poverty and modernizing the armed forces.
 Putin's appearance at the congress resulted in higher than usual security, and only a few journalists, most from the state television channels and the main Russian news agencies, were allowed in for his speech. According to security guards, about 1,000 people attended the congress, which began at 9 a.m. and wrapped up by mid-afternoon.
 At a news conference held afterward by all four party leaders, journalists questioned whether it was ethical for the president to openly back a party.
 The party leaders responded by saying they had not expected the president to come. Gryzlov said Putin came as "one of our voters." 
 Luzhkov said Putin came on his own initiative and that he did not see anything wrong in it. "In civilized and democratic countries, we see presidents and prime ministers taking part in [party] congresses. ... It was the president's desire and it is his right to take part in events of this kind," Luzhkov said.
 Putin was criticized earlier this month when he publicly endorsed Valentina Matviyenko, the presidential envoy to the Northwest Region, in her bid to become governor of St. Petersburg.
 Matviyenko said Sunday, election day in St. Petersburg, that Putin had been right to back United Russia despite the post-Soviet tradition of the president being above politics.
 "I believe the president supports the party of common sense, working toward improving life in our country," she said, Reuters reported. "I can't see how anyone could fail to support such a program."
 Gryzlov said he is expecting some 20 organizations to join forces with United Russia during the campaign. As examples he gave groups headed by Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev and State Sports Committee head Vyacheslav Fetisov.
 After the election, some of the other Kremlin-supported parties are likely to join up with United Russia in the next Duma.
 The Rebirth of Russia party, led by Duma Speaker Gennady Seleznyov, and the Party of Life headed by Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov, which are running in the elections together, pledged to back United Russia if they break the 5 percent barrier to get into the Duma.
 Even though the People's Party, which from its founding in September 2001 had been part of United Russia, has decided to run independently, it is widely seen as a Kremlin project to bring home the protest vote. 
 The Homeland bloc headed by left-leaning economist Sergei Glazyev is also widely perceived as a Kremlin project, in this case to attract the left-wing electorate. Dmitry Rogozin, a Kremlin-connected hawk who is running in the No. 2 spot on Homeland's federal list, left the People's Party early this year in the hope of getting a top position in United Russia.
 
 
 
 


TITLE: Yabloko: Shchekochikin Inquiry Worrying
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - An investigation into the death of Yabloko Deputy Yury Shchekochikhin is showing some "very alarming" results suggesting he might have been killed, Yabloko leader Georgy Yavlinsky said Monday.
 
Shchekochikhin, who also was a leading anti-corruption journalist, died in a Moscow hospital at the age of 52 in July after suffering a severe allergic reaction. Yabloko and Novaya Gazeta, where Shchekochikhin had worked, arranged for tissue taken during Shchekochikhin's autopsy to be analyzed at several laboratories.
 "The analysis continues ... and we have very alarming news," Yavlinsky said Monday on Ekho Moskvy radio. 
 He added, however, that it is too early to say whether Shchekochikhin was murdered. 
 Yavlinsky noted that Shchekochikhin's anti-corruption investigations "infringed upon the interests of many."
 Last week, a Yabloko official said in a telephone interview that prosecutors have been informed of the preliminary findings of the tissue analysis and that final results should be available by October. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said preliminary results indicate that Shchekochikhin might have been murdered.
 Shchekochikhin first made a name for himself in the early 1980s, writing newspaper articles exposing corruption in the Soviet ranks. He served as deputy editor of Novaya Gazeta since 1997 and a deputy in the State Duma since 1995.
 


TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Draft Budget Approved
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The St. Petersburg government has approved the draft city budget 2004 with a deficit of 4.4 percent of a total spending, Inerfax reported Monday.
 Total income would approximate 83.9 billion rubles (about $2.27 billion) with total spending of 80.2 billion rubles (about $2.65 billion), which is 8.8 percent increase compare to the budget for 2003.
 Mikhail Krylov, acting head of City Hall's finance committee, said the deficit is due to a recent decision of the federal government to abolish petrol tax, the Legislative Assembly's refusal to raise taxes on gambling and a new law lowering taxes on properties of companies.
 The draft budget is to be approved by the Legislative Assembly within next two months.
 
 
<b>Police Detain Suspect 
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The police have detained a suspect in the assassination of Alexei Kurnikov, director of City Hall's hotel management office, who was found dead Sept. 5, Interfax reported Sunday.
 The suspect, Artur Kzhzhevich, was born in 1961 and has several convictions for grievous bodily harm was detained Friday afternoon after Zenith-Spartak football game at Petrovsky Stadium by employees of the Northwest Criminal Police Department. 
 
 
<b>Grenades Fired in City 
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Several shots were fired from a grenade launcher in downtown of Petrozavodsk, the capital of Karelia, 550 kilometers north of St. Petersburg, Interfax reported Monday.
 The shooting occured in an area close to a garage owned by the Karelian Health Ministry. A guard suffered acoustic shock, police said.
 
 
<b>Dutch Head of Nato
 </b>

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Dutch Foreign Minister Jaap de Hoop Scheffer has been appointed the new head of NATO, succeeding Britain's George Robertson, the military alliance said.
 NATO said Monday that the North Atlantic Council had appointed De Hoop Scheffer as secretary-general of the 19-nation alliance. 



TITLE: 'Namedni,' STS and 'Idiot' Pick Up Prizes
AUTHOR: By Denis Maternovsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Leonid Parfyonov's &quot;Namedni,&quot; CTC television and the &quot;Idiot&quot; mini-series were the winners at the third annual TV Press awards Friday. 
 
The prizes were presented by the Television Press Club, whose 16 members represent 13 newspapers and magazines, including Kommersant, Izvestia, The Moscow Times, Gazeta.ru and Radio Liberty. Winners received a plaque from the Russian Television Academy and a sketch by The St. Petersburg Times cartoonist Viktor Bogorad. 
 The jury presented the personality of the year award to the reporters of NTV's &quot;Namedni&quot; for bringing &quot;new heights to an old genre.&quot; &quot;Namedni,&quot; which offers a blend of political, business and entertainment news, was named the best program at last year's ceremony. This year the jury did not pick a program of the year after no contender received more than 50 percent of the vote.
 CTC general director Alexander Rodnyansky also was named personality of the year for being &quot;a serious manager of an entertainment channel.&quot; The channel, known for its game shows and series, saw its viewership soar over the past year, at times even passing NTV as the country's No. 3 network.
 &quot;This decision means that entertainment TV is no longer perceived as something in really bad taste - it can also mean interesting and respectable,&quot; Rodnyansky said.
 The prize for TV event of the year went to Rossia television's &quot;Idiot&quot; &quot;for reanimating classic works and rehabilitating viewers.&quot; The adaptation of Dostoevsky's famous novel created a sensation when it was aired last spring and topped the rating charts. 
 Film director and television producer Valery Todorovsky, who accepted the award, said adapting &quot;Idiot&quot; for television was &quot;akin to testing a new airplane.&quot; 
 For the first time this year, two special awards were presented to Parfyonov and Viktor Shenderovich of now-closed TVS &quot;for the professionalism and civic responsibility expressed in the 'Namedni' and 'Besplatny Syr' programs following the Dubrovka hostage crisis.&quot; 
 Parfyonov said in his acceptance speech that he &quot;didn't like the prize,&quot; stressing that it was not up to journalists to show civic responsibility.
 Shenderovich called his post-hostage program the only thing that made worthwhile &quot;the compromise that I had to agree to when I joined the irresponsible project that was TVS.&quot; 
 The jury announced two anti-event of the year awards - one for &quot;the collective irresponsibility of TVS participants that led to the channel's shutdown&quot; and the other to &quot;the professionally unmotivated management change at NTV.&quot; 
 No anti-event award was supposed to be handed out, but Shenderovich joked he would take the prize on behalf of the former TVS team &quot;if it had some monetary value.&quot;

TITLE: Young Lawyer Turning Heads in Court
AUTHOR: By Kevin O'Flynn
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Few lawyers successfully win a suit against the Moscow city government on its home turf.
 
The media avidly followed lawyer Igor Trunov as he lost suit after suit in his high-profile battle to win damages for dozens of relatives of those who died in the &quot;Nord-Ost&quot; theater seize, and few expected that anyone else would have much success.
 But then Venera Kamalova, a 23-year-old lawyer just a year out of law school, entered the picture. 
 In a court case that got little media coverage before it began, Kamalova in July won a ruling against the city that will ensure that Tatyana Khaziyeva and her 3-year-old daughter will receive about $60,000 in compensation over the next 15 years. Khaziyeva's husband, Timur Khaziyev, was a musician in the &quot;Nord-Ost&quot; orchestra and died with more than 120 hostages when special forces pumped gas into the Dubrovka theater to end a three-day standoff with Chechen rebels in October.
 The difference in the court cases appears to be the key to Kamalova's victory. Trunov, who had more than 60 clients, demanded tens of millions of dollars for pain and suffering. Kamalova worked with a single client and asked the city to make good on the financial loss of the household's breadwinner.
 Kamalova said in an interview that a friend of a friend introduced her to Khaziyeva. 
 &quot;The idea was born from a real attempt to help this person,&quot; Kamalova said over tea at a restaurant. 
 Seeing Sofia, 3, was heartbreaking, she said. &quot;The grain of interest to help somebody was there, and then an interest as a lawyer as a professional was born.&quot; 
 A native of the small village of Kubinka in the Moscow region, Kamalova graduated from the Moscow State University of Commerce a year ago and had only been in court for cases involving land problems - her specialization. But that did not deter her from taking on Khaziyeva's case. 
 &quot;I started to investigate, and it got more and more interesting, like a present being unwrapped,&quot; Kamalova said. &quot;It is a professional pleasure and a pleasure to help a person. All together.&quot;
 The law firm where she has been since her second year in university allowed her to work flexible hours to take on the case. Kamalova declined to name the law firm or say whether she received any payment for her services.
 Kabalova said she examined the new law on terrorism, on which both she and Trunov based their cases, and told Khaziyeva that Trunov's cases had little hope. As she saw it, the only way to win was to ask for compensation for the loss of the family's breadwinner.
 Documents such as Khaziyev's salary chits were gathered to prove that he was the sole breadwinner.
 Kabalova herself understand full well the challenge she faced winning a suit against the city government. 
 &quot;Lots of lawyers who I asked for advice said, 'What? It's the Moscow government. You won't win,'&quot; she said.
 Although disheartened at first, she returned to examine her law books and decided to trust her first impressions anyway. It was perhaps this reluctance to take on the city that pushed Khaziyeva to ask an inexperienced lawyer for help, Kabalova said.
 &quot;There was not a wide choice. There was Trunov with his millions who didn't really promise anything and a person who simply explained the situation and guaranteed a victory on that argument,&quot; she said.
 &quot;We're now waiting for the end of the situation with Tatyana,&quot; she added. 
 The wait is for the first monthly payment to Khaziyeva and her daughter. And they were right to wait. The Moscow city government appealed to the Moscow City Court last month - even though the amount of time given to appeal had lapsed.
 Since her July victory, Kabalova has received a number of requests from help from other &quot;Nord Ost&quot; relatives. 
 &quot;One father whose daughter was killed came to me. She wasn't the breadwinner, she wasn't a source of money for him. This is a hole [in the law]. People should get something,&quot; Kabalova said.
 &quot;I hope that there won't be a lot more of this kind of work because it is fun and sad at the same time,&quot; she said.

TITLE: Belarussian Jews Watch Diggings in Dismay
AUTHOR: By Yuras Karmanau
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOZYR, Belarus - Belarussian Jews liken what happened here during the Holocaust to the mass suicides in the legendary fortress of Masada nearly 2,000 years ago. For city authorities, that whole story is in doubt, and they're tearing up the cemetery where the victims are believed to be buried. 
 
Yakov Gutman, head of the World Association of Belarussian Jews, said that about 40 Jews in Mozyr, including his grandfather, gathered in a house in 1941 and set it on fire, killing themselves rather than surrender to Nazi forces. 
 &quot;These people repeated the deed of the Jews at Masada,&quot; where hundreds of Jews killed themselves rather than surrender to Roman forces in 74 A.D., Gutman said. 
 The controversy in Mozyr, 370 kilometers south of the capital, Minsk, echoes a dispute in another Belarussian city, Grodno, where bones from a Jewish cemetery were dumped in the dirt used to fill street potholes. 
 The Mozyr victims' remains were taken to a cemetery that was covered over by a sports ground in the 1960s, when Belarus was under Soviet rule. It is now being excavated for a gas pipeline. 
 Meanwhile, at another disused Jewish cemetery, the foundation for an elegant house is being dug. 
 Most city officials refuse to acknowledge the Mozyr mass suicide even happened, saying no documents confirm it. In 2001 the Belarussian Culture Ministry ordered the site placed on a list of protected places, but Mozyr authorities have curtly rejected pleas to halt the digging. 
 &quot;We refuse to acknowledge that this deed ever took place,&quot; said Sergei Kostyan, the federal parliament deputy from Mozyr. 
 However, KGB archives opened after the collapse of the Soviet Union contain reports of the burning. As for the pipeline, &quot;the city authorities consider it advisable to continue construction,&quot; said Leonis Pisanik, a deputy mayor. 
 Kostyan put it more strongly, accusing Jews of sowing &quot;ethnic discord.&quot; 
 &quot;Must we leave the city without gas because of Jews?&quot; he said. &quot;I am not an anti-Semite, but Belarussians suffered no less than the Jews.&quot; 
 Until the Nazis invaded, Mozyr had 7,000 Jews. Today it has 1,000, in a population of 112,000. There were some 1 million Jews in what is now Belarus before the start of World War II, but just 30,000 today; estimates of the number of Jews killed in Belarus under the Nazis range as high as 800,000. 
 About 40 Mozyr Jews have signed a petition calling for stopping the pipeline construction, and Yury Dorn, head of the Judaic Religious Association, said the group is demanding a halt to construction at both cemetery sites. 
 &quot;So far, the situation resembles the sad experience of Grodno,&quot; Dorn said. 
 In Grodno, authorities agreed last month to stop digging on the site of a Jewish cemetery, where the renovation of a soccer stadium disturbed graves and left bones in piles of dirt on the street.
 Dorn acknowledged that construction has stopped, but said the authorities have not fulfilled their undertaking to arrange a decent burial for the remains. 
 If an agreement is reached on the Mozyr cemeteries, it is unclear whether what has been dug up can be recovered. 
 &quot;The remains are collected, put into bags and taken somewhere,&quot; said Vladimir Lis, a construction worker at the site of the cemetery where the mansion is being built.

TITLE: Berezovsky 'Plan' Revealed
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russian secret service agents planned to kill tycoon Boris Berezovsky in Britain, according to a report in The Sunday Times, the website lenta.ru reported.
 
Quoting a source in the British intelligence agency MI5, the Sunday Times wrote that an agent from SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service, had been set to arrive in Britain and kill Berezovsky.
 Berezovsky, who received political asylum in Britain last week despite attempts to extradite him, was to have been poisoned with a James Bond-style device made up of a disguised cigarette lighter and a fountain pen, the paper reported.
 Poison hidden in the lighter would have been injected into Berezovsky via a needle hidden inside the pen.
 But an SVR spokesman, Boris Labusov, described the report as &quot;rubbish,&quot; Interfax reported.
 &quot;We consider it impossible to even comment on these insane allegations,&quot; Labusov said Sunday.

TITLE: Summit Putting New Spin on Energy Deals
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: If last year's buzzword was &quot;dialogue,&quot; this year's was surely &quot;partnership.&quot;
 
It doesn't sound like much of a difference, but unlike the get-to-know-you session in Texas last year, the second annual U.S.-Russia energy summit in St. Petersburg this year has more of an imperial air to it, more of a feeling of urgency.
 &quot;We all recognize a simple truth. Russia will be an important player in the global energy market,&quot; U.S. Commerce Secretary Donald Evans told a packed house of some 500 executives and officials from both countries Monday.
 &quot;You can not help realize what a powerful thing this partnership between these two countries can be,&quot; Evans said.
 Although a few significant deals were announced on the first day of the two-day affair, it was the rumble of major deals in the making that dominated hallway conversations.
 A year ago, oil-rich Iraq was still pumping considerable amounts of crude, America had yet to articulate its strategy to combat its chronic shortage of liquified natural gas, and the British hadn't trumped its global rivals via BP's record $7.7 billion play for half of TNK. And with the Saudis, Germans, Italians, French, Japanese and Chinese increasingly anxious to get a slice of the vast Russian hydrocarbon pie, Washington needs to act fast if it is to secure future energy supplies from its former Cold War foe.
 &quot;You will see more and more [U.S.] companies coming to this country,&quot; Evans said, naming the familiar list of oil majors with a major interest in Russia, such as ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, Conoco Philips and Marathon.
 If anyone should know, Evans should. Like his boss, U.S. President George W. Bush, Evans has spent a considerable part of his life in the oil business. &quot;And if this event had taken place 26 years ago, President Bush and I might have been in this crowd,&quot; he said.
 Leading up to the summit, the oil world was abuzz with reports that either ChevronTexaco or ExxonMobil would agree to pay up to $11 billion for 25 percent of Yukos, Russia's largest oil producer. All three of the companies, however, would neither deny nor confirm the reports, adding to the rumors that something big was in the works.
 &quot;I've said on several occasions that we are constantly holding talks with all international oil companies, Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky told journalists.
 &quot;We'll consider any good offer,&quot; he said, adding that there was no chance that journalists could &quot;milk any more words&quot; out of him on the subject.
 But the very real possibility of a U.S. supermajor rerating the Russian market by paying a huge premium for a so-called blocking stake in a company under siege by prosecutors kept discussions lively.
 The &quot;language and the tone&quot; of the summit are consistent &quot;with the talk of big transactions within a defined period of time,&quot; said Stephen Jennings, CEO and founder of Renaissance Capital, a leading Moscow investment bank.
 &quot;It is very hard at a forum like this for people to get specifics on anything - but the atmosphere here is extremely open and the word partnership keeps getting mentioned by all parties involved,&quot; Jennings said.
 Unlike last year's summit, which was dominated by oil, natural gas played a leading role.
 Evans said the dynamics of the liquefied natural gas market and growing U.S. demand have combined to create &quot;vast opportunities &quot; for the two nations to cooperate in the sector.
 U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham has said that America was counting on Russia's emerging LNG industry to satisfy booming U.S. demand. And on Monday, Gazprom said it planned to strike a deal with a U.S. company by the end of the year for a joint project to build a $10 billion LNG facility to tap the massive Shtokman field, which is estimated to contain 3 trillion cubic meters of natural gas.
 &quot;A consortium between Western companies and Gazprom for the $10 billion LNG project can be set up before the end of the year,&quot; Gazprom deputy chairman Alexander Ryazanov told reporters.
 Ryazanov said Gazprom was in talks with ConocoPhilips and other U.S. companies, but he wouldn't name them. He also said shipping LNG from Russia's Far North would be far cheaper than from the Persian Gulf.
 &quot;The interest of both countries are clearly of a mutually complementing nature,&quot; he said.
 Energy Minister Igor Yusufov said the government is trying to woo U.S. companies into helping it create a special fleet for transporting LNG, as well as the technologies for LNG production itself. Russia up to date has no facilities to produce LNG.
 But even before Russian gas hits U.S. shores, Russia's gas industry is blazing a trail into the world's largest economy, according to Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref.
 Gref said that Stroitransgaz, a Gazprom affiliate, will sign a contract during the summit to build a gas pipeline in America, although he offered no further details.
 Khodorkovsky, who earlier stole the spotlight from Abraham's deputy simply by sneaking into the conference room and taking a seat in the back row, used his time at the podium to lobby for increased pipeline capacity and the construction of a new export terminal in Murmansk that could ship crude directly to America.
 It only takes nine days for crude to be shipped to the U.S. East Coast from Murmansk, but it takes 32 days from the Persion Gulf, he said.
 In another bid to boost exports, No. 2 producer LUKoil announced that it had signed a $130 million loan agreement with the U.S. government's Overseas Private Investment Corp. to help finance a new $225 million oil terminal on the Gulf of Finland that will have an export capacity of 200,000 barrels per day.
 Oil transportation will take center stage at the summit Tuesday.

TITLE: Soyuzpushnina Set for Swift Privatization
AUTHOR: By Andrey Musatov
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: Soyuzpushnina, the organization that runs Russia's only fur auction, will be privatized within the next two months. It looks likely that the company's suppliers will gain a controlling interest. Zenit Bank, long a partner of the auction organizer, will compete with the fur farms.
 
The Russian Federal Property Fund (RFFI) will sell a 58% stake in VEO Soyuzpushnina at a special auction to be held in Moscow Nov. 13, Interfax reported last week. The asking price for the controlling share is 110 million rubles. The price set for the 4.8 million shares originally issued at 1 rubles will be 22.92 rubles each. Applications for participation in the auction will be accepted from Sept. 30 to Oct. 24.
 Soyuzpushnina trading company was founded in 1931. Currently the controlling interest (58 percent) belongs to the state, while the remaining shares are distributed among 67 shareholders all with less than 5 percent of shares in the company. During the Soviet era Soyuzpushnina was the leading auction for trapped and farmed fur with yearly revenues of $150 million. Starting in 1991, sales began to fall, bottoming out at $14.3 million in 2001. The farms that had formerly supplied the company with mink, ermine, fox and other furs sent their pelts to foreign auctions.
 Soyuzpushnina auctions are held twice a year. Earnings from the April 2003 auction amounted to $9 million. The company owns a building in St. Petersburg located at 98 Moskovsky Prospekt.
 Irina Gandilyan, chief of the Soyuzpushnina marketing department says that companies working on the fur market could be interested in buying shares.
 Such a view is shared by Vladimir Chichkov, deputy general director of Plemzavod Biryulinsky, a fur farm located in Tatarstan that supplies Soyuzpushnina with mink, sable, fox and other types of fur.
 According to Chichkov, the Biryulinsky farm would like to participate in the privatization of Soyuzpushnina. &quot;We discussed this question with RFFI and the company's board of directors,&quot; he says, adding that the farm has enough capital to put up in the auction.
 The privatization of Russia's only international fur auction is consistent with world practice. According to Don Ranford, public relations director of Canada's Fur Harvesters Auction, there are no other state-owned fur auctions in the world. &quot;It is quite possible that the fur farms will be most interested in buying shares in Soyuzpushnina,&quot; says Ranford. &quot;By becoming shareholders in Soyuzpushnina they can more effectively boost sales through marketing and by controlling prices on their products. This could increase the company's sales since it will be more profitable for the producers to sell fur at their own auction,&quot; he says.
 Yevgeny Simonov, general director of the Rossiisky Mekh concern, says that fur producers have enough cash to buy shares in Soyuzpushnina. &quot;The advertised price is quite affordable for fur farm owners,&quot; says Simonov. &quot;However, we don't know how high the price could go during the bidding.&quot; Simonov declined to comment on possible intentions to participate in the sale.
 Chichkov, the Biryulinsky farm deputy general director, is afraid that Zenit Bank - a longtime partner of Soyuzpushnina and several of the farms - will compete with his firm. The bank started working with the auction in 1996 when it provided several loans to the company. Later, in 2001, two of the bank's former managers, Mikhail Lebedev, formerly in charge of loan management at the bank, and Anton Leonenko, chief economist of the same department, joined the Soyuzpushnina board of directors. In 2003 the bank is prepared to finance fur farms and wild fur harvesters in St. Petersburg auctions to the tune of $9 million.
 In 2001 an employee of Soyuzpushnina told Vedomosti that the purchase of the company's shares by a financial organization would be a good solution to the auction's declining sales, which have fallen four-fold over the last decade.
 Zenit Bank refused to comment on the auction. Soyuzpushnina also shied from commenting on its relations with the bank.

TITLE: Krinitsa Starts Paying Back Baltika Loan
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Belarussian brewery Krinitsa has returned 5 percent of its $10.7 million debt to St. Petersburg's Baltika brewery, ABN reported Monday.
 
According to the Baltika press service, the loan was extended to the Belarussian brewery in 2001 and was slated for repayment on May 31, 2002.
 Krinitsa only made the first installment after the Russian Federation Chamber of Commerce arbitration court issued five rulings in Baltika's favor.
 In 2001 Baltika invested $10.5 million in upgrading the Krinitsa plant and intended to complete the first stage of reconstruction in April 2002. The dispute caused Baltika to sour on the deal and initiate bankruptcy proceedings for the Belarussian plant.

TITLE: Russia Joins 4-Nation Economic Zone
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: YALTA, Ukraine - Leaders of former Soviet republics endorsed an ambitious plan Friday aimed at recreating the economic union that collapsed with the breakup of the Soviet Union, a move they stressed was a not a bid to turn back the clock but to pump up the region's sagging economic might.
 
The Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose grouping of 12 former Soviet republics, agreed to move toward the eventual creation of a free trade zone stretching from Central Asia to the edge of the European Union.
 Leading the march were Russia and three of its neighbors, who signed a separate four-way agreement to create a common economic space akin to the EU that envisions the free movement of goods, capital and labor as well as common tariffs and customs.
 Earlier attempts at economic unions among former Soviet states have been hindered by gaping differences between scales of economy and levels of development, as well as fears of domination by Russia - a concern that has not died away. In fact, few observers have been able to get access to the union's content.
 &quot;This is a document that is a foundation for solving economic problems... And the most important thing is that it does not threaten the political interests of our countries,&quot; Putin said after a day and a half of talks.
 He also dismissed any suggestion the new body was tantamount to a return to the Soviet Union: &quot;That is complete rubbish... that matter is closed.&quot;
 Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma agreed with Putin and the others - Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko and Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev - that the union was vital to secure economic growth, independently of Europe and beyond.
 &quot;European markets are closed to us.... [Now] we are moving ahead and not standing still,&quot; Kuchma told reporters. &quot;Better an egg today than a hen tomorrow.&quot;
 The four nations set a Dec. 1 deadline to outline the main steps needed to create the common market, which ultimately will require harmonizing legislation.
 Nazarbayev, whom Putin credited with proposing the idea, emphasized that it was &quot;not a closed organization&quot; and that the other eight CIS nations would be encouraged to move toward membership.
 In the meantime, all members of the CIS initialed an economic plan stretching through 2010, which envisions moves toward harmonizing their markets, particularly in the transport and energy sectors.
 But moving ahead with the plans adopted Friday is likely to be fraught with complications. Lukashenko hinted at the problems ahead when he complained about the already slow movement of integration and warned that his country would take the necessary steps to create the common market only after his partners do so.
 For Kuchma, the agreement has sowed political turmoil at home, with several Cabinet members openly defying his decision to move forward with it despite considerable popular opposition.
 On Friday, he supported firing ministers who opposed the common market, but he refused to dismiss them himself.
 Some had voiced concerns that the pact would jeopardize Ukraine's goal of joining the World Trade Organization and integrating into the EU, while others claimed the pact contradicted the country's constitution, legislation and international agreements.
 
 <i>(AP, Reuters, MT) </i>

TITLE: Russia Cracks World Investment Top 10
AUTHOR: By Alex Nicholson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Basking in the glow of the BP-TNK union and buoyed by macroeconomic stability, Russia has for the first time cracked the top 10 list of the world's most attractive countries for foreign direct investment, according to a new poll of chief executives conducted by global management consultancy firm A.T. Kearney. 
 
Russia jumped from 17th to eighth in this year's study, one notch below the United Kingdom. 
 For the first time since 1998, when the Asian Crisis swept in from the East, so-called developing countries dominated the top 10.
 China and the United States held on to the top spots, while Mexico, Poland, India and Brazil jumped to Nos. 3, 4, 6 and 9, respectively.
 &quot;Corporations are deploying multi-country strategies to reduce costs, spread risks and ensure business continuity. At the same time, developing economies are making advances in education and liberalizing their service sectors to attract FDI,&quot; said Paul Laudicina, A.T. Kearney's vice president and managing director of the firm's Global Business Policy Council, which interviewed 1,000 executives for the study.
 Three Group of Eight members ~ France, Italy and Canada ~all dropped out of the top 10, as did Australia.
 And although the United States held on to its runner-up spot, more than a third of respondents in the survey expressed fears that &quot;domestic security and terrorism&quot; concerns are weighing more heavily on sentiment toward the economic giant than the corporate governance scandals that have plagued it in recent months. 
 Like the United States, Russia has its fair share of corporate governance and terrorism risks, but executives apparently feel that the opportunities in Russia far outweigh the potential pitfalls.
 &quot;It is also a reflection on the improvement of attitudes towards bad corporate governance practices [in Russia],&quot; Alfa Bank's Chris Weafer said Thursday. 
 &quot;While nobody can claim that the problem is now past history, the evidence strongly suggests that the worst is now well behind corporate Russia.&quot;
 Despite climbing A.T. Kearney's list of 60 countries, Russia has yet to see its improved image attract any meaningful foreign direct investment. 
 Even optimistic Central Bank figures put FDI at just 1 percent of gross domestic product.
 Most countries in Eastern Europe enjoy between 5 percent and 10 percent.

TITLE: Putin: Yukos Case About Murder
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin said Saturday that he couldn't interfere in the inquiry into Mikhail Khodorkovsky's oil giant Yukos because crimes such as murder have been alleged and are too serious to ignore, Interfax reported.
 
&quot;The case is about Yukos and the possible links of individuals to murders in the course of the merging and expansion of this company,&quot; Putin told U.S. journalists ahead of his trip to Camp David this week. &quot;In such a case, how can I interfere with prosecutors' work?&quot;
 The remarks were the first Putin has made directly about an investigation that began with the June arrest of a senior security official at the company for murder and has since mushroomed to included embezzlement and tax evasion. A key Khodorkovsky partner, Yukos shareholder and Menatep chairman Platon Lebedev, has been in jail since July on charges that he stole a government stake in fertilizer monopoly Apatit in 1994.
 Putin denied the widespread belief that the legal assault was instigated by Kremlin hawks unhappy with Khodorkovsky's growing taste for politics.
 That is &quot;complete rubbish,&quot; he said. &quot;What I'm trying to do is warn both sides not to make the affair political,&quot; Interfax quoted him as saying. He dismissed concerns that the case was an effort to reverse the privatizations of the 1990s, upon which Khodorkovsky and most of Russia's richest men built their fortunes.
 &quot;Privatization is the least of the reasons for [the investigation],&quot; he said.
 He denied the case had raised the fears of the business community, or that it was a prelude for a wider assault of the oligarchs, whom he has vowed &quot;to get rid of as a class.&quot;
 But Putin did accuse the oligarchs of &quot;lacking a sense of social responsibility,&quot; although he said they were starting to change for the better.
 &quot;They have already made enough money for themselves, their children and grandchildren, and they should stop making money [just for the sake of it]. It is time to do something creative, and they already understand that.&quot;

TITLE: Experts Fear Capital Flight Up
AUTHOR: Alex Fak
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Capital has been flying out of the country since July, several economists say, which reverses the much-touted inflows over the second quarter of the year.
 
The Central Bank's gold and foreign currency reserves have not regained their high-water mark for the year, posted the week Platon Lebedev, a major Yukos shareholder, was arrested, despite factors like high oil prices and large trade surpluses that normally boost their volume.
 &quot;Capital flight is quite bad, [though] we do not know how bad yet,&quot; Alexei Moiseyev, chief economist at Renaissance Capital, said in a research note last week, citing preliminary estimates.
 The Central Bank on Thursday announced that its reserves rose slightly this week by $100 million to $62.1 billion, following an absolute decline of $2.7 billion over three weeks.
 Roland Nash, chief strategist at Renaissance, argued that this uptick is negligible, and does not contradict the broader downward trend. 
 &quot;In the first six months of the year, the reserves rose by $17 billion. In the last ten weeks, they've fallen by two and a half billion. Something has changed.&quot;
 Peter Westin, a senior economist at Aton, said his firm is revising downwards its year-end target for reserves.
 Final numbers from the Central Bank clarifying the cause of the drop in reserves won't be available until data for the third quarter balance of payments are released around November, but observers say they know how to spot money leaving the country.
 &quot;It's pure math,&quot; said Anton Struchenevsky, an economist at Troika Dialog. &quot;You've got high trade surplus, moderate foreign debt payments, and [despite] this, a decline in gross international reserves. The reason is net capital outflow.&quot;
 Debt payments peaked in August, with the Central Bank spending $2.1 billion to repay the country's creditors. Struchenevsky notes that the trade surplus amounted to around $9 billion since July, so debt payments alone could not explain the fall in reserves. 
 &quot;If you are running a 12 percent GDP trade surplus and your reserves are falling, by definition, you have money leaving the country,&quot; Nash said.
 Moiseyev said capital flight in the form of exporters not repatriating their revenues was &quot;the major factor&quot; in lower reserves.
 Struchenevsky and Moiseyev both traced the capital flight back to the Yukos affair.
 &quot;If you look when it all began, the main outflow began right after the start of these events,&quot; Struchenevsky said, referring to the July arrest of Lebedev.
 Besides non-repatriated revenues, the illegal trickle of capital out of the country also played a role, he said.
 Not everyone is convinced there's evidence of capital flight.
 Natalya Orlova, Alfa Bank's chief economist, said rising yields on world markets prevented companies from borrowing abroad. That, coupled with the Central Bank's reaction to the rising dollar, accounted for the depletion in reserves, she said.
 The Central Bank intervened to strengthen the ruble in early September. 
 &quot;Russians follow currency movements as closely as Americans follow the stock market,&quot; since bank savings and cash are an important part of people's assets, one analyst said.

TITLE: WTO Delay May Be Good for Russia
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The walkout by a group of disgruntled poor nations that led to the dramatic collapse of global trade talks in Mexico last week raised speculation that the WTO's days may be numbered ~ but it also breathed new life into Russia's decade-long quest to join the global trade body.
 
&quot;There was no tragedy in Cancun,&quot; Russia's top trade negotiator, Deputy Economic Development and Trade Minister Maxim Medvedkov, said Thursday.
 The collapse of the summit makes it virtually impossible for the global trade body to agree on new, more stringent rules by its own 2005 deadline, meaning that Russia has more time to join the body without liberalizing further its own trading rules.
 &quot;It is obvious that there is no alternative to the [World Trade Organization],&quot; Medvedkov told reporters.
 He added that if the government stays on its current timetable for accession, the delay will likely benefit Russia.
 &quot;We now have room for maneuver. We thought the global talks would be completed before 2005, but now the general view is that this round of talks will be extended. So now we have more time to join the WTO [under the current rules] if we will require it.&quot;
 Russia, the biggest economy outside of the WTO, has made great strides aligning its trade policies with the rest of the world, but sticking points remain on energy tariffs and in the agriculture, telecom, banking and insurance sectors. 
 Medvedkov said that Russia has come to the stage in negotiations where &quot;there remains but a narrow field of unresolved problems.&quot;
 &quot;We hope that this year we will complete the most part of negotiations on the access to the market of goods and services and focus next year on the report of the government's working group on WTO entry,&quot; he said.
 If all goes well, he said, negotiations could be wrapped up by the end of next year.
 &quot;Our position remains unchanged, in that entering the WTO should not influence our plans for energy reform.&quot;
 Disagreements also persist on import tariffs on passenger jets, automobiles, textiles, furniture and aluminum. 
 Although only an observer, Medvedkov said he met with delegates from 30 nations in Cancun and made some headway, but he declined to go into detail.
 &quot;So far we do not have consensus with all the participants on these issues.&quot;

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Ford Testing Facility
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Ford Motor Company has completed construction of a new safety testing facility at the Ford Vsevolozhsk plant in the Leningrad Oblast.
 According to the Moscow office of Ford, this facility will be used to test all vehicles produced by the plant. 
 Manufacturing capacity at the Ford Vsevolozhsk plant stands at 25,000 cars a year, which could be increased to 100,000 cars a year if demand increases.
 The plant manufactures three models of Focus passenger car: a station wagon, sedan and a hatchback.
 
 
<b>EU Goods Green Light
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - A green corridor was opened for shipping of goods from countries of northern Europe and the EU Monday at the Torfyanovka border crossing, run by Vyborg Customs. According to the Russian customs press office, the ceremony was attended by the customs chiefs of Russia, Finland and Sweden.
 An agreement on the project was reached at a December 2002 meeting in Goteborg, Sweden. Shipments will be pre-registered electronically, reducing processing time from several hours to a few minutes. The new system will be tested on 15 Finnish and Swedish firms. 
 
 
<b>Minimum Wage Hike
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - As of Oct. 1, the monthly minimum wage, or MROT, will increase from 450 rubles per month ($14.7) to 600 rubles ($19.6) after the State Duma unanimously approved the change Wednesday.
 The previous attempt to increase the MROT failed in the spring session, when the Federation Council refused to approve it due to lack of government funds. Now the government has secured 10.6 billion rubles ($346 million) to help support regions that don't have enough funds to cover the increase. 
 
 
<b>10% Cars Insured 
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - About 10 percent of the country's over 30 million car owners bought car insurance since July 1, when the new law on mandatory car insurance became active.
 A total of 3.5 million policies were sold and 2,500 claims made since then, the head of Russian Union of Automobile Insurers Alexander Koval said Thursday, Interfax reported. Some 300 people have received compensation payments.
 The law may be debated by the State Duma this fall as some of the deputies argue that the base cost of the policy - 1,980 rubles, or $65 - is too high. 
 
 
<b>LNG Hungry Japan
 </b>

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Japan's Kyushu Electric may double imports of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, it had already agreed to purchase from a Shell-led group on the Far Eastern island of Sakhalin, news agencies said. 
 The deal, if finalized, would underline Royal Dutch/Shell's confidence in its $10-billion project to build the world's biggest LNG plant on Russia's remote island by 2006. 
 
 
<b>IMF Revises Forecast
 </b>

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - The IMF on Thursday said it had revised its forecast for Russia's economic growth this year sharply higher but said the country needed to reinvigorate structural reforms and make exchange rates more flexible.
 The IMF, in a semi-annual assessment of the world economy said Russia was likely to post economic growth of 6.0 percent this year, up from an estimate made earlier this year of 4.0 percent. The fund expects the Russian economy to expand 5.0 percent next year.
 The revision reflected "stronger than expected momentum arising from strong real wage growth, favorable liquidity conditions in domestic financial markets, and increased access to international capital markets," the IMF report said.
 The fund noted the pace of disinflation had lagged in Russia, reflecting the authorities' dilemma between controlling inflation and limiting appreciation of the ruble.
 "A more flexible exchange rate policy would allow the inevitable real appreciation to take place while the central bank could appropriately focus on targeting inflation," the IMF advised.
 Setting up the proposed fund for inflows from oil revenues would also help reduce oil price related currency volatility. 



TITLE: Sports? The Economy? United Russia Delivers
AUTHOR: By Irina Petrovskaya
TEXT: The late-night news on Channel One recently led with the Russian national soccer team's emphatic 4-1 victory over Switzerland in a European Championship qualifying game. The report featured highlights of the game, shots of ecstatic fans and of respectable middle-aged men in dark suits jumping for joy and hugging one another. One of the men bore a strong resemblance to Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov, though the real minister has never been known to display his emotions in public before. Brief interviews with the players followed, then an interview with national team coach Georgy Yartsev.
 
The camera panned out to reveal not one but three ministers flanking Yartsev: Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu, State Sports Committee head Vyacheslav Fetisov and, yes, Gryzlov. Yartsev said the support of those present (here he nodded significantly in the direction of the men in dark suits) and of the fans had spurred the team on to victory. &quot;We all got a taste of national success today,&quot; Gryzlov said. &quot;A sporting Russia is a united Russia,&quot; Fetisov proclaimed. &quot;Or the other way around: A united Russia is a sporting Russia.&quot; (From his delivery it was hard to tell if Fetisov meant to capitalize the &quot;u&quot; in United Russia, so to be on the safe side I have opted for the lower case.)
 &quot;Yes, it would be hard to divide us now,&quot; Gryzlov said, working his way back into the conversation. &quot;Success in sports, politics and the economy - that's what we're working for.&quot; End of story.
 The point was obvious: If not for the support of &quot;those present,&quot; the team wouldn't have had a hope. Now that we have identified the key to success, shouldn't the government dispatch one of &quot;those present&quot; to every major sporting event? Would that make Russia the World Cup champion?
 All in all, a blatant example of campaign advertising.
 The national team's victory just happened to coincide with Channel One's airing of the third and final installment of a documentary film called &quot;The Landscape Before the Battle.&quot; The presenter, Alim Yusupov, stared intently through binoculars, surveying the positioning of forces before the State Duma elections: &quot;Left Flank,&quot; &quot;Right Flank&quot; and &quot;The Center.&quot;
 In terms of the election law, which requires the media to provide equal coverage of all candidates, the series was unassailable. The three installments were all of equal length. But journalists like Yusupov know a thing or two about covering election campaigns. And the documentary film genre allows a director to cancel out the words spoken by his subjects with visual images.
 The film's first installment opens in a home for the elderly and handicapped. As soon becomes clear, this is a collective image of the Communist electorate. Sweet old women living out their lives in quiet dignity. Their lives, they say, were hard but full. Work was plentiful and the pay wasn't bad. Under the democrats they lost their life savings overnight. But most residents of the home don't think much of the current crop of Communist leaders, either.
 A skillfully selected series of images sums up the lifestyle of the new &quot;left&quot;: expensive suits, foreign cars, champagne and caviar, and ties to the oligarchs who bankroll the Communist Party.
 Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov is shown in such a close-up that his face doesn't fit in the frame - another means of evoking an emotional response in the viewers. Juxtaposed with the images of pitiful old women, it leads to one thought: &quot;He got fat by exploiting the suffering of the people.&quot;
 Of course, any face, even a taut young one, looks like something out of an anatomy textbook when you get this close to it. A face no longer young, and not exactly perfect to begin with, becomes a spectacle of pock marks, warts and gaping pores that forces the viewer to turn away from the screen in horror.
 Zyuganov's former comrades who were expelled from the party for lack of discipline talk about the degeneration of the party and its leader, about how personal interests now trump those of the party and about Zyuganov's fear of actually running the country. The comments of his loyal comrades, on the other hand, are full of contradictions, proving that the Communists have no clear program, and that there is dissension in the ranks.
 Yusupov predicts that the Communists will remain on Russia's political Olympus for the foreseeable future. Yusupov doesn't say why. The answer comes in the closing words of an elderly woman from the home: &quot;Life is hard because my strength is running low.&quot; The film leads inevitably to the conclusion that the &quot;left&quot; is also running out of gas.
 The installment on the &quot;Right Flank&quot; is driven by the image of horse racing at the hippodrome. A jockey talks about horses. &quot;Every horse is an individual. Those fillies have character.&quot; In the same way, every politician on the &quot;right&quot; is an individual, a difficult character, from Yavlinsky to Nemtsov to Chubais. This has weakened the right as a whole, the host observes. An elderly punter with an intelligent face sums things up: &quot;Nemtsov is a blowhard. Yavlinsky is an eternal candidate. Zyuganov is yesterday's news. Who does that leave? Putin. I like him.&quot;
 The bets are placed, the horses are off. The oligarchs are sitting pretty. You look at the well-groomed faces of Nemtsov and Co., their luxurious apartments and dachas, and you realize that they're cut off from the people. They don't understand the real problems facing the country. And you ask yourself: Who am I supposed to vote for then? Which party puts the interests of the country before its own?
 The answer comes in the third installment: &quot;The Center.&quot; The film begins with images of a once-great country: conquering outer space, bringing vast expanses of virgin soil under the plow.
 This episode is interspersed with footage of a watch and watch factory. The watch is broken, but there are people out there capable of fixing it and restoring the natural flow of time, of making Russians proud of their country again, its past and its present. Yes, such people exist, and we know who they are. And you don't need binoculars to see them; these are not the minor figures featured in the first two installments. The frame is bordered by red, white and blue stripes. The United Russia logo is displayed in one corner. Party leader Boris Gryzlov appears against a Russian flag underlining that this, clearly, is the party to lead Russia.
 There is no dissension in the centrist camp. The party is united in its aim to restore Russia to greatness. Sergei Shoigu sums up United Russia's priorities in the words of a song from the 1958 movie &quot;On the Other Side&quot;: &quot;That our homeland might prosper; there can be no other concerns.&quot; As the tune plays on, the party grows. Ministers, governors, the leaders of other Duma factions, athletes and entertainers receive their party cards.
 Unlike the first two films, the third employs little off-camera narration, and when it does it's pure spin. &quot;The Center&quot; is less film, more 40-minute campaign spot. 
 So that's the lie of the land before the battle begins. And a few minutes later, the battle itself - the Russia-Switzerland match. The third installment never makes clear what &quot;action&quot; United Russia plans to take, but that doesn't matter anymore. Now we understand: These are the men who delivered the 4-1 victory. Such is the power of television campaign advertising.
 But this time they might have gotten a little carried away.
 
 <i>
Irina Petrovskaya writes a column for Izvestia, where this comment first appeared. </i>

TITLE: A Businessman's Moral Right to the Fruits of Labor
AUTHOR: By Edwin A. Locke
TEXT: One year ago, Jack Welch, who as CEO of General Electric created $400 billion in stockholder wealth, faced a storm of public protest over his retirement benefits, which were worth a modest $2.5 million a year. Welch caved in and renounced the benefits. Now Richard Grasso, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, has followed Welch's lead, forgoing $48 million. Evidently neither man believed he had the moral right to the wealth he had earned.
 
Grasso's cave-in followed a public uproar, including the wrath of many in Wall Street and Washington, over the fact that he was awarded $139.5 million in accumulated pay for his 36 years at the exchange, the last eight as chairman. His salary, bonus and retirement payments were reasonably comparable to those of CEOs at other top financial institutions. Calls for him to give back the money and resign abounded - never mind that Grasso had earned every penny of his compensation by displaying exceptional leadership. As CEO of the exchange, he had helped to grow the exchange, upgraded its technology, and led it through a recovery from the 9/11 attack. 
 What reasons were given as to why Grasso should surrender his payout? Some complained that his compensation was above the median (or 50th percentile) for his peer group of CEOs. But this is a rationalization. Half of all CEOs earn more than the median; so why not Grasso, if his work merits it? To those who protested Grasso's income, however, merit and ability are irrelevant. 
 Adding to the clamor against Grasso was the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, William Donaldson. He complained that because of Grasso's compensation package, the SEC was finding it more difficult to persuade private companies to lower the pay levels of CEOs. But as long as there is no fraud involved, CEO pay should be none of the government's concern. The government has no right to interfere in the running of privately owned businesses. But the SEC evidently is on a moral crusade to level down the salaries of all CEOs.
 What can explain the desire to induce guilt in successful CEOs and to reduce their pay? It is the egalitarian remnants of Marxism. Though Communism has fallen, the premises of Marxism persist. According to Marxism, real wealth is earned by brute labor and so profits earned by managers and CEOs are assumed to be stolen rather than earned. Marxism evades the true source of wealth: human intelligence. 
 Morally, the Marxist view holds that no individual has a right to his own personal gain; all must work self-sacrificially for the sake of the group, the state, society: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. This inverted morality punishes success and rewards indolence. Regardless of people's differences in ability and effort, on this view, the more able must sacrifice themselves - they must be forced to give up their &quot;surplus&quot; earnings - for the sake of the less able and productive. 
 
 <i>
Edwin A. Locke, a Professor Emeritus of management at the University of Maryland at College Park, is a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute, Irvine, California. </i>

TITLE: Presidential Tug-of-War
AUTHOR: By Dmitry Trenin
TEXT: President Vladimir Putin will meet with his U.S. counterpart, George W. Bush, at Camp David this Friday and Saturday, two years after a shift in Russian foreign policy that led to increased cooperation between the two countries. The fall of 2001 was a honeymoon of sorts in U.S.-Russian relations, and a year later it seemed that Russia was set to become one of the United States' closest allies.
 
As the second anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks rolled around, however, the two countries were struggling to overcome their differences over the U.S.-led military intervention in Iraq. This crisis in bilateral relations revealed the Kremlin's lack of a long-term policy on relations with the U.S., as well as the Bush administration's unwillingness to build a meaningful partnership with Russia.
 At their 45-minute mini-summit in St. Petersburg in early June, Putin and Bush agreed to improve the channels for communication on key political issues. Now the challenge will be to ensure that capable, far-sighted people use those channels to exchange fresh, productive ideas.
 The U.S.-Russian agenda today is dominated by the security threats of the 21st century. The war on terrorism has a way of bringing countries together without uniting them.
 The members of the anti-terror coalition all battle their own specific enemies, and pass this off as their contribution to the common cause. The U.S. goes after al-Qaida, Russia battles separatist fighters in Chechnya, China deals with Uighur insurgents and India with separatists in Kashmir.
 International cooperation rarely extends beyond high-minded declarations of intent. To achieve closer cooperation, especially between Russia and the U.S., two main obstacles must be overcome, the first being mutual suspicion; the second being reforms to improve the security services' ability to engage in multilateral operations.
 It's not enough for the president to say, &quot;Let's be friends.&quot; A new approach to &quot;security management&quot; is needed at both the national and the global level. The existing bilateral commission on cooperation in the war on terrorism should be converted into a permanent joint committee staffed by U.S. and Russian security specialists. A special high-level working group could be charged with developing theoretical and practical strategies for cooperation.
 The spread of weapons of mass destruction, especially when linked to terrorist groups, represents not only the most horrifying but also the most pressing threat to international security. The nuclear programs in North Korea and Iran are matters of global, not regional, significance. The U.S. and other leading countries, including Russia, must come up with a common strategy for defusing these situations and subjecting them to strict international control.
 The time has come to learn the lessons of North Korea and Iran, and to develop a joint U.S.-Russian strategy for stopping the spread of WMD.
 Terrorist activities and the spread of WMD are facilitated by instability in a number of regions. It has been argued that the continuing chaos in Iraq is beneficial for Russia because it serves to keep the price of oil high. But under current conditions, Moscow would hardly benefit from a premature U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and the further radicalization of the Middle East as a whole.
 Russian interests are not undermined by the United Nations' legitimization of the U.S.' leading role in postwar Iraq. As for Russia's role, sending a peacekeeping force would be a symbolic but unjustified step. Russia would do better to concentrate on restoring Iraq's transportation, energy and water supply infrastructure. Stabilization of the situation inside Iraq will gradually make it possible for Russian companies to get back to business in the region.
 The situation in Afghanistan, where NATO has taken charge of peacekeeping duties, bears some similarities to the situation in Iraq. The issues of security and state-building have come to the fore. The production and proliferation of narcotics are serious security concerns. Russia has a strong interest in stabilizing the situation, and could make a major contribution to international efforts there.
 Moscow and Washington must, at a minimum, agree on rules for co-existence in the post-Soviet south. These should include constant contact between military and diplomatic representatives, exchange of liaison officers and information, an agreement on measures for averting accidental incidents, and so on. A more ambitious, and more important, project would involve the coordination of U.S. and Russian efforts to stabilize the situation in Central Asia, and the coordination of plans for dealing with increased tension in any given country in the region.
 Coordination could include joint counter-terrorist training exercises, with the involvement of local armed forces. It could also extend to the creation of a joint military command, financed and manned for a specific period.
 The Caucasus presents serious security concerns in the short term. The impending leadership change in Azerbaijan could result in destabilization there. In Georgia, chaos could ensue following the departure of Eduard Shevardnadze from political life. Moscow and Washington must work out a plan under which both countries can effectively pursue their national interests in the South Caucasus. Successful U.S.-Russian cooperation in Armenia shows that this goal is achievable.
 It would make sense to pursue U.S.-Russian cooperation in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caucasus as part of a single working group. Such groups could also help to increase U.S.-Russian cooperation in developing the Russian Far East and Siberia. The more powerful partners Russia has east of the Urals, the better it will be equipped to develop and defend this enormous territory.
 The first task is to create favorable conditions for attracting U.S. investment and technology. Strictly speaking, this is a matter of economic cooperation, but it would help to meet one of the most serious threats to Russian national security.
 A strong partnership between Russia and the U.S. could even help provide the foundation for a new system of international relations. Institutional reform of the UN will not contribute to an increased ability to manage world affairs. This goal could be achieved, however, by means of strong bilateral relations between the U.S. and the other powers.
 With such a system in place, management of global affairs could be achieved during the next 20 to 25 years using the formula &quot;U.S. + UN.&quot; As the relative strength of individual powers changes, relations within this flexible formula would alter accordingly. This formula could work. The main difference between the international system of the 21st century and its 20th-century predecessor is that the main threats to the community of nations issue from the periphery of this community and beyond its borders.
 This is the main lesson of Sept. 11, 2001. And it represents our best chance for peace.
 
 <i>Dmitry Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times. </i>

TITLE: Vote Result a Clear Message To Kremlin
TEXT: Sunday's gubernatorial election in the Northern Capital clearly demonstrated that St. Petersburgers will not blindly vote for whichever candidate has President Vladimir Putin's blessing (although there were no equine candidates in the race to test a theory advanced by one of the candidates in the run-up to the poll).
 
And having failed to win outright in the first round despite massive use - or abuse - of &quot;administrative resources,&quot; Valentina Matviyenko, presidential envoy to the Northwest Federal District, is far from assured of a second-round victory. This is a major setback not only for Matviyenko, but also for the Kremlin and personally for Putin who went out of his way to endorse her candidacy with the explicit purpose of bolstering her chances.
 The low turnout on Sunday (less than a third of the electorate) may have played into Matviyenko's hands in some respects, but it means that while Matviyenko got 49 percent of the vote, a paltry 14 percent of eligible voters supported her - hardly a glowing endorsement. Furthermore, it does not augur particularly well for the second round. If the turnout stays under 30 percent, the eventual winner's legitimacy and mandate to govern the city will likely be called into question.
 One thing is clear: The vast majority of St. Petersburgers voted with their feet by preferring to stay at home or tend their dacha plots.
 The irony is that the Kremlin's heavy-handedness appears to be have been a major contributing factor. Polling organization Megapolis says that before Putin publicly endorsed Matviyenko's candidacy on national television, she had above 50 percent support.
 Now Matviyenko faces the possibility of a second-round defeat and even humiliation at the hands of &quot;against all candidates.&quot;
 Putin, whose promotion of Matviyenko is partly seen as getting even with former governor Vladimir Yakovlev, stands to suffer considerable loss of face. In the early 1990s, Putin and Yakovlev both served as deputy mayors of the city, before Yakovlev decided to run against Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, a move that Putin considered a betrayal.
 Putin will undoubtedly remember that Sobchak had an easy lead in the first round, but then watched Yakovlev steal the election, as Sobchak rested on his laurels. And if the president, who on paper enjoys enormous popularity, cannot prevail in his hometown, one wonders just how much he can influence elections in the rest of the country.
 Amid all the foul play and the bias in favor of the Kremlin's candidate, there is one small cause for optimism: At least, there was no unseemly ballot-stuffing late in the day in order to nudge Matviyenko over the 50 percent mark (something the Kremlin is quite capable of sanctioning). Maybe they are just keeping their powder dry for the second round.

TITLE: Looking Back At Election Frauds Past
TEXT: I had to chuckle when told that Gennady Zyuganov had just been sent a copy of The Moscow Times' three-year-old investigation into fraud and falsification in Vladimir Putin's election.
 
Judging from my e-mail box, that September 2000 report is getting attention. Some are dusting it off with thoughts of preventing fraud in 2004, others in search of tips on observing it in action. I have no idea why Zyuganov would want it, though, since we described in the report how unhelpful his Communist Party was in assembling it.
 There were about 95,000 voting precincts in the 2000 presidential election, and at each, ballots were counted locally and recorded in a &quot;protocol.&quot; So the most basic way to audit the process was to go to the local level and obtain copies of protocols - and then see if they were reported accurately higher up the chain.
 Only the Communists could come close to fielding observers in 95,000 precincts, so we asked them in particular to share. They obliged with a tiny handful of documents from Dagestan (we had some of the same documents, so we knew they weren't forgeries). But when we asked to see more, we were told Zyuganov kept the rest with him &quot;in a folder,&quot; and so we were out of luck. Yet even with less than one-fifth of Dagestan's protocols in hand, we were still able to identify definitively 87,000 votes subtracted from other candidates and given to Putin (or 3.9 percent of his 2.2 million-vote victory margin).
 We reasoned the other four-fifths of Dagestan was probably little better- because this agreed with our anecdotal reporting on the ground, and also because precincts that had kicked out observers and classified the protocols seemed, if anything, to have more to hide. So we extrapolated that in Dagestan alone, it was already possible to see almost a quarter of Putin's victory margin as highly questionable.
 Dagestan stood out, moreover, mostly for hosting the most oafish fraud: lying in the capital about what was already published in the provinces. We detailed other evidence of fraud and falsification, some of which at least tried to be more subtle, in Chechnya, Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, Saratov, Kabardino-Balkaria, Kursk, Mordovia, Kaliningrad and Nizhny Novgorod - regions that represented millions of votes. All told, it was hard to imagine how fraud could not have been decisive, given Putin's 2.2 million-vote victory. But enough math. Anyone who wants more can go to www.themoscowtimes.com/ election_fraud.html
 Our report was not just numbers. We interviewed voters who had had pens snatched from their hands and their ballots checked for them. We cited open letters from entire villages protesting how their votes had been hijacked. We quoted citizens who recounted seeing election registration rolls that described their apartment buildings as having fictional extra floors - with fictional extra apartments, no doubt filled with Putin supporters.
 We reported on voters who were told that they would lose their jobs, or their apartments, or their social welfare payments, unless they voted correctly.
 Since its publication, the report has often been dismissed. Some say that everyone already knew elections were rigged; others worry about the numbers. Neither approach pays much attention to the voices of angry, disillusioned, cheated citizens.
 
 <i>Matt Bivens, a former editor of The St. Petersburg Times, is a fellow of The Nation Institute [www.thenation.com]. </i>

TITLE: Chris Floyd's Global Eye
TEXT: <b>Vanishing Act
 </b>
It's a shell game, with money, companies and corporate brands switching in a blur of buy-outs and bogus fronts. It's a sinkhole, where mobbed-up operators, paid-off public servants, crazed Christian fascists, CIA shadow-jobbers, war-pimping arms dealers - and presidential family members - lie down together in the slime. It's a hacker's dream, with pork-funded, half-finished, secretly-programmed computer systems installed without basic security standards by politically-partisan private firms, and protected by law from public scrutiny.
 
It's how the United States, the &quot;world's greatest democracy,&quot; casts its votes. And it's why George W. Bush will almost certainly be the next president of the United States - no matter what the ***people*** of the United States might want.
 The American vote-count is controlled by three major corporate players - Diebold, ES&amp;S, and Sequoia - with a fourth, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), coming on strong. These companies - all of them hardwired into the Bushist Party power grid - have been given billions of dollars by the Bush Regime to complete a sweeping computerization of voting machines nationwide by the 2004 election. These glitch-riddled systems - many using &quot;touch-screen&quot; technology that leaves no paper trail at all - are almost laughably open to manipulation, according to corporate whistleblowers and computer scientists at Stanford, John Hopkins and other universities.
 The technology had a trial run in the 2002 mid-term elections. In Georgia, serviced by new Diebold systems, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both unseated in what the media called &quot;amazing&quot; upsets, with results showing vote swings of up to 16 percent from the last pre-ballot polls. In computerized Minnesota, former vice president Walter Mondale - a replacement for popular incumbent Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash days before the vote - was also defeated in a large last-second vote swing. Convenient &quot;glitches&quot; in Florida saw an untold number of votes intended for the Democratic candidate registering instead for Governor Jeb &quot;L'il Brother&quot; Bush. A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly &quot;glitched&quot; local election went to court to have the computers examined - but the case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the innards of America's voting machines are the &quot;trade secrets&quot; of the private companies who make them.
 Who's behind these private companies? It's hard to tell: the corporate lines - even the bloodlines - of these &quot;competitors&quot; are so intricately mixed. For example, at Diebold - whose corporate chief, Wally O'Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, has publicly committed himself to &quot;delivering&quot; his home state's votes to Bush next year - the election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob's brother, Todd, is a top executive at &quot;rival&quot; ES&amp;S. The brothers were originally staked in the vote-count business by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council for National Policy, a right-wing &quot;steering group&quot; stacked with Bushist faithful.
 Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist &quot;Christian Reconstructionist&quot; movement, which openly advocates a theocratic takeover of American democracy, placing the entire society under the &quot;dominion&quot; of &quot;Christ the King.&quot; This &quot;dominion&quot; includes the death penalty for homosexuals, exclusion of citizenship for non-Christians, stoning of sinners and - we kid you not - slavery, &quot;one of the most beneficent of Biblical laws.&quot;
 Ahmanson also has major holdings in ES&amp;S, whose former CEO is Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. When Hagel ran for office, his own company counted the votes; needless to say, his initial victory was reported as &quot;an amazing upset.&quot; Hagel still has a million-dollar stake in the parent company of ES&amp;S. In Florida, Jeb Bush's first choice for a running mate in his 1998 gubernatorial race was ES&amp;S lobbyist Sandra Mortham, who made a mint installing the machines that counted Jeb's votes.
 Sequoia also has a colorful history, most recently in Louisiana, where it was the center of a massive corruption case that sent top state officials to jail for bribery, most of it funneled through Mob-connected front firms. Sequoia executives were also indicted, but escaped trial after giving immunized testimony against state officials. The UK-owned company's corporate parent is private equity firm Madison Dearborn - a partner of the Carlyle Group, where George Bush I makes millions trolling the world for war pork, privatizations and sweetheart deals with government insiders.
 Meanwhile, the shadowy defense contractor SAIC has jumped into the vote-counting game, both directly and through spin-offs by its top brass, including Admiral Bill Owens - former military aide to Dick Cheney and Carlyle honcho Frank Carlucci - and ex-CIA chief Robert Gates. SAIC's history of fraud charges and security lapses in its electronic systems hasn't prevented it from becoming one of the largest contractors for the Pentagon and the CIA - and will doubtless pose little obstacle to its entrance into election engineering.
 The mad rush to install unverifiable computer voting is driven by the Help America Vote Act, signed by Bush last year. The chief lobbying group pushing for HAVA was a consortium of arms dealers - those disinterested corporate citizens - including Northop-Grumman and Lockheed-Martin. The bill also mandates that all states adopt the computerized &quot;ineligible voter purge&quot; system which Jeb used to eliminate 91,000 ***eligible*** black voters from the Florida rolls in 2000. The Republican-run private company that accomplished this electoral miracle, ChoicePoint, is bagging the lion's share of the new Bush-ordered purge contracts.
 The unelected Bush Regime now controls the government, the military, the judiciary - and the machinery of democracy itself. Absent some unlikely great awakening by the co-opted dullards of the corporate media, next November the last shreds of a genuine American republic will disappear - at the push of a button.
 
 <i>
For annotational references, see the Opionion section at www.sptimesrussia.com </i>

TITLE: Al-Qaida Planned for 10 Planes
AUTHOR: By John Solomon
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, has told American interrogators that he first discussed the plot with Osama bin Laden in 1996 and that the original plan called for hijacking five commercial jets on each U.S. coast before it was modified several times, according to interrogation reports reviewed by The Associated Press.
 
Mohammed also divulged that, in its final stages, the hijacking plan called for as many as 22 terrorists and four planes in a first wave, followed by a second wave of suicide hijackings that were to be aided possibly by al-Qaida allies in southeast Asia, according to the reports.
 Over time, bin Laden scrapped various parts of the Sept. 11 plan, including attacks on both coasts and hijacking or bombing some planes in East Asia, Mohammed is quoted as saying in reports that shed new light on the origins and evolution of the plot of Sept. 11, 2001.
 Addressing one of the questions raised by congressional investigators in their Sept. 11 review, Mohammed said he never heard of a Saudi man named Omar al-Bayoumi who provided some rent money and assistance to two hijackers when they arrived in California.
 Congressional investigators have suggested Bayoumi could have aided the hijackers or been a Saudi intelligence agent, charges the Saudi government vehemently deny. The FBI has also cast doubt on the congressional theory after extensive investigation and several interviews with al-Bayoumi.
 In fact, Mohammed claims he did not arrange for anyone on U.S. soil to assist hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi when they arrived in California. Mohammed said there &quot;were no al-Qaida operatives or facilitators in the United States to help al-Mihdhar or al-Hazmi settle in the United States,&quot; one of the reports state.
 Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were on the plane that was flown into the Pentagon.
 Mohammed portrays those two hijackers as central to the plot, and even more important than Mohammed Atta, initially identified by Americans as the likely hijacking ringleader. Mohammed said he communicated with al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar while they were in the United States by using Internet chat software, the reports states.
 U.S. authorities continue to investigate the many statements that Mohammed has made in interrogations, seeking to eliminate deliberate misinformation. But they have been able to corroborate with other captives and evidence much of his account of the Sept. 11 planning.
 Mohammed told his interrogators the hijacking teams were originally made up of members from different countries where al-Qaida had recruited, but that in the final stages bin Laden chose instead to use a large group of young Saudi men to populate the hijacking teams.
 As the plot came closer to fruition, Mohammed learned &quot;there was a large group of Saudi operatives that would be available to participate as the muscle in the plot to hijack planes in the United States,&quot; one report says Mohammed told his captors.
 Saudi Arabia was bin Laden's home, though it revoked his citizenship in the 1990s, and he reviled its alliance with the United States during the Gulf War and beyond. Saudis have suggested for months that bin Laden has been trying to drive a wedge between the United States and their kingdom, hoping to fracture the alliance.
 U.S. intelligence has suggested that Saudis were chosen, instead, because there were large numbers willing to follow bin Laden and they could more easily get into the United States because of the countries' friendly relations.
 Mohammed was captured in a March 1 raid by Pakistani forces and CIA operatives in Rawalpindi. He is being interrogated by the CIA at an undisclosed location.
 He told interrogators about other terror plots that were in various stages of planning or had been temporarily disrupted when he was captured, including one planned for Singapore.
 The sources who allowed AP to review the reports insisted that specific details not be divulged about those operations because U.S. intelligence continues to investigate some of the methods and search for some of the operatives.
 The interrogation reports make dramatically clear that Mohammed and al-Qaida were still looking to strike U.S., Western and Israeli targets this year.

TITLE: Californian Candidates Pitch Policies
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SAN FRANCISCO - With a federal judicial panel likely to reinstate the Oct. 7 date for the California recall election, Governor Gray Davis and the candidates vying to succeed him are preparing for a final two-week campaign push.
 
The best known Republican in the race, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was preparing to step into the spotlight for his first and - chances are, only - debate of the campaign Wednesday. On Sunday, Schwarzenegger outlined several proposals to cut air pollution in California by 50 percent by 2011.
 His appearance came a day before an 11-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was scheduled to hear arguments on whether to uphold a ruling by a smaller panel last week that the election must be postponed until six counties still using punch card ballots can upgrade to more reliable voting machines.
 The judges chosen for the new panel are said to be more conservative than the three who made the original ruling. Observers say the new panel will likely reverse the earlier ruling.
 Schwarzenegger promised Sunday to create a network of hydrogen fueling stations in order to promote increased use of hydrogen powered vehicles.

TITLE: Koizumi Taps New Ministers
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TOKYO - Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi named a new Cabinet on Monday, replacing several key members - including his ailing finance minister - in a bid to consolidate his power and breathe new life into efforts to turn around Japan's sickly economy.
 
The reshuffle comes two days after Japan's popular leader won re-election to a three-year term as head of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Emboldened by the new mandate, Koizumi has vowed to move ahead with his efforts to cut government spending and carry out broad structural reforms.
 As expected, Koizumi replaced ailing Finance Minister Masajuro Shiokawa, who is 81. Appointed to the post was Sadakazu Tanigaki, who previously held the public security portfolio.
 In a surpise move, however, Koizumi retained adviser Heizo Takenaka, a former university professor, as both minister for economic policy and minister of financial services.
 Though he won re-election by a wide margin, Koizumi was under intense pressure to replace members of his current Cabinet who were selected not from within the ruling party but from the private sector.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Africa AIDS Warning
 </b>

NAIROBI (Reuters) - The United Nations AIDS group warned on Sunday of a 3 billion shortfall in funding to fight the disease in sub-Saharan Africa where almost 30 million people are living with HIV/AIDS.
 "Even with recent increases in AIDS spending, the mismatch between need and funding continues to be one of the biggest obstacles in the struggle to control the epidemic," UNAIDS said.
 Without the cash, countries in sub-Saharan Africa - where 10 million young people (aged 15-24) and almost 3 million children under 15 live with HIV - will be unable to effectively implement or expand prevention and treatment programs, it said.
 
 
<b>Pole Worker Rescued
 </b>

DENVER (AP) - An airplane carrying an ailing worker from the U.S. research station in the South Pole landed in Chile on Sunday on an emergency rescue flight.
 The ill employee was to be flown to the United States from Chile on a charter. The employee, whose name is being withheld at his request, can walk but may need surgery. 
 Raytheon, the Denver-based company manages the station for the National Science Foundation, confirmed reports he has a bladder infection.
 
 
<b>IMF Backs Argentina 
 </b>

DUBAI (Reuters) - The IMF approved an economic plan for Argentina on Saturday aimed at bolstering investor confidence and growth in a country deeply scarred by a botched peso devaluation and a record sovereign debt default last year.
 The board approved a $12.55 billion line of credit for Argentina under a three-year program and extends repayment of $2.43 billion owed to the fund.
 IMF sources said four executive board members out of 24, mainly from Europe, abstained from voting to show reservations about the deal, which some critics say is too soft on Argentina.
 
 
<b>Clinton Visits Bosnia 
 </b>

SREBRENICA, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) - Former U.S. President Bill Clinton called for ethnic and religious tolerance on Saturday as he joined survivors of Europe's worst massacre since World War II in opening a memorial center for the victims.
 Srebrenica, 80 kilometers northeast of Sarajevo, had been declared a "safe zone" by the United Nations when it was overrun by Bosnian Serb soldiers in July 1995. The soldiers executed up to 8,000 Muslims, most of them men and boys.
 The slaughter has become a symbol for the brutality of Bosnia's 1992-1995 war, which pitted the country's Muslims, Orthodox Christian Serbs and Catholic Croats against each other. 
 
 
<b>New SARS Alert in HK
 </b>

HONG KONG (AFP) - A Hong Kong hospital has raised a new SARS alert after four patients were observed to have fever, a key symptom of the potentially deadly illness, a hospital spokeswoman said.
 Further investigations conducted on the four women, aged 24 to 73, showed only one remained feverish, the spokeswoman said.
 Initial investigations had shown that the fevers of the four women was caused by influenza and not the potentially-fatal SARS virus, but more tests and observations were being performed. 
 <b>Car Bomb Kills 2
 </b>

BAGHDAD (AP) - A car bomb exploded Monday morning while the vehicle was being examined at a checkpoint as it tried to enter the U.N. compound, killing at least two people and injuring eight others.
 The blast occurred about 100 meters from the UN compound at the Canal Hotel, scene of a devastating car bombing last month that killed 23 people, including the UN's top envoy in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello.
 "The bomber drove up and was engaged by an Iraqi security individual just before the checkpoint," said a U.S. 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment spokesman, Captain Sean Kirley. That policeman was killed.
 
 
<b>NYSE Names Reed 
 </b>

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The New York Stock Exchange reached far beyond Wall Street to announce on Sunday that former Citigroup Chairman John Reed will be interim successor to Dick Grasso as chairman and chief executive.
 Reed, who retired from the summit of high finance over three years ago, will return from an overseas vacation next week and, for only the second time in his career, enter the NYSE's landmark building in lower Manhattan.
 The NYSE's board on Sunday named Reed, the former chairman and co-chief executive at Citigroup Inc., interim head of the exchange after the resignation last week of Dick Grasso.
 
 
<b>Peres' 80th Celebrated
 </b>

TEL AVIV (AP) - A parade of global figures - from Bill Clinton and Mikhail Gorbachev to actress Kathleen Turner - filed into Tel Aviv Sunday to celebrate the 80th birthday of former prime minister Shimon Peres, the Nobel laureate, visionary of peace and oft-failed political candidate.
 The extraordinary guest list reflected global appreciation for Peres' efforts toward a "New Middle East" - the title of his 1993 book dismissed by many here as utopian - and a longing for the days before the Israeli-Palestinian peace process collapsed.
 Peres, whose birthday was last month, says he only went with the party idea to bring some cheer to the region. 
 
 
<b>Chirac: No French Veto
 </b>

NEW YORK (AFP) - French President Jacques Chirac says he has no intention to veto a new UN Security Council resolution proposed by the United States on Iraq.
 "I have no intention of opposing the resolution, that is, saying 'No,' vetoing it," he told The New York Times in an interview that was to be published Monday. 
 But he said France will vote for the resolution only if it includes a deadline and timetable for a transfer of sovereignty in Iraq to representatives of its people, as well as a "key role" for the United Nations. If these provision were not included, France will abstain.
 
 
<b>Bavaria Spurns SPD
 </b>

MUNICH, Germany (AFP) - Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrat party has been heavily beaten at the polls in the southern German state of Bavaria - according to provisional results - battered by discontent over his failure to spur the economy and curb unemployment.
 The electoral commission announced that Bavaria's ruling conservative Christian Social Union (CSU) had won a landslide victory in the Alpine state with 60.7 percent of Sunday's vote. 


TITLE: Isabel Leaves a Trail of Damage in Wake
AUTHOR: By Julie Halenar
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BALTIMORE - The flooding caused by Hurricane Isabel ebbed away from city streets and suburban docks across the Mid-Atlantic, but millions of people remained without power and faced the drudgery of cleaning out basements and yards during the weekend.
 
Despite its rapid weakening, the storm caused at least 24 deaths and potentially billions of dollars in damage. Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown warned that Isabel's flooding threat may be a delayed reaction.
 &quot;Because Isabel moved through so quickly, we're going to see some blue skies and people will think it's all over with. But indeed we still have a very good chance of some flash flooding. We will still have some rivers that continue to creep up on their banks and overspill,&quot; Brown said.
 Isabel raced into Canada on Friday, dumping less rain and packing less of a punch than expected. By the time it reached the frontier, it had shriveled from a 160-kilometer-per-hour hurricane into a 50-kilometer tropical depression.
 Gary and Kate Hathaway, who live off a cove on Middle River in Baltimore County, said they would probably need to re-landscape their backyard - ruined by flooding that covered their back porch - and possibly make foundation repairs to their home.
 &quot;When it blew in, it landed in our backyard,&quot; Kate Hathaway said. &quot;Our house was like a moat.&quot;
 She said she could hear their pier, as well as pieces from other piers, hitting their home during Thursday's storm.
 President George Bush declared federal disasters in Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina. Delaware officials say they probably would make a disaster request this week.
 The North Carolina National Guard had to abort plans Saturday to airlift Salvation Army mobile kitchens to Buxton on Hatteras Island, which was cut off from the mainland when the ocean washed away part of the island's highway, and to Ocracoke Island, said Salvation Army spokesman John Edwards. The kitchens were too heavy for the helicopters supplied for the mission and will have to be sent on barges, he said.
 In all, about 6 million people from North Carolina to New York lost power because of Isabel - 1.6 million of them in southeastern and central Virginia, where uprooted trees and downed power lines closed hundreds of highways and secondary roads. Debris was scattered everywhere. Long lines formed at gasoline stations that managed to stay open.
 By late Friday, nearly 1.3 million Virginians were still without electricity. A quarter-million people remained without power in North Carolina, and outages were widespread in other Mid-Atlantic states.
 Along North Carolina's Outer Banks, where Isabel first made land Thursday, Friday's brilliant sunshine brought the first real glimpse of the destruction. In the town of Kitty Hawk alone, at least three fishing piers crumbled into the surf and about 25 oceanfront homes were destroyed or ripped from their foundations.
 On the only highway through the 180-kilometer barrier islands, long stretches of pavement were simply erased, or left with holes. Near the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, Isabel's storm surge tore a new inlet that stranded 300 residents and floated at least one house into the Pamlico Sound. Authorities were still working to account for all of the 4,000 coastal residents who refused to evacuate.
 At a Salisbury, Maryland, hospital, baby Isabel Avila Alcantar slept peacefully, named for the hurricane that roared out of the Atlantic.
 Her mother, Graciela Avila Alcantar, headed to the hospital while the hurricane slammed into the coast of North Carolina.
 &quot;It was a very special day she was born on, so we said, 'Yes, why not,'&quot; Alcantar, a 33-year-old native of Mexico, said as her nurse translated for her. &quot;Something very beautiful happened on a day when there was so much fear.&quot;

TITLE: Cardinals, Green Bay Grab Wins
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK - The Arizona Cardinals beat the heat and wilting Green Bay for their first victory of the season. The Cleveland Browns avoided an 0-3 start, too, surprising San Francisco with a last-minute comeback. 
 
The Cardinals upset the Packers 20-13 on Sunday at aptly named Sun Devil Stadium, where it was 38.9 degrees Celsius at kickoff and 41.1 at the beginning of the fourth quarter. 
 &quot;The heat did take it's toll, and we were able to capitalize on it,&quot; Cardinals newcomer Emmitt Smith said. 
 The 106 degrees at nearby Sky Harbor Airport was a record for the date, surpassing the 105 recorded in 1949 and 1984. 
 &quot;The elements are the elements,&quot; Packers coach Mike Sherman said. &quot;People come up to Green Bay, and I don't say we beat them because it's cold out. I say we beat them because we won the game. They beat us because they played better than we did - bottom line.&quot; 
 Brett Favre, 35-1 when it's 34 degrees or colder, is 12-18 in games when the kickoff temperature is above 70. 
 Favre, 23-for-33 for 226 yards and a touchdown, drove the Packers (1-2) to the Arizona 7 in the final seconds. But on third-and-goal, his pass was picked off by Dexter Jackson. 
 &quot;People got their money's worth today,&quot; said Arizona quarterback Jeff Blake, who completed 20 of 31 passes for 273 yards. &quot;I heard somebody in the stands say last week that we were robbing them. Well, we're even now.&quot; 
 Blake threw a 1-yard pass to James Hodgins for the winning touchdown with 3:59 to play. 
 In San Francisco, Andre Davis caught an 11-yard touchdown pass from Kelly Holcomb with 29 seconds left as Cleveland rallied for two late scores to beat the 49ers 13-12. 
 Holcomb led the Browns (1-2) on two stirring drives for the victory. Owen Pochman made four field goals for the 49ers (1-2). 
 &quot;That's Cleveland Browns football: Wait until the last minute and 35 seconds of the game,&quot; coach Butch Davis said. 
 Humiliated by Jamal Lewis' NFL-record 295 yards rushing last week, Cleveland held the tailback tandem of Garrison Hearst and Kevan Barlow to 32 yards combined. 
 While Arizona and Cleveland found ways to win, there are still six winless teams: the New York Jets, Jacksonville, Cincinnati, San Diego, Philadelphia and Chicago.
 
 <strong>
N.Y. Giants 24, Washington 21 (OT).</strong> IN Landover, Maryland, Matt Bryant kicked a 29-yard field goal 4:15 into the extra period for New York. 
 
The Giants (2-1) led 21-3 at halftime, but a mistake-filled second half and bad clock management late in the game allowed Washington (2-1) to tie it onJohn Hall's 34-yard field goal with 0:13 left in regulation.
 
 <strong>
Seattle 24, Los Angeles 23.</strong> In Seattle, Matt Hasselbeck threw a 3-yard touchdown pass to Koren Robinson with a minute remaining and Josh Brown made the extra point as the Seahawks overcame a 13-point deficit. 
 
Marshall Faulk, held to 31 yards on 15 carries for the Rams (1-2), left in the third quarter with an injured left hand. Seattle is 3-0 for the first time in five years.
 
 <strong>
Tampa Bay 31, Atlanta 1.</strong> In Atlanta, Warren Sapp scored the first offensive touchdown of his career on a 6-yard catch as the Bucs rebounded from a disappointing loss. 
 
Tampa Bay (2-1) took out all its frustration following a loss to Carolina on the Falcons (1-2), who failed for the second week in a row to give Dan Reeveshis 200th coaching victory.
 
 <strong>
Indianapolis 23, Jaguars 13.</strong> In Indianapolis, Reggie Wayne caught a career-high 10 passes for 141 yards and two touchdowns for the Colts. 
 
Indianapolis is off to its first 3-0 start since 1996 and its second such start since 1978. Jacksonville (0-3) has lost five straight dating to the endof last season.
 
 <strong>
Kansas City 42, Houston 14.</strong> In Houston, Dante Hall had a 73-yard punt return for a score to help Kansas City to its first 3-0 start in seven years. 
 
Priest Holmes had 156 total yards and two touchdowns. The Texans (1-2) trailed 14-7 until Trent Green hit a wide-open Eddie Kennison with a 15-yardscoring pass, and Hall made his big play.
 
 <strong>
New England 23, N.Y. Jets 16.</strong> In Foxboro, Massachusets, Tom Brady overcame a sore right elbow and scored on a 1-yard run late in the third quarter to lead the Patriots. 
 
Asante Samuel added a TD on a 55-yard interception return for New England (2-1). Vinny Testaverde threw for 264 yards for the Jets (0-3), moving him intoeighth place on the NFL's career list with 40,300 yards passing.
 
 <strong>
Baltimore 24, San Diego 10.</strong> San Diego, Jamal Lewis ran for 132 yards and one touchdown, a week after setting the NFL single-game record with 295 yards. 
 
The Ravens (2-1) won their second straight. San Diego (0-3) has beenoutscored 88-37 this season.

TITLE: Spain, Australia Set for Davis Showdown
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MALAGA, Spain - Spain reached the Davis Cup final on Sunday, eliminating Argentina when Carlos Moya won the final singles match after top-ranked compatriot Juan Carlos Ferrero was upset. 
 
Moya downed Gaston Gaudio 6-1, 6-4, 6-2, giving Spain a 3-2 victory in the best-of-five series. 
 &quot;Moya played like a world No. 1,&quot; Gaudio said. &quot;I think he might have beaten anyone today.&quot; 
 Moya offset Ferrero's surprising loss in the day's opening singles to Agustin Calleri. Calleri, who anchored a doubles victory a day earlier, won 6-4, 7-5, 6-1 to even a semifinal that started with two Argentine losses. 
 Spain will play Australia for the Davis Cup title in Melbourne on Nov. 28-30. Australia defeated visiting Switzerland 3-2 in the other semifinal. 
 &quot;I always dreamed of this,&quot; said Moya, the only one of his teammates who didn't play on the team that won the 2000 Davis Cup against Australia in Barcelona. 
 Australia won the Davis Cup finals against Spain in 1965 and 1967, both in Australia. 
 Moya, ranked No. 6, had little trouble against Gaudio. Gaudio entered the series with a Davis Cup record of 13-1. He lost both matches against Spain. 
 In the first match, Calleri was playing on about 19 hours' rest. He was a last-minute substitute for the doubles team as well as Sunday's singles. 
 &quot;This was the most important match of my life,&quot; he said. 
 Argentina showed a lot of grit during the semifinal, forced to play without injured stars Guillermo Coria and David Nalbandian. 
 Calleri and Lucas Arnold, playing together Saturday in a tournament for the first time, defeated Albert Costa, the 2002 French Open winner, and Alex Corretja in four sets. 
 Calleri was selected to play Ferrero, the reigning French Open champion and U.S. Open runner-up, because Mariano Zabaleta had not recovered from his cramps in his loss to Moya on opening day. 
 Ferrero thought the tone of his match Sunday might have changed had he won the second set. 
 &quot;Maybe he would have tired out&quot; or cooled off, he added, his voice trailing off. &quot;It got away from me.&quot;
 Spain will face Australia in the final, after Lleyton Hewitt rallied from two sets down Sunday to beat Wimbledon champion Roger Federer of Switzerland to put his country through in Melbourne.
 Hewitt won 5-7, 2-6, 7-6 (4), 7-5, 6-1, giving his country a winning 3-1 margin in the best-of-five semifinal. 
 Australia will play Spain in the Nov. 28-30 final in Melbourne. The Spaniards defeated visiting Argentina 3-2 in Malaga. The Aussies won the Davis Cup title against Spain in 1965 and 1967, both in Australia. 
 The final singles between Todd Woodbridge and Michel Kratochvil was called off after Kratochvil won the first set 6-4 and Woodbridge quit with an unspecified injury, making the final score 3-2 for Australia. 
 Hewitt trailed 5-3 in the third set before breaking Federer's serve. He then went on to win the match at Rod Laver Arena in 3 hours, 31 minutes. 
 Hewitt said the victory topped the Grand Slam titles he won at Wimbledon in 2002 and the U.S Open in 2001. 
 &quot;Everyone knows how passionate I am about Davis Cup,&quot; Hewitt said. &quot;To be standing there and serving for the match like I was tonight is an unbelievable feeling.&quot; 
 He recalled a stirring Davis Cup comeback by countryman Pat Cash 17 years ago. Hewitt said he has watched countless time tape of Cash's five-set win over Sweden's Mikael Pernfors that gave Australia the 1986 Davis Cup. 
 &quot;I think I know every shot in that match,&quot; Hewitt said. &quot;The way he came back was incredible. I drew inspiration from him and just tried to hang in there.&quot; 
 Hewitt dropped the first two sets and was in a big hole with Federer serving for the match at 5-3 in the third. But Hewitt surged back, breaking Federer and eventually sending the set to a tiebreaker. 
 Hewitt ended a streak in which Federer had won 31 consecutive singles sets in Davis Cup play dating to April 2001. 
 After winning the next two sets, Hewitt was lifted high into the air by Australian captain John Fitzgerald while Hewitt's girlfriend, top-ranked Kim Clijsters of Belgium, cheered from the stands. 
 &quot;I was a little bit nervous and tight at the beginning and he was pretty much unstoppable in the second set,&quot; Hewitt said. 
 Swiss captain Marc Rosset credited Hewitt for his play against Federer. 
 &quot;I don't know if he would have been able to do it in a normal tournament,&quot; Rosset said. &quot;But that's what makes Davis Cup so special.&quot; 
 Australia led 2-1 Saturday after a five-set doubles victory by Wayne Arthurs and Woodbridge over Federer and Rosset. The teams split the singles Friday, with Federer beating Mark Philippoussis in a Wimbledon final rematch and Hewitt downing Kratochvil.

TITLE: Modest Maddux Breaks Young's Mark
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ATLANTA - As usual, Greg Maddux gave the credit to his teammates. 
 
Maddux became the first pitcher in major league history to win at least 15 games in 16 consecutive seasons, leading the Atlanta Braves over the Florida Marlins 8-0 Sunday. 
 Maddux (15-11) had shared the record of winning 15 or more games in 15 straight seasons with Cy Young. 
 &quot;Sometimes, you're pretty fortunate on the mound,&quot; Maddux said. &quot;It worked out. Probably the most special thing was seeing the other 24 guys on the team really busting it for me. To see your teammates go out of the way, that's pretty special.&quot; 
 He was referring to several outstanding defensive plays by shortstop Rafael Furcal and a diving catch by center fielder Andruw Jones. 
 &quot;I had a horseshoe,&quot; Maddux said. 
 Heading into the final week of the regular season, the Marlins lead the NL wild-card race by one-half game over Philadelphia, a 4-3 loser to Cincinnati on Sunday. 
 The Marlins play the Braves on Monday then go home to open a three-game series against the Phillies on Tuesday. 
 Maddux pitched five scoreless innings and allowed only one hit in his 288th career victory. He tied Tommy John for 22nd place on the all-time win list. 
 &quot;We got it done in great fashion. Greg pitched great, the offense did its job and the bullpen slammed it,&quot; Braves manager Bobby Cox said. &quot;It was a great way to accomplish such a great feat.&quot; 
 Maddux was struck on the right ankle by a hard grounder off the bat of Juan Pierre for the final out of the third inning. The right-hander had the ankle taped in the bottom of the inning, then went out and retired the Marlins in order in the fourth and fifth innings. 
 The NL East champion Braves scored four times in the fifth for a 6-0 lead and Maddux left for a pinch-hitter. 
 Maddux had a bruise and X-rays were negative. He was expected to make his next start. 
 &quot;I'll be OK,&quot; Maddux said. &quot;It was kind of hard to keep my weight on it. It was a little uncomfortable.&quot; 
 He said he was glad he wasn't hit in the knee. 
 &quot;With a foot you can go on,&quot; he said. &quot;I don't know how much it swelled up, but I know it hurt.&quot; 
 Maddux gave up just a leadoff single to Derrek Lee in the second inning. He didn't strike out any or give up a walk and threw only 43 pitches, 29 strikes. 
 &quot;He's a smart cookie. He knows how to pitch,&quot; Florida manager Jack McKeon said. &quot;He doesn't get you out, he makes you get yourself out.&quot; 
 Chipper Jones drove in four runs for the Braves with a two-run homer - his 27th - a sacrifice fly and RBI single. 
 The Marlins wound up with four hits, getting two off Darren Holmes in the seventh. Lee had three hits. 
 The Braves took a 1-0 lead in the first on Jones' sacrifice fly and made it 2-0 in the third on his run-scoring single. 
 Atlanta broke it open with the four-run fifth against Carl Pavano (11-13). Javy Lopez hit a two-run double and Rafael Furcal drew a bases-loaded walk. 
 
 <strong>
Oakland 12, Seattle 0.</strong> Ted Lilly won his sixth straight start and Mark Ellis hit his first career grand slam as the Athletics avoided a three-game sweep by second-place Seattle with a 12-0 win Sunday. 
 
Billy McMillon had three hits and drove in two runs as the defending AL West champions lowered their magic number to win the division to three. The A's lead the Mariners by four games. 
 Seattle fell 2 1/2 games behind Boston in the AL wild-card race. The Red Sox won 2-0 at Cleveland. 
 Seattle had 31 hits in the first two games of this series, but managed only four hits against Lilly (12-9) and three relievers. 
 Harden was scratched because of back spasms and replaced by the left-handed Lilly, who beat Seattle for the first time in eight career starts. He entered 0-4 with a 6.89 ERA against the Mariners. 
 The A's built an early lead again, but held onto it this time. They had been ahead in the first two games of this series. Oakland's 12 runs doubled its combined total from the last three games. 
 Oakland hammered Gil Meche (15-11) for five runs in the second inning and he didn't even record an out before he was through. Meche's outing was his shortest of his career and his second straight poor start. Meche lasted just 2 1-3 innings in a 10-5 loss at Texas on Sept. 16 and has a 35.10 ERA in his last two outings.

TITLE: Russia, China Get Solid World Cup Starts
AUTHOR: By Ken Peters
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CARSON, California - China is off to a winning start in the Women's World Cup, four years after being beaten in the finals by the United States. 
 
Sun Wen, the 1999 World Cup MVP, scored on a header in the 29th minute and China beat Ghana 1-0 Sunday night. 
 Although the score was close, the Chinese dominated the game. 
 China coach Ma Liangxiang noted the scoring chances his team had, adding, &quot;On the other hand, Ghana had a very good team defense.&quot; 
 He and Sun each said that China needs to improve. 
 &quot;We were not in as good a shape for today's game,&quot; Sun said through an interpreter. &quot;The first game is always the hardest. We can't say this was the real performance of the team.&quot;
 &quot;We can't make it if we play like we played tonight. It takes time to get better,&quot; he said. 
 Ma said he expects the team to play better against Australia later this week. 
 &quot;Aggressive attacking is one of the points I deliver to my players. I can say the game on Thursday will be more entertaining and exciting,&quot; the coach said through an interpreter. &quot;I expect the team will be better prepared, psychologically prepared.&quot; 
 Russia also won its Group D game. Yelena Fomina atoned for a missed penalty kick by scoring the tiebreaking goal in the 89th minute in a 2-1 victory over Australia. 
 The Chinese were constantly on the attack in their game, outshooting Ghana 15-3 and holding a 5-1 edge in shots on goal. Ghana goalkeeper Memunatu Sulemana made several fine saves to hold the score down. 
 China was scheduled to host this year's tournament, but the SARS outbreak there led FIFA officials to shift the competition to the United States. 
 The skilled Chinese, one of the world's top teams for the past decade, controlled the game with superior passing and tactics. Goalkeeper Zhao Yan got the shutout, although China's defense kept Ghana from mounting many serious threats. 
 The 30-year-old Sun, who has said she is retiring after the World Cup, was a constant presence with her dribbling and pinpoint passes that helped to keep China on the attack. 
 Sun also blocked a free kick by Alberta Sackey from just outside the box in the 57th minute, one of Ghana's few scoring opportunities. The ball struck Sun in the face, and she fell to the turf and lay there motionless for a moment before springing up and chasing the play downfield. 
 Her goal finished a well-executed sequence. Bai Jie took a throw-in just on the left side just outside the box, whirled quickly toward the goal line and sent a high pass toward the far post. As Sulemana jumped, the ball sailed just beyond her reach and Sun - in perfect position - leaped and knocked the ball into the goal. 
 &quot;I saw that Bai Jie had already gotten to the touch line, and I thought the far post would be the best choice,&quot; Sun said. &quot;It was a very good cross.&quot; 
 It was her 106th career goal and 11th in World Cup play. 
 Wen had a tournament-leading seven goals in the 1999 World Cup, but the Chinese were left looking for their first world title when the Americans defeated them 5-4 on penalty kicks in the championship game at the nearby Rose Bowl. 
 Ghana, ranked 53rd internationally, played determined defense against China, which is ranked No. 4. Ghana is led by Sackey and Elizabeth Baidu, both NAIA All-Americans at Robert Morris College in Illinois. 
 The Chinese beat Ghana 7-0 four years ago in the World Cup. 
 &quot;The aim was to improve on the 1999 performance and we achieved that,&quot; Ghana coach Okoe Aryee said. &quot;My intention was to play in a way that we wouldn't concede many goals like we did in 1999. I'm satisfied. China played better and we stopped them from scoring more goals.&quot; 
 Russia's victory gave it the early edge for second place in the group. China is heavily favored to win the group, and the top two teams advance. 
 Fomina took a pass from Galina Komarova and drilled a shot from 20 meters just inside the left post. Fomina's penalty kick in the 71st minute banged off the crossbar. 
 Russian coach Yury Bystritsky said the game was difficult for his team. 
 &quot;Maybe it wasn't such a beautiful game as we're used to, but the result is quite satisfying,&quot; he said through an interpreter.