SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #911 (79), Friday, October 17, 2003
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TITLE: City Has Enough Records To Fill A New Book
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: When, in 1964, a Leningrad district court sentenced the future Nobel Prize laureate and unemployed poet Joseph Brodsky to five years of forced labor for "parasitism," the judge could not know that 40 years later that his decision would add half a page to the St. Petersburg Book of Records.
 
It was the country's first and only criminal court trial of a future Nobel Prize winner, according to the recently published book.
 In 1964 the country's famed poet failed to prove that "writing poetry is work." Under a Soviet law on "sponging," Brodsky was taken to a village, where he worked as a photographer's assistant and a freelancer for a local newspaper.
 The thick and colorful St. Petersburg Book of Records, launched by the Operativnoye Prikrytiye publishing house on Oct. 16, was published in 2003 to shower its readers with hundreds of the most interesting and unique facts about the city in its 300 years of existence.
 It took the book's authors, who included journalists and representatives of other spheres, nine months to look through countless archival documents, history books and newspaper publications, and fill the book with the miraculous and curious.
 Although some of the so-called facts may seem a bit subjective, when for instance, St. Petersburg six-times-Olympic champion and Hero of Russia Lyubov Yegorova is called "the most famous skier in the world," the authors have nevertheless succeeded in attracting attention because their book is so hard to put down.
 According to the book, St. Petersburg can take pride in being home to the world's biggest boxer - Nikolai Valuyev (150 kilos, 210 centimeters); the largest collection of seeds - at the Vavilov Plant Growing Institute; the fastest sail-powered frigate "Mir; and the man who smoked at the highest altitude.
 Ironic as it may be, the feat of St. Petersburg alpinist Georgy Kotov, who climbed Everest and smoked a cigarette on top in 1995, is recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records.
 Kotov's name is next to that of another St. Petersburg legendary alpinist Mikhail Bobrov, who was the oldest person to ski to the North Pole at the age of 75; and city hairdresser Anna Mikhailova, who in 2001 created 315 hairdos in 12 hours, a world record.
 The city is the origin of the biggest diaspora of Russian Jews who emigrated to Israel, and is also home to the world's oldest practising surgeon, Fyodor Uglov, now 99 years old, who entered the Guinness Book in 1994. St. Petersburg also boasts Europe's largest prison, located on the banks of the Neva.
 It's no surprise that many of the records have to do with St. Petersburg's architectural pearls and the peculiarities of its location.
 The book declares St. Petersburg one of the world's wettest cities, with 10 percent of its territory covered in water, and the city with the most lions - since the number of lion sculptures and bar reliefs on the buildings is incalculable.
 The Bronze Horseman, completed in 1782 to mark 100 years since the coronation of city founder Peter the Great and unofficially the city's talisman, was Russia's first monument, according to the book.
 St. Petersburg's noisiest road - made of roofing iron - was built in the city in 1911 on the right side of Nevsky Prospekt in front of the Kazan Cathedral. The din was so intolerable, and horses fell over on it so often, that the city residents branded it that "damn road," and it was dismantled several weeks later.
 The architecture of the country's Soviet period enriched the city with the only school built in a shape of a hammer and sickle. The school is located at Prospekt Stachek.
 The statue stolen most often is the 5 kilogram, 11-centimeter high modern sculpture to a bird Chizhik-Pyzhik on the Fontanka Canal. In 10 years, the statue has disappeared five times.
 Meanwhile, the Summer Garden - the city's first garden founded in 1704 - was in the 19th century considered the place to find the greatest number of potential brides.
 In May, girls from rich families showed up at the garden surrounded by their nannies and maids to impress local young men.
 St. Petersburg's architectural peculiarities are linked with several local traditions, the happiest of which, of course, have to do with marriage.
 Thus, the most famous wedding traditions of St. Petersburg include obligatory kissing by newlyweds on the bridges, which they pass on their ride after the wedding service. The custom demands that a wedding couple starts kissing at the entrance to the bridge and finishes at the bridge's end.
 Sometimes, drivers cross the bridges slowly to make the kiss last longer.
 Another tradition says newlyweds must go to Palace Square and touch a toe of one of the city's famous Atlantes, that decorate the Hermitage. After that, the couple goes to the Alexander Column, where the new husband should pick up his young wife and carry her around the column - each circuit stands for one child they will have.
 From an almost unlimited choice of musical compositions, in a city that was home to quite a few world-famous composers such as Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the book singles out Dmitry Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony.
 Shostakovich wrote the first two parts of the symphony during the Siege of Leningrad in 1941. It was played in Leningrad on Aug. 9, 1942, the date that Hitler had set for the capture of the city. The Soviet authoriteis took unprecedented measures so that not a single bomb or shell hit the city during the performance, and they were successful.
 Meanwhile, among the city's contemporary musicians, the book names Sergei Shnurov, head of the infamous group Leningrad. He is billed as the most famous contemporary poet known for using foul language in his poetry.
 Recently Shnurov was shunned by Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, who refused to let Leningrad perform in Moscow, even though the group is one of the country's most popular and young people treat Shnurov as a hero.
 Shnurov was not the only St. Petersburger whose vocabulary attracted the authors' attention.
 The city interpreter Vitaly Krichevsky hit the Guiness Book of Records with his drinking dictionary, titled "Vodka From A to Z." Krichevsky collected 3,828 words and expression of rich Russian language, connected to the process of drinking and the product itself.
 St. Petersburg has a long association with wordsmiths, including the country's best writers of literature, such as Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Vladimir Nabokov.
 The funniest Russian Empress to live in St. Petersburg was Peter the Great's daughter Yelizaveta, the book says. The empress liked dressing up and going to balls so much that by the end of her life her wardrobe held 15,000 dresses and 4,000 pairs of shoes.
 Alexander III, father of Russia's last czar Nicholas II, is rated the best family man of all the Russian czars. After marrying the Danish princess Dagmar, later renamed Maria Fyodorovna, he never had lovers. But as fate would have it, the most amorous royal couple were buried apart - in Russia and Denmark.
 St. Petersburg's most scandalous society was secretly founded in early 19th century. The society called The Brotherhood of Pigs, had many foreign members and practised group sex.
 St. Petersburg was the scene of the assassination of Grigory Rasputin in early 20th century. The murder of Russian State Duma deputy Galina Starovoitova in St. Petersburg in 1998 was the first political killing of a woman.
 According to the book, the silliest project ever offered in the city was the plan of making the port ice-free. In 1928, an engineer suggested a kind of local Gulfstream could be created, using water from the city sewers and factories.
 "Huge amounts of kilocalories of precious warmth, developed as a result of the city's vital activities, are wasted. If we concentrate the warm waters it won't let the sea freeze," the enthusiast said.
 The reaction of a port worker, who said he had no wish "to choke in the sea of dung" was barbed, but the project was anyway regected as unfeasible.
 Apart from that funny episode, before the Second World War II, Leningrad was known as the country's only city, where they made clothes out of fish skin. The Soviet "aristocracy" considered purses, shoes, or gloves made of fish skin very stylish, while a skin of one lancet fish was big enough to sew a whole jacket or even a coat.
 Until recently, St. Petersburg was also the world's city with the highest tram volume. The length of tram rails in the city totaled 591 kilometers.
 Ice-cream and koryushka, or smelt, the city's most popular fish, are among the favorite foods of St. Petersburg residents.
 The book's authors point out that compared to the famed Guinness Book of Records the St. Petersburg edition not only enumerates facts and statistics, but links them to lively stories.
 The publication was sponsored by St. Petersburg energy giant Lenenergo, that holds the record of the country's first energy system. 
 Lenenergo head, Andrei Likhachyov, who wrote the foreword, said he hoped the outstanding features of the city will increase.
 


TITLE: Heavyweights From Moscow Join Inauguration
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: New St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko's friends in high places were on prominent display as she was officially inaugurated Wednesday in the city's Mariinsky Palace.
 
At the ceremony, Matviyenko got pledges of support from the Federation Council, the government, the Kremlin and Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov. 
 The governor said she would cooperate with the Moscow city government to learn from its experience in city administration.
 "We will cooperate in an active way," she said to Luzhkov. "I will not promise to wear a cap as you do, but promise that the priceless and progressive experience of Moscow will be used in St. Petersburg."
 The inauguration ceremony took a similar form to the inauguration of President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin in spring 2000. An orchestra played outside and inside while Matviyenko walked up a long stairway after the flags of Russia and St. Petersburg were placed on the podium.
 Alexander Voloshin, head of the presidential administration, read a letter of congratulation from Putin.
 "The voters entrusted you with the fate of the northern capital, a city of inimitable beauty and a rich and heroic history. To implement a program to develop St. Petersburg means to fulfill the expectations of St. Petersburgers," Putin's message said.
 Federation Council head Sergei Mironov said Matviyenko can count on the support of the upper chamber of the Russian parliament, including his personal assistance.
 "When I look at your biography ... I'm always reminded that you were the only female deputy prime minister, the only female presidential representative, and now you are the only woman to head a region," he said.
 Despite such praise for Matviyenko's femininity, Luzhkov raised a big laugh from onlookers when he referred to her as Valentin Ivanich, using the male first name and patronymic as if she were a man.
 Matviyenko said she would make the city an example of what Europe is like for the rest of the country.
 "We have to raise this city to the European level of [human] rights and freedoms," she said. "St. Petersburg should become a standard of the European civilized word for Russia and a business card of Russia for Europe."
 Matviyenko also said she would cut red tape and City Hall staff to spur business development.
 "In the next four years we have to create the foundation for a breakthrough," she said. 
 Luzhkov said that in the near future Moscow and St. Petersburg would have several joint projects, naming only joint tourism development specifically, but also hinting at housing construction. 
 "I am against penetration of Moscow companies to the local market," said Vladimir Golman, a Legislative Assembly lawmaker with close connections to the local construction business, said outside the official program.
 Luzhkov would not discuss a proposal to shift the arbitration and constitutional courts to St. Petersburg from Moscow, saying that this should not be a priority for officials.
 "There are lots of far more important problems in the country and as German experience shows this is not such an easy thing to do. Even in Germany they haven't fully complete the project to move the parliament to Berlin," Luzhkov said at a briefing Wednesday.
 Igor Artemyev, State Duma lawmaker of Yabloko faction said Matviyenko intends to cut City Hall staff by a third and that cooperating with Moscow will be easy.
 "Moscow has very close connections in the federal government and St. Petersburg has close connections in the presidential administration," he said outside the official events. "They are going to use both for each other to push development of different projects. The high-speed railway project collapsed, but projects such as the construction of federal and city roads or the metro could be advanced this way," Artemyev said.
 
 
 
 
 


TITLE: UN Vote On Iraq Gets Nod
TEXT: The Associated Press
 UNITED NATIONS - The Security Council voted unanimously on Thursday to adopt a resolution on the future of Iraq. The 15-0 vote was a victory for the United States, but its impact was to some extent symbolic.
 
Hours before the Security Council acted, Russia, France and Germany, all of which opposed the war on Iraq, agreed to back the measure. But in a serious reservation, they said they would not go beyond the support they had already agreed upon in order to ease the burden of the American forces in Iraq.
 The United States also won backing from China and Pakistan, and - perhaps most surprisingly - from Syria, the only Arab nation on the Security Council and a staunch opponent of the American-led war.
 Pakistan, however, announced that it "won't be able to contribute troops'' because a multinational force led by the United States that is created by the resolution does not have "a separate and distinct identity'' from the coalition forces.
 With the approval of the resolution, the United States and Britain win a sort of international assent to the political and military outcome of the Iraqi war, get approval of the multinational force and gain an endorsement for a political transition under the control of the American-led occupation authority.
 But the resolution papers over the fundamental differences dividing the United States from many council members. It is unlikely to have much impact in winning new military forces beyond those that have already been committed, and financial contributions for Iraq's reconstruction.
 The agreement on the vote by Russia, Germany and France came after a 45-minute conference call between Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac.
 "We agreed that the resolution is really an important step in the right direction,'' Schroeder said in Brussels, Belgium, where he was attending a European Union summit meeting.
 The chancellor said, however, that Germany, France and Russia are not "in a position to engage ourselves militarily'' or with "material engagement.'' And he added that not all disagreements over Iraq's reconstruction had been overcome. France and Germany said both countries would attend the donors' conference in Madrid, Spain, next week, however.
 Washington agreed late Wednesday to postpone the vote until Thursday to give Putin time to try to persuade France and Germany to accept the draft, diplomats here said. Putin was in Malaysia on Thursday for a summit meeting of Muslim countries.
 The vote is a diplomatic victory for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who brought the reluctant Security Council together without directly ceding any of the American-led coalition's control.
 
 


TITLE: Visa, Permit Snafus Blamed on Moscow
AUTHOR: By Robin Munro
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast officials on Thursday blamed Moscow for problems foreigners are having getting visas and work permits.
 
Speaking at a roundtable on visas and related matters for American Chamber of Commerce members, the officials said they did not expect any quick improvement. 
 The local bureaucrats declared the regulations - introduced sporadically since a new law on foreigners came into force on Nov. 1 a year ago - to be flawed and urged foreigners and their representatives to write complaints to federal authorities.
 "Unfortunately, a number of documents sent to Moscow get lost or stuck in the system," said Antonina Chetverikova, head of department of external labor migration for the oblast and city.
 Applications for work permits are taking two or three months to process, she added.
 "If we don't hear anything from Moscow in two months, we send the papers again." 
 Her directorate has an "unwritten agreement" that people inconvenienced by such delays will not lose their right to live and work while their papers are still being processed, she said.
 "Even if Moscow wants to, it is incapable of processing those thousands of permits," she said.
 She added that a quota on foreign workers would be unlikely to restrict the number of people working here - only about 10,000 work permits have been issued in the last year, but the city allows 14,000. The oblast allows 7,000. 
 Chetverikova, who has worked under the Federal Migration Service since it was founded in 1992, conceded that approval for foreigners to work in Russia is largely a formality - she knew of only one final refusal in 10 years.
 That obtaining permits is also easier for citizens of CIS countries than for western investors is also wrong, particularly with the law on foreigners being introduced partly to battle illegal migration, some of which comes from those countries, she said.
 The law will not be changed by lower level officials like herself, but only if the clamor of complaints reaches the highest echelons, she added.
 "We have to change the law and people in the Federal Migration Service have some understanding about the inconveniences," she said. 
 "The Interior Ministry is organized like the military," she said. "No one high up will listen to us subordinates, but if embassies and organizations write complaining that might work."
 Mikhail Utyatsky, head of the city and oblast's passport and visa directorate, said that the procedure for foreigners wanting to live and work here is for them to arrive on a three-month single-entry visa and then to apply for a one-year multi-entry visa.
 The directorate had been working hard - of the approximately 200,000 foreigners registered in the region and oblast, some 56,000 were registered in the last year, he insisted.
 Another way of getting visa documents processed quickly was through the commercial firm, Inostranets, he said.
 Rachel Shackleton, general director of Concept training, development and consultancy services, said it had taken her nine months to obtain a multi-entry visa, partly because staff had not been following procedures. She finally got the visa she wanted only because she paid a commercial firm to get it for her.
 Utyatsky said Shackleton was unlucky because she started in January. Regulations that clarified procedures were finalized in June, he added. 
 Inna Bigotskaya, deputy head of the oblast's committee on external economic relations, said that delays and other hindrances hurt foreign investors The oblast government will do all it can to help those mired in the process.
 Maxim Kalinin, chairman of the AmCham executive committee, said the chamber will take up the officials' advice and write letters of complaint about the problems.

TITLE: Reburial of Last Tsar's Mother Due to Take Place Next Year
AUTHOR: By Jan M. Olsen
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: COPENHAGEN, Denmark - The remains of Danish-born Tsarina Maria Fyodorovna, mother of the assassinated Nicholas II, will be returned to Russia and laid to rest with her family in St. Petersburg, Denmark's government said Wednesday.
 
Born in 1847 in Copenhagen, Maria Fyodorovna, originally Danish Princess Dagmar, married Tsar Alexander III in 1866 and had six children, including Nicholas II. When the Bolshevik revolution swept Russia in 1917, she fled St. Petersburg.
 "I am happy, very happy," said Prince Dmitry Romanov, a descendant who lives in Denmark. "Finally she can be put to rest next to her husband, which was her wish."
 Maria Fyodorovna was the sister of King Frederik VIII of Denmark, Britain's Queen Alexandra and King George I of Greece. She returned to Denmark in 1919 and lived there until her death in 1928.
 She was buried at the Roskilde Cathedral - 40 kilometers west of the capital where dozens of Danish kings and queens are buried.
 In a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin Danish Queen Margrethe wrote that she "would not stand in the way" of the Romanov family's wishes.
 The letter was given to Russian Ambassador Dmitry Ryurikov Wednesday by Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller.
 In the missive, Denmark asked that the reburial be "carried out in a dignified and respectful way."
 Moeller said the remains cannot be touched and any DNA analysis is forbidden.
 In 1991, the remains of Nicholas II, his wife, Alexandra, and their five children were exhumed and reburied in the gilded, 18th-century cathedral in 1998. They were killed by a firing squad in 1918 in the Siberian city of Yekaterinburg. Their bodies were burned, doused with acid, and thrown into a pit outside the city.
 After the 1991 Soviet collapse, Romanov family members had asked Margrethe to repatriate Maria Fyodorovna's remains, Romanov said. Romanov is the great-great grandson of Tsar Nicholas I who was the great-grandfather of Nicholas II, Russia's last emperor.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>River Border Shifts
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Deputies of the Estonian parliament sent an inquiry to the Estonian Interior Ministry on problems with border markers on the Narvar river, Interfax reported Thursday.
 Deputies Mikhail Stalnukhin and Robert Lepikson wrote to Interior Minister Margus Leivo complaining that fishers from Narva on the Estonian side of the border town said the markers had moved moved further into Estonian territory, making it difficult for people to go fishing.
 "Over 700 of our fishermen, sailing to the river from a [local] port on motor boats now can barely sail and have to row their boats or propel them with poles," the news agency quoted Stalnukhin as saying.
 He said the markers were pushed to the Estonian side by ice in the spring. 
 
 
<b>Oil Spills Near Fleet
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The Natural Resources Ministry sea inspectorate and the Kaliningrad sea port authorities noticed oil pollution in an area where Baltic fleet ships are located, Interfax-ABN reported Wednesday.
 "After examination of the area was completed, the specialists ... registered oil spills by almost every navy ship. According to preliminary results this is a fuel oil mixed with used machine oil," Interfax quoted Mikhail Durkin, senior port inspector as saying Wednesday.
 He said the size of the spills ranged from 50 square meters to 1000 square meters and one was 150,000 square meters.
 Anatoly Lobsky, spokesman for the Baltic fleet, said the fuel oil might have come from the navy ships. The fleet's ecology department is investigating.
 
 
<b>River Tunnel Mooted 
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG - Alexander Dedyukhin, head of City Hall's road construction and maintenance committee said a construction company has offered to build a tunnel under the Neva River to link Piskaryovski Prospekt and Orlovskaya Ulitsa, ABN reported Tuesday.
 Dedyukhin said the project looks financially viable, because this is cheaper and shorter than plans for a deeper tunnel - 600 meters long compared to 1,300 meters. Construction company Mostotryad-19 estimates the cost would be $50,000 per meter.
 This week City Hall was to announce results for the project's tender.
 "This version of the underwater road is very promising. But City Hall is paying more attention to construction of a tunnel between the Admiralteisky District and Vasilyevky Island. The main reason for this is [the upcoming] renovation of Shmitda Bridge," Dedyukhin said.
 
 
<b>Slaying Suspects Held
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Tolyatti police have detained two men suspected of assassinating Alexei Sidorov, editor of "Tolyaittinskoye Obozreniye" who was stabbed next to his yard Oct. 9, Interfax reported Wednesday.
 One suspect is a local metal worker, another is unemployed. They approached Sidorov when he was drinking outside of his yard and asked to join him for a drink, according to Vladimir Scherbakov, colonel general, head of Privolzhye Police. After Sidorov refused one of the suspects approached him and stabbed him in his back with a sharp object, the colonel said.
 "This was not a contract killing," Scherbakov said.
 He said the suspects will be charged as soon as they are identified by witnesses. As for the killers of Valery Ivanov, the previous editor killed in April last year, Scherbakov said his killers are hiding abroad. 



TITLE: Markova To Found Political Foundation
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Anna Markova, former vice-governor of St. Petersburg and second-placed candidate in the recent gubernatorial elections, this week announced plans to create a political foundation.
 
Although she declined to name any political or financial supporters for the future foundation on the grounds that negotiations are still being held, Markova said the organization, tentatively titled &quot;New Right Policy,&quot; has already drawn much interest from a number of non-governmental organizations, financial groups and ordinary people.
 &quot;Only 10 days have passed since the elections, and the idea is still rather raw, but what I can tell you right now is that the foundation's main purpose is to develop an efficient new policy leaning for support on active, responsible and conscious citizens,&quot; Markova said.
 The foundation is not registered.
 Markova said the idea occured to her after making a thorough analysis of the past elections. 
 &quot;Apart from the formal result of an elected governor, we had another, genuine result of nearly three-quarters of voters ignoring the elections,&quot; she said. &quot;It is clear that these people don't see a political force that they trust.&quot;
 The politician likened post-electoral St. Petersburg to post-war Iraq, saying that the city was taken over in a brutal manner that is only used when alien lands are conquered, with promises of future prosperity going hand in hand with a forceful invasion.
 However, Markova said she doesn't see her foundation as a hotbed for opposition to Governor Valentina Matviyenko. 
 &quot;What I have in mind is constructive cooperation,&quot; she said.
 Markova also made it clear that she would like the foundation to evolve into a political party, but that it is too early as of now.
 St. Petersburg politicians showed a cautious, but positive, reaction to the news about the new foundation being established.
 &quot;Competitiveness is always good and stimulating for the politics,&quot; said Leonid Romankov of the Union of Right Forces and Citizens' Watch in St. Petersburg. &quot;I would welcome the foundation, especially if they take the word 'right' in the meaning of 'liberal' and don't position themselves as unbridled opposition.&quot;
 But Romankov expressed reservations about the appeal of the new organization. 
 In the context of fierce rivalry and obvious antipathy between Markova and Matviyenko, it is quite likely that some people would prefer not to tease the winner, Romankov said. 
 Mikhail Brodsky, who was this week appointed Matviyenko's representative in the Legislative Assembly, said the potential of the foundation will be clear after Markova introduces her team.
 &quot;Depending on who is there and what they do, people will judge if they are effective,&quot; he said, admitting that during his time as a lawmaker witnessing Markova in action, he didn't see her as a devoted democrat.
 &quot;On the other hand, when people have the power, they perceive democracy as an obstacle, while when they lose the power, democracy is a valuable tool to regain it,&quot; he said. &quot;So Anna Markova may well have reconsidered.&quot;

TITLE: City Jews Celebrate Succoth Festival
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The world's Jews this week are celebrating Succoth - the Jewish Harvest Festival - which begins on the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Tishri. 
 
The dates change every year in the Gregorian calendar that is used throughout the world, but always fall in September or October. 
 A week long, Succoth is perhaps the most cheerful Jewish holiday. This year's Succoth runs from Oct. 11 through 17.
 The word <i>succoth</i> means booths, and refers to the makeshift huts in which Jews lived during their 40 years wandering the desert. 
 During Succoth, a special ceremony is held each day to remember Hebrew ancestors and to thank God for the harvest. According to centuries-old tradition, families should gather for meals and sleep inside booths as well.
 These days, very few people can afford to be so dedicated, and some Jews construct a <i>succah</i>, the singular of succoth, in their gardens or even balconies, and decorate it with whatever fruits and vegetables they can find.
 In Israel, the roofs of succoth are built primarily with branches of olive trees and decorated with local fruits and flowers. 
 In St. Petersburg, the booths - in the courtyard of the Great Choral Sinagogue on Lermontovsky Prospekt - were covered with the branches of a fir tree. Local weather has been at its worst this week, with pouring rain and cold winds forcing Jews to hold most of the festivities inside the synagogue.
 &quot;Succoth is a family holiday, with sharing [of roof and meals] being an important part of its philosophy,&quot; said Menahem Mendel Pevzner, principal rabbi at the synagogue. 
 Sharing food explains its second name, the Feast of Tabernacle. 
 &quot;Naturally, Succoth should be held in booths, but this year the weather really made it impossible, and we had to make an exception.&quot;
 Magicians, acrobats, a childrens choir - and, of course, the children, who made for a good half of the crowd - created a cheerful, hospitable and cosy atmosphere for the holiday. 
 In line with another tradition, many people have special plants in their hands. During the festival, Jews take the four plants and fruit - the etrog (citron), the lulav (palm tree), haddash (myrtle) bush sprouts and branches of the willow tree - and tie them together. 
 The four plants represent four types of people - etrog symbolizes the virtuous, demonstrating purity of mind and deeds. The palm tree represents the learned, but not necessarily those who lead a good life, while the myrtle sprouts symbolize the opposite - not refined intellectuals, but those with a good heart. The willow tree is for those who possess neither intellegince, nor a benevolent soul. 
 &quot;The idea is very obvious: take the etrog, it is bright and has a fine aroma, while the willow tree is not really impressive,&quot; said Rabbi Tsvi Pinski of the tradition, and its unifying spirit. &quot;But all people are human and should live in peace.&quot;
 Several hundred people turned out for the St. Petersburg event. 
 In New York, however, Jews celebrate the holiday by the thousands. A video of the Succoth festival in Brooklyn, New York, showed whole streets filled with people, dancing and singing. But after decades of harsh repression in Russia, and several waves of emigration the difference is hardly surprising.
 &quot;I grew up in the Soviet Union, and my father, who himself spoke Hebrew was afraid to teach me the language,&quot; said Yulia Degtyaryova, who runs a childrens choir in Jewish school Beit Sefer Menahem. The choir performed in the synagogue as part of festivities Tuesday. 
 &quot;The result is that very few families speak the language, and in most cases it is Yiddish, not Hebrew. Of course, these days many families teach their children without fear.&quot; 
 Masha Golokhova, nine, sings in the choir. 
 &quot;I like Succoth very much, and this is already the third time I will take part in this holiday,&quot; she said. &quot;Jews have a lot of holidays, and we learn all about them in school. I enjoy those lessons about our culture and history.&quot;
 Rabbi Pinski follows strict Succoth traditions. 
 He and his family take their meals only in booths throughout the week of festivities. But he said more and more people are joining them in the Great Choral Sinagogue for the Jewish holidays. 
 &quot;There are hundreds and hundreds of people, who maintain these ancient traditions here,&quot; he said. &quot;Not all of them are religious, while some live very far from the synagogue, and would only be able to come once, but the most important thing is that the historical tradition lives on.&quot;

TITLE: Shakirov To Be Izvestia Editor
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Raf Shakirov, former editor of newspaper Gazeta, was on Thursday appointed to head Moscow-based national daily Izvestia, Interfax reported.
 
Last year Shakirov worked as editor of Kommersant before financial tycoon in exile Boris Berezovsky, a strong opponent of President Vladimir Putin, acquired a controlling stake in Kommersant's publishing house.
 Mikhail Mikhailin, Shakirov's former deputy, replaced him at Gazeta.
 At a briefing Thursday Shakirov refused to answer questions about possible changes of editorial policy at Izvestia, saying &quot;it will be possible to talk about that some time later.&quot;
 Mikhail Kozhokin headed Izvestia before Shakirov was appointed. He signed a letter of resignation saying he would work on his own project.
 Izvestia is a part of tycoon Vladimir Potanin's Interros holding.

TITLE: Greece Rejects Plea To Extradite Gusinsky
AUTHOR: By Patrick Quinn
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ATHENS, Greece - A Greek appeals court on Tuesday rejected a Russian extradition request for Vladimir Gusinsky, accused in his country of fraud and money laundering. 
 
 In a hearing that lasted about one minute, appellate court Judge Nikos Fagiolas threw out the Russian request after ruling that under Greek law the accusations against the former media magnate did not constitute a crime and were not proven. 
 &quot;The court rules against the extradition request because the crimes are not proven. It lifts the restrictions that have been placed on the accused,&quot; Fagiolas told the court. 
 The hearing began with a short statement read out by defense lawyer Alexandros Lykourezos, who said Russian claims that Gusinsky owed money to the state were unfounded. 
 &quot;No crime has taken place,&quot; he said. 
 After an equally short statement from another defense lawyer and a nod of assent from Gusinsky, Fagiolas read out the decision made jointly by the three-member appellate court. 
 Gusinsky, who had been released on bail a week after his arrest in Athens on Aug. 21, was set free and left the downtown Athens court in a jeep. 
 &quot;He will leave Greece this afternoon,&quot; Lykourezos said. 
 He was expected to return to his home in Israel later in the day, lawyers said. 
 &quot;I am satisfied with the court's decision,&quot; a smiling Gusinsky said without further comment. 
 Another of his lawyers, Antonis Vgontzas, said the court decision saved Greece from &quot;an insane adventure.&quot; 
 &quot;We are not simply satisfied, we are enthusiastic,&quot; Vgontzas said. 
 Russian prosecutors, acting on the Greek court's request, sent additional documentation last week to bolster the extradition bid for Gusinsky. The Prosecutor General's Office said new information sent on Sept. 7 gave details of Gusinsky's compensation agreement with state-owned gas company Gazprom, Interfax reported.
 The gas giant took over Gusinsky's media holdings in 2001 - a move widely criticized as a blow to media freedom. 
 The Prosecutor General's Office refused to comment on Tuesday's decision,, but that its investigation into Gusinsky remained ongoing.
 During a Sept. 29 hearing, a Greek prosecutor had described the extradition request as &quot;unclear.&quot; 
 Gusinsky was arrested after arriving from Israel. He was released on bail a week later and has since been staying at a luxury hotel in Athens. His 100,000 euro ($117,000) bail was returned.

TITLE: New Customs Code Looms
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Is Russia ready for a regime change?
 
It had better be. A new Customs Code comes into force in just over two months that proponents say promises a dramatic increase in international trade volumes by improving the way Russia does business with the rest of the world.
 Critics of the code, however, who have now had several months to study its final form, say it will cut budget revenues, breed chaos, squeeze out small traders, encourage intellectual property pirates and foster corruption in an agency already notorious for graft. Some even call it criminal.
 Neither side knows for certain what the effects on the economy will be from the unprecedented changes to a customs regime that accounts for some 40 percent of all federal budget revenues. But one thing is sure - there's no turning back. Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov made sure of that last week by handing backers of the new code, most notably the State Customs Committee, a clear victory over the Finance Ministry, the Economic Development and Trade Ministry and other critics who lobbied vociferously to delay the code's introduction by at least six months in order to amend &quot;problem clauses&quot; they say will hurt the economy.
 Kasyanov told ministers that any proposed changes to the code should be submitted by the end of the year, thus ensuring that the current parliament will not be able to consider them. With the last hurdle cleared, the new code will come into force as intended on Jan. 1 - some four years after it passed its first reading in the State Duma and eight months after it was finally approved by both houses of parliament and signed into law by President Vladimir Putin.
 With the changeover day fast approaching, one question is looming larger by the day: Will the Byzantine customs committee and its 68,000 employees be ready to handle all the changes embodied in the new, 269-page, 439-article law?
 The answer to that, according to committee chief Mikhail Vanin, is a resounding &quot;yes.&quot; Moreover, he said, the primary objective of the committee is no longer the roughly $2 billion it collects every month. From now on, he said, customs is about service first of all, not money.
 &quot;Today a decision was taken... [to change] the committee's main focus from being a major budget donor to regulating foreign economic activity,&quot; Vanin said after last week's Cabinet meeting.
 The head of the committee's legal department, Galina Balandina, who helped draft the legislation, said the code &quot;is not just a law that formally describes the movement of goods... it is a new philosophy of customs administration.&quot;
 &quot;The main objective is to protect the rights of importers and ensure trade develops in a civilized way and customs' administrative barriers do not become an obstacle [for businesses],&quot; she said.
 Customs contributed two out of every five rubles earned by the government last year, and is on pace to exceed this year's collection target of 638 billion rubles ($21.18 billion) by nearly 20 percent.
 While insisting that the government is too reliant on the committee for revenues, and despite the new emphasis on service, Vanin expects collections to jump another 20 percent next year to at least 900 billion rubles. This will be possible, he said, because of the increase in trade the new code will foster - a contention very much disputed by both the Finance Ministry and the Economic Development and Trade Ministry.
 In a joint analysis, the two ministries concluded that the new code will not only lead to annual losses to the budget in the &quot;dozens&quot; of billions of rubles, it will also actually encourage more corruption by stifling competition and boosting the customs' power rather than weakening it, as was intended.
 One example cited in the analysis is the decision to scrap licensing formalities for customs brokers, freight forwarders and the warehouses they use for temporary storage.
 The committee hailed the provision as a streamlining measure that would give all three categories of operators the right to function by simply notifying it of their existence. The catch, however, is that they must put up collateral before they can work, either in the form of property, cash, bank guarantee or bail bond. The hardest hit will be the brokers, who will have to come up with collateral worth 50 million rubles, while forwarders and warehouses will have to stump up 20 million rubles and 2.5 million rubles, respectively.
 Alexei Zernov, vice president of the Kaliningrad Association of Forwarders, said this provision alone will put scores of smaller companies out of business. &quot;This is just a way for customs officials to fill their pockets,&quot; he said.
 Zernov said some companies have already raised prices 30 percent as they scramble to make the deposit threshold by Jan. 1.
 And even if companies can afford the deposit, the mechanisms to provide them, such as identifying the banks, insurers and bonding agents authorized to operate, have yet to be worked out, said Alexander Malyutin, general director of Zoll.ru All-Russia Customs Broker.
 At a conference with businesses last week, Balandina of the customs committee fiercely protected the collateral requirement. &quot;[With this provision in place] the broker will not risk servicing shady deals. It will be like a stamp of quality,&quot; she said.
 Vanin said one of the main points of the provision was to make brokers more reliable. As a result, he said, the number of brokers will be reduced &quot;from thousands to several hundred.&quot;
 The Netherlands, for example, has just 15 brokers who handle exports and imports worth more than $600 billion a year, far more than in Russia, &quot;and nothing terrible is happening there,&quot; he said.
 The code is intended to be a clearly written law of &quot;maximum direct application&quot; that replaces the current hodgepodge of some 4,000 bylaws and instructions, some of which were written half a century ago. If all goes well, the end result will be a dramatic reduction in the amount of time and paperwork - or, ideally, computer work, since electronic declarations will be introduced - it takes to clear goods through the border. One somewhat zealous new measure to speed up processing requires customs officials who refuse to accept a declaration to file a report saying why.
 On average, it now takes nearly an hour for a truck to clear customs, but Vanin said it will be 10 to 15 minutes under the new code. And it should be even faster for some. Last month, with much pomp, Russia opened its first so-called green corridor in Vyborg on the Finnish border, allowing vehicles originating from Finland and Sweden to cross with no more hassle than waiting for a bar code to be scanned.
 Under the new program, customs agencies of both countries electronically transfer information about the cargo and carrier directly to the committee's information center, which then sends the information to the customs post. 
 One provision of the new code that may come back to haunt Russia is one that clearly violates the intellectual property rules of the World Trade Organization, which Russia has been trying to join for years.
 From Jan. 1, customs officials will no longer confiscate pirated goods unless the intellectual property owners of those goods essentially tell them an illegal delivery is about to enter or leave the country, a nearly impossible task.
 Some say the code will make life easier and more predictable for foreign and domestic companies alike. &quot;The code should, and indeed will, facilitate business,&quot; said Andrew Somers, president of the American Chamber of Commerce. &quot;Its self-implementation will reduce the opportunity for corruption.&quot;

TITLE: EU and Russia Agree On Grid Integration
AUTHOR: By Alla Startseva
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The European Union and Russia agreed Thursday to move toward full integration of their respective electricity grids, an ambitious project both sides said could be completed by 2007.
 
&quot;This is a groundbreaking proposal that is of tremendous interest to us,&quot; Anatoly Chubais, CEO of national power monopoly UES, told reporters after a roundtable meeting between senior energy officials from both sides.
 Europe's top energy and transportation official, Francois Lamoureux, said the ultimate goal was the complete synchronization of the massive grids to form a common electricity market and ensure the safety of energy supplies.
 He said he would officially recommend that Brussels and Moscow draft an agreement establishing joint institutions to work on the details.
 Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Khristenko, whose brief includes the energy sector, led the Russian delegation at Thursday's roundtable, held under the auspices the EU-Russia Energy Dialog and attended by more than 50 officials and industry experts.
 Chubais, who also represented the Commonwealth of Independent States at the meeting as chairman of the CIS Energy Council, called the need for nations to synchronize their power grids &quot;a global problem.&quot;
 Khristenko said that in light of the massive blackouts that have occurred in Europe and America this year, &quot;the problem of the reliability of power supplies must be rethought.&quot;
 UES, which has already synchronized the grids of all 14 of Russia's neighbors, is already studying how to do the same with Europe, Chubais said.
 Experts set up a working group in March to draft a &quot;comprehensive report&quot; on the issue, said Stephan Gewaltig of the EU's energy and transport directorate. He said it would be finalized and presented to Brussels early next year.
 Synchronizing electricity grids is a &quot;significant issue&quot; for the industry as a whole, but it benefits consumers the most because it increases both the reliability of power supplies and competition, which eventually leads to lower prices, Chubais said.
 Both sides said it was technically feasible for the EU and Russia to fully integrate their electricity grids within four years.
 &quot;The most optimistic scenario is 2007,&quot; Khristenko said.

TITLE: Cabinet Helps Small Business
AUTHOR: By Simon Ostrovsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov on Thursday hailed the growing role small businesses are playing in the economy, but called on the government to redouble its efforts to support the sector through less bureaucracy and taxes. Kasyanov, speaking to ministers during the weekly Cabinet meeting, said small businesses now account for 20 percent of gross domestic product, up from 14 percent just a year ago, but that bureaucracy remains &quot;the most sensitive and painful issue&quot; for the sector. 
 
&quot;A large economy starts with small business. Small business means social and economic stability for this country,&quot; Kasyanov said, according to the government's web site. 
 However, while Kasyanov trumpeted government efforts to cut red tape - such as reducing the number of organizations that must be visited to register a company from five to one - experts said little progress has actually been made on reducing bureaucracy. 
 &quot;The only thing that has changed is that you don't have to register your company with the local administration any more. This is done with the tax authorities now,&quot; said Oleg Zamulin, assistant professor at the New Economic School. 
 Zamulin, who conducted a nationwide survey of small businesses for the Center for Economic and Financial Research, or CEFIR, said much more needed to be done. 
 &quot;You still have to register with the Pension Fund, statistical organizations, social and medical insurance organizations, even though all these things could be brought under one roof,&quot; he said. Kasyanov also praised legislation that simplifies taxes and prevents regulators from visiting a small business for the first three years of its existence. Small businesses often complain of predatory inspections from fire, health and other inspectors who often exact bribes disguised as fines. 
 The simplified tax regime allows businesses with fewer than 100 employees and revenues of less than 15 million rubles ($500,000) per year to either pay 8 percent of revenues or 20 percent of profits. It also eliminates social security payments, but retains contributions to the Pension Fund. 
 &quot;The ideas are right but they are not being implemented fully,&quot; said Vladislav Oreshkin, an economist at the investment house United Financial Group. 
 Both Oreshkin and Zamulin said the figures given by Kasyanov - that the small-business sector accounts for 20 percent of GDP and employs 13 million people - were conservative. 
 &quot;Government figures are very general and don't take into account the gray economy,&quot; Oreshkin said, &quot;If the reforms were working, more companies would be encouraged to register, pay taxes and statistics would be more accurate.&quot; 
 Nevertheless, reforms are having moderate success. 
 &quot;Those businesses switching to the simplified tax system are seeing taxation as less of a problem than before,&quot; Zamulin said. 
 &quot;Although heavy taxation remains the No. 1 problem businesses complain about, we found that other factors such as economic instability, regulation and tax administration are taking a back seat to competition as the greatest challenge small businesses face, and that's the way it should be.&quot; he said. 
 Adding to the confusion are the criteria by which Russia considers businesses to be &quot;small,&quot; which vary depending on what a company produces. If measured by international standards, the small-business sector would account for 40 percent of GDP, Zamulin said. 
 Kasyanov approved an Anti-Monopoly Ministry proposal that will universalize criteria used to define small businesses next year. Under the proposal, companies with fewer than 10 employees and a turnover below 15 million rubles will be considered micro-businesses and firms employing fewer than 100 people will be considered small businesses. No revenue ceiling has been set for the latter yet. Companies employing fewer than 250 employees with annual revenues of less than $500 million will be considered medium-sized businesses. 
 Also on Thursday, the World Bank offered Russia a long-term, low-interest $300 million loan to support small-business development, news agencies quoted Anti-Monopoly Minister Ilya Yuzhanov as saying. &quot;It would not make economic sense to reject an offer that allows Russia to borrow on the cheap,&quot; Yuzhanov said.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Housing Solution
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Gosstroy chairman Nikolai Koshman announced at a briefing in St. Petersburg Thursday that the ministry will implement a program to renovate dilapidated housing in the city, Interfax reported. "Gosstroy will sign an agreement with the city administration and attract private investors who will revamp the housing pool," the minister said.
 Koshman said the new program does not preclude use of federal funds in the same sector. According to Gosstroy data, in 2003 the federal budget contributed 1,380,000 rubles to rebuilding outdated housing in Russia.
 Another solution to old housing problem is a program initiated in August 2002 by the governments of Moscow and St. Petersburg in which 27 five-story apartment buildings are slated for demolition during the first quarter of 2004.
 
 
<b>Tinkoff Goes Macro 
 </b>

MOSCOW (SPT) - Microbrewer Tinkoff has teamed up with Germany's Krones AG to build a fully-fledged brewery in Pushkin in a deal worth $75 million, Vedomosti reported Wednesday. The plant, which will come on line in September next year, will initially increase Tinkoff's output ten-fold to 20 million hectoliters. With an additional $20 million investment the brewery will have a capacity of 40 million hectoliters per year. Tinkoff expects $35 million in sales this year and currently controls a tiny 0.08 percent of the domestic beer market according to Business Analytika data. 
 
 
<b>Transneft Pipelines
 </b>

MOSCOW (SPT) - Transneft is investing 23.7 billion rubles toward the expansion of the Baltic Pipeline System, Interfax reported Wednesday.
 Ten billion rubles of that sum was made up of loans from Sberbank used to increase processing capacity of the pipeline by 6 million tons. Capacity now stands at 18 million tons.
 The draft plan for the project names a total cost of 34.7 billion rubles, 12 billion rubles of which Transneft plans to raise by selling bonds.
 The pipeline will transport oil from the Timano-Pechorsky and Zapadno-Sibirsky gas fields. 
 Forecast capacity for the pipeline is 42 million tons of oil per year. 



TITLE: Oil and Ecology at Odds in Kaliningrad
AUTHOR: By Steven Paulikas
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: CURONIAN SPIT, Lithuania/Kaliningrad - The golden dunes and towering forests of the Curonian Spit seem to exude a sense of natural majesty and calm.
 
Yet this 99-kilometer wisp of wild and sandy land in the Baltic Sea shared by Lithuania and Kaliningrad has become ground zero in an increasingly contentious conflict pitting oilmen against ecologists and two increasingly divergent cultures against each other.
 Oil major LUKoil's announcement earlier this year that it plans to begin exploiting an oil field called D-6 off the coast of the spit, a UNESCO world heritage site, has been tacitly endorsed by Moscow and even the local residents of the southern, Russian sector of the peninsula. But it is being fiercely resisted not only in the northern sector, but in Lithuania as a whole.
 The venture, projected to produce 600,000-700,000 metric tons of crude per year for three decades, has rankled Lithuanians, who object to the platform's proposed construction site, which is 22 kilometers from the spit and only 7 kilometers from the international maritime border - close enough to virtually guarantee massive environmental damage should an oil slick develop.
 While Russian officials and LUKoil executives alike maintain that the environmental effects on the spit will be minimal, Russia's Natural Resources Ministry has ignored repeated requests from Vilnius to share the results of the impact study it claims to have conducted.
 The controversy over the platform has raised serious concern among the Lithuanians living on the northern end the spit.
 &quot;This is just the biggest load of rubbish ever,&quot; said Danguole Sauliene, director of cultural affairs in the Lithuanian municipality of Neringa, located in the central section of the spit, roughly 350 kilometers from Vilnius.
 &quot;I'm at a loss - all the people here are at a loss - as to what to do,&quot; said Sauliene, who fears that oil from the D-6 field could permanently destroy the delicate ecosystem of the spit, which separates the sea from the enormous yet shallow Curonian Lagoon.
 The 3,000 residents of the Lithuanian side of the spit depend overwhelmingly on tourism and fishing -two activities sensitive to the environmental health of the region - for the economic well being of their community.
 &quot;I don't know a single person here who isn't afraid of D-6,&quot; said Irma, who sells smoked eel to tourists in the fishing village of Juodkrante. &quot;If there's an accident, fishing will be damaged, and the tourists will stop coming. Would you let your children swim in a sea full of oil?&quot;
 LUKoil has vowed to use the same technology it employs in much more elaborate projects, such as those in the Caspian region, to guard against spills or leaks. But Lithuanians, who stand to gain nothing from the drilling, for the most part simply don't trust the intentions of the company, or Russia for that matter.
 Adding to the distrust is LUKoil's sometimes awkward handling of the matter, which has done little to comfort a Lithuanian conscience still tender from decades of occupation.
 &quot;What kind of guarantee can we give?&quot; said one company official. &quot;We could talk about the [Chernobyl-style] Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania - no one in Lithuania will guarantee the safety of that.&quot;
 Also compounding public opposition to the project is what Lithuanians view as the Russian government's cavalier attitude about it, refusing, for example, to share the details of its environmental impact study and resisting two UNESCO resolutions mandating that an international team of experts inspect the site.
 Faced with a little more than tacit moral support from the European Union, Lithuanian politicians have, perhaps belatedly, begun to act. Last month, the Lithuanian Conservative Party threw its support behind a movement to boycott the network of gas stations owned by LUKoil's Lithuanian subsidiary LUKoil Baltija. The initiative, originally organized by the Lithuanian Green Movement, an environmental action group, gained widespread media attention while inflicting an undisclosed amount of financial damage on LUKoil.
 Emotions over the current crisis are further complicated by the long history of D-6, a field that was discovered by Soviet geologists in 1983. After locals on the Lithuanian side learned of plans for intensive drilling a year later, mass protests derailed the government's plans, creating a 20-year lull in petroleum extraction in the eastern Baltic Sea. &quot;Russians want to come and shit on my home, just like they did before,&quot; said Kazimeras Mizgeris, an artist and long-time resident of Neringa, who has been active in the campaign against the platform. &quot;Of course I'm angry about it.&quot;
 &quot;These idiots will come here, pump, and if something goes wrong, we'll just hear, 'oops, sorry.' But for us, it will be a complete disaster,&quot; he said.
 The predominant pattern of land use in the Lithuanian sector of the spit, which requires strict adherence to conservation laws, reflects a national sentiment bordering on obsession with the area.
 &quot;Even in Soviet times, there were different regulations on each side; there was a ban on farming and a cap on the number of people allowed to live here,&quot; explained Stasys Mekalis, mayor of Neringa.
 The growing sense of anxiety about D-6 has some of the Lithuanian residents of the peninsula increasingly focusing their outrage not only at distant Moscow, but at their Russian neighbors to the south.
 The differences in mentality, history, and material well-being are palpable when crossing the heavily fortified border into the Russian sector of the spit.
 In an area where Russian rural poverty exists within uncomfortably close proximity to an up-and-coming European resort, environmental concerns are taking a backseat to the need for economic revival.
 Kaliningraders' enthusiasm for LUKoil as one of a scarce few potential economic saviors is bolstered by the company's considerable presence in the geographically isolated region. LUKoil officials claim to directly contribute some 40 percent of Kaliningrad's municipal and regional budget revenues, a figure independent analysts say is closer to 30 percent, but nonetheless significant.
 While residents up and down the spit prepare for what they say is the inevitable implementation of the project - the platform is nearly finished on the Russian mainland - for better or for worse, environmental groups in Lithuania and Russia warn that such a large field will eventually require more than a single platform to exploit, a claim that LUKoil will neither confirm nor deny.

TITLE: U.S. Cargill Plans New Investment
AUTHOR: By Alex Nicholson
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - American food and agriculture giant Cargill plans to invest $200 million in expanding its business in Russia, according to Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev.
 
Gordeyev, who met in the White House on Monday with David Rogers, head of Cargill's European division, Cargill International SA, was quoted Tuesday as saying the Minnesota-based company would invest the money in building new plants.
 Cargill's Moscow office said late Tuesday that it was awaiting word from its office in the United States before releasing a statement.
 Gordeyev said Cargill would pump $100 million into building a new plant to make vegetable oil in Voronezh and $50 million into a malting plant in Tula.
 The remaining $50 million will be invested in the company's Yefremovsky glucose and syrup plant, in which it has had a controlling stake since 1995.
 The privately held conglomerate opened its Moscow office in 1991. It is involved in everything from trading grain and crude oil to processing meat, making steel, and financial services.
 Cargill could face stiff competition in Voronezh. News reports in March said Russian agricultural giant Rusagro had signed a contract with the regional administration to build its own $100 million vegetable oil factory. The factory is due to be completed in March 2005.
 Cargill expects to post a net profit of $1.3 billion in 2003 on revenues of some $60 billion. It reported a profit of $798 million in 2002.
 This week the conglomerate launched a worldwide advertising campaign that employs the tag line, &quot;Nourishing Ideas. Nourishing People,&quot; to encourage people to think of it more as a business partner than a provider of raw materials.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Publisher Joint Venture
 </b>

MOSCOW (SPT) - The news and publishing houses Prof-Media and Independent Media will set up a joint venture for establishing or acquiring up to 20 professional magazines on the Russian market over the next five years, the press service of Prof-Media, which is a part of the Interros group, reported Thursday. 
 The joint venture will be created on parity basis and it will specialize in B2B magazines. Derk Sauer, the head of Independent Media, reported that the two companies would invest several million dollars in the joint venture.
 Independent Media was established in 1992. It publishes such famous magazines as Cosmopolitan, Harper's Bazaar and Men's Health, newspapers Moscow Times, St. Petersburg Times and Vedomosti (in cooperation with Financial Times and Wall Street Journal). 
 
 
<b>Lebedev Denied Bail 
 </b>

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Moscow court declined an appeal to allow a shareholder in Russian oil company Yukos, Platon Lebedev, out of prison, a spokesman for Lebedev said Wednesday. 
 Lebedev, who is being investigated for his role in the 1994 privatization of a fertilizer company, has been held in a Moscow jail since early July. His detention and a string of Yukos-related investigations are widely seen as a Kremlin effort to keep pressure on Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Yukos' majority shareholder as well as its chief executive, in an election season. 
 
 
<b>Oil Reserve Woes 
 </b>

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia, the world's second largest oil exporter, has no interest in raising production much above 9 million barrels per day because it would quickly deplete its reserves, Moscow's top energy official said Wednesday. 
 But analysts said it was up to private oil majors to decide whether to maintain fast output growth, which could rise to 12 million bpd this decade if new pipelines were built and prices remained above $20 per barrel. 
 
 
<b>Aeroflot Gets Airbus 
 </b>

MOSCOW (SPT) - Aeroflot on Wednesday received the first of 18 new Airbus A319 aircraft it ordered as part of a sweeping fleet restructuring, the flagship carrier said. Aeroflot is replacing 27 older Boeings and Airbuses with 27 new craft - 9 Boeing-767 and 18 Airbus A-320/319. Restructuring is expected to be completed in 2005 and will allow the company to save $95 million annually. 
 
 
<b>Gazprom Accounting 
 </b>

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Gazprom, which has resisted pressure to improve its financial reporting, said Wednesday its board would discuss the idea of presenting separate results for each of its divisions. 
 The monopoly currently holds all businesses in a single entity and its annual reports do not break down the individual performance of its production, transportation and sales units. Government free market reformists say that makes it difficult for independent producers to evaluate how much they should be charged for using Gazprom's pipelines. 
 The Economic Development and Trade Ministry has proposed spinning off the different businesses to introduce more clarity into Gazprom's reports as part of plans to restructure the gas industry. 



TITLE: Governors Line Up
AUTHOR: By Nikolai Petrov
TEXT: United Russia's party list for the State Duma elections, announced at the party's congress on Sept. 20, provided analysts with plenty of food for thought. In addition to the two regional heavyweights, Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov and Tatar President Mintimer Shaimiyev, included on the federal part of the list, 28 regional leaders figure on regional lists. In total, two thirds of regional lists are headed by governors.
 
The Kremlin's rapprochement with regional leaders, who until not long ago were among the federal center's biggest enemies, was initiated at United Russia's congress at the end of March, when the party's higher council inducted six governors: Viktor Ishayev (Khabarovsk), Vladimir Pozgalyov (Vologda), Vladimir Chub (Rostov), Alexander Khloponin (Krasnoyarsk), Aman Tuleyev (Kemerovo) and Yegor Stroyev (Oryol).
 The current gubernatorial &quot;crescendo&quot; is in counterpoint to the Duma elections in 1999, when initially several dozen governors signed an appeal to the country, which was the first stage in the creation of the pro-governmental Unity party; several days later at the official launch, only nine regional leaders made an appearance; and when they got down to drafting the party list, only one governor consented (Tver Governor Vladimir Platov, who now faces criminal charges).
 So what were the criteria for selecting United Russia's gubernatorial regiment? The backbone is made up of the gubernatorial caucus in United Russia's higher council. Clearly, first and foremost the Kremlin needs influential heads of strong regions. It is surely no coincidence that the Kremlin team includes six of the seven governors heading the regional centers of the federal districts: Luzhkov, Chub, Ishayev, Sverdlovsk Governor Eduard Rossel, acting St. Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov and even Nizhny Novgorod Governor Gennady Khodyrev - who was elected with the Communist Party's support and whose wife is running on the Glazyev bloc party list.
 Of course, the Kremlin's relations with the regional elite are far too pragmatic to allow ideological considerations to get in the way. As a result, the Kremlin regiment includes former Soviet Politburo member Stroyev, former regional First Party Secretary Shaimiyev, former Communist presidential candidate Tuleyev, as well as technocrats such as Adygeya President Khazret Sovmen and Khloponin. The original idea of getting &quot;non-party&quot; governors on board is reminiscent of the so-called &quot;indestructable bloc of communists and non-party members&quot; in Soviet times.
 Having big names on the list is all well and good, but the most important thing is how many voters stand behind those names. The Kremlin list attempts to encompass as many voters and regions as possible. Of Russia's 10 largest regions, nine are represented on the United Russia party list, accounting for almost one third of the electorate. All told, the several dozen regional leaders on the party list give the Kremlin a &quot;controlling stake&quot; of more than 50 percent of voters.
 The Kremlin not only lured all the most influential governors into the United Russia camp, it also scared the others off running with any other parties. The only exception is Mikhail Lapshin, leader of the Agrarian Party and head of the Altai republic.
 Four years ago, apart from governors on the Fatherland-All Russia party list (six) and Unity (one), there were six on Our Home Is Russia's party list and two on the Communist Party list. This time around, the number of governors participating in the elections has increased, and they are all marching under the banner of the chief &quot;party of power.&quot;
 It is pretty clear what the Kremlin needs from the governors, but what do the governors need from the Kremlin? Six of the regional leaders face gubernatorial elections in December and, while they normally register as independent candidates, a show of Kremlin support can be quite important for them, as well as the &quot;administrative resources,&quot; which are now much more heavily concentrated in the hands of the Kremlin than before. Some governors, such as Leningrad Governor Valery Serdyukov and Rossel, have just won re-election, and now it's payback time.
 Russia's rich history provides us plenty of analogies. For example, the Kremlin's tactics vis-a-vis the regional leaders can be compared to those employed in 1993, when to ensure that Boris Yeltsin's constitutional referendum was passed, the governors had to run in elections for the Federation Council. Then, of course, the governors' incentives were positive - they were gaining legitimacy independent of the Kremlin. Now they are more like hostages who have to prove themselves and earn the right to rule as feudal princes.
 Chained to United Russia, they are called upon to ensure a good result for the Kremlin not only by delivering the vote for the &quot;party of power,&quot; but also by ensuring a good turnout. Following the principle that you answer with your head, I would recommend banishing the governors whose regions perform poorly to the Duma for &quot;retraining&quot; purposes. Indeed, it should not be ruled out that some governors will end up there.
 If the Kremlin strategists' are successful, it could have far-reaching consequences, including vis-a-vis plans to enlarge regions and Duma elections becoming a vote of confidence in regional governors.
 
 <i>Nikolai Petrov, head of the Center for Political and Geographical Research, contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times. </i>

TITLE: Leave Soviet- Era Training In Soviet Era
TEXT: Centrist and leftist factions in the State Duma seem to be determined to re-introduce so-called preliminary military training to Russian schools.
 
Last Friday, the Duma voted 338 to 42 in a first reading to revive this compulsory Soviet-era training for students in their final year of school. The bill was introduced by the Duma defense committee, which is chaired by General Andrei Nikolayev of People's Deputy, a pro-Kremlin faction.
 Other pro-Kremlin centrists all but had to support the bill, especially after President Putin told teachers that such training &quot;is not bad, it's necessary and useful'' - comments which were no doubt welcomed by the Defense Ministry, which continues to rely on teenage conscripts to fill the ranks of its armed forces.
 It is clear why the Communists and the Liberal Democratic Party also voted for the bill: They long for the gigantic Soviet war machine. It is not clear, however, if such training would enhance Russia's security.
 Arguably, the Soviet armed forces benefited from the fact that every graduate knew or was supposed to know how to disassemble and assemble a Kalashnikov in less than a minute and duck for cover if stranded in open ground during a nuclear explosion.
 After all, the Soviet military planners were preparing for an all-out war with NATO, envisioning both large-scale ground battles and nuclear strikes.
 Post-Soviet Russia no longer faces the specter of a global war with the West, and its armed forces should be prepared to ward off different and more real threats, such as local conflicts and incursions by non-state actors.
 Such warfare requires a lean but professional fighting force that can be deployed rapidly and, if necessary, reinforced by regularly trained reservists. It should be equipped with high-precision, all-weather weaponry and communications systems.
 Only such a force and not a mass of Kalashnikov-toting teenage conscripts would allow Russia to deter and interdict the existing threats to its security with minimal loss of life and maximum efficiency.
 Those teenagers who wish to become professional soldiers have plenty of military academies to choose from, whereas the others would be better off attending the survival course that replaced military training in schools.
 Even if some commanders still see NATO as the gravest threat, teaching hundreds of thousands of teenagers to march and fire a Kalashnikov is not the answer. After all, virtually every male in Iraq knows how to handle a Kalashnikov, but neither the volunteers nor the Soviet-styled Iraqi armed forces proved able to stop the technologically superior and professional U.S.-led force.


TITLE: Border-Zone Shifts Reek of Willful Neglect
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalyev
TEXT: While federal authorities pay at least lip service to the goal of Russia becoming integrated into European society, their colleagues in the regions do things that keep pushing Russia back into its past. This happened recently in the republic of Karelia republic, a region that includes thousands of square kilometers annexed from Finland as a result of the 1939 Winter War. This fact should have inspired the Karelian government to do anything possible to make the two nations become closer, whether by developing economic ties or by providing a better environment for foreign investment in the republic. But in spring, the republic's head Sergei Katanandov signed a decree that was to take effect from Nov. 1 to extend the border zone, making it 20 times greater than it was in Soviet times, when a fence restricted entry to the zone within 40 kilometers of the border. Katanandov's restrictions would have taken in all areas up to 100 kilometers from the Finnish border. Federal regulations state that non-residents may enter the border zones only if the Federal Border Service has given permission, a rule that many describe as a throwback.
 
Izvestia reported last week that border authorities in Karelia are getting ready to start enforcing the regulation in two weeks, convinced that it will be easier for them to stop illegal migration and smuggling in the region. The regulation would have done so, if the republic's economic development authority had not backed off at the last minute and persuaded Katanandov to change his mind. It's very hard for me to understand why Katanandov made his decision in the first place if his real aim was to secure the border. Last December, Russian national media reported the Finnish border service was concerned about the safety of its eastern border after Russia allegedly moved border troops from the northwest to Chechnya. To check this information, in January I met Lieutenant Colonel Pasi Tolvanen, a representative of Finnish Frontier Guard Headquarters. Armed with lots of statistics and charts spread around the table of his Helsinki office, Tolvanen said Finns have nothing to worry about.
 The Finnish side is pretty happy about its cooperation with the Russian border service and there is no sign that illegal border crossings are increasing, only very rare cases of illegal immigrants trying to climb over the fence. The western part of the border is quite safe, he said. It looks as if border guards do their job quite well, given the recent experience of a 21-year-old French student, who happened to get lost on his bicycle traveling along the Finnish border. He ended up in the hands of Russian border guards on Monday after unintentionally crossing the line with a small amount of Euros and a French identification card. Such things happen - the student was returned to Finland on Tuesday. The Federal Border Service says that in the first half of 2003 only two people were detained for trying to cross the border illegally.
 Izvestia quoted locals who said they would have been happy if the border zone was extended because they are tired of tourists and poachers. Of course they are. In spring of 2002, I traveled to the border zone with a group of Swiss journalists to get a picture of how people live there. This picture turned out to be gray and frustrating. In contrast with the amazing landscapes - from unblemished hill country to wild and ancient forests with bright colors - was the poverty of the locals, widespread unemployment, drug addiction and prostitution. Selling their bodies seems to be a principle source of income for women, who live by the border with their husbands. Every night the men drown themselves in vodka bought with money their wives just earned on the freeway. It is as hard to believe as it is hard to see. I hope it was not because Katanandov wanted these types of activities to occupy the residents of an even greater part of the republic. Or was it that he just wanted to have more unregistered wood to be sold to Finland? Timber could be like gold for Karelia and processing it could create many jobs. But it looks as if the Soviet-style decision to extend the fence was aimed not at improving the lives of local people, but at selling more raw materials. I am glad the Russian border guards will stay closer to the border. It would be even better if they patrolled only the line of the border itself, as is common practice in the most civilized countries.

TITLE: Mariinsky Rises From Ashes
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Although posters for &quot;The Golden Cockerel&quot; had already been printed, the Mariinsky Theater made a last minute change in its programme and opened its new season with a production of &quot;Mazepa&quot; on October 10.
 
Artistic director Valery Gergiev hadn't been planning to attend the opening of the season, but flew from New York to conduct the opera. He wanted to show support for what this year has become a very meaningful event.
 The sets for &quot;Mazepa&quot; were destroyed in a huge fire in one of the theater's warehouses on Ulitsa Pisareva, about a kilometer from the theater itself, in early September. The sets for &quot;The Golden Cockerel,&quot; meanwhile, were in another storage facility, and didn't suffer.
 By arranging to show &quot;Mazepa&quot; instead, Gergiev said on opening night, &quot;We wanted to show everyone that the fire didn't knock us down. The fire won't marr the festive spirit of the jubilee year.&quot;
 Immediately after the fire, there were many doubts as to whether the company would be able to open the season, and maintain its schedule, both at home and abroad. Gergiev dismissed the speculation.
 &quot;We haven't canceled a single tour abroad, and we won't,&quot; he said. 
 The restoration of sets for six productions - out of thirty destroyed in the fire - is now in progress, and according to Gergiev, &quot;The Fountain of Bakhchisserai,&quot; &quot;Romeo and Juliet,&quot; &quot;The Flying Dutchman&quot; and &quot;Parsifal&quot; will be back on stage before the New Year.
 The next day after the fire, the theater was bombarded with offers of help and commiserations from around the world.
 Many of the company's sponsors also reacted promptly. &quot;For instance, Airbus transferred $25,000 to our account immediately,&quot; Gergiev said. &quot;Transneft and Vneshtorgbank have been very helpful, too.&quot;
 &quot;We had messages from opera and ballet theaters around the world, and from individual admirers,&quot; said Mariinsky spokeswoman Oksana Tokranova.
 Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi said that his ministry would give the theater financial and organizational support for the acquisition of a new building for the warehouse, or to restore the burnt one.
 But Gergiev admitted that the forthcoming season will see fewer premieres than in previous years, when the Mariinsky put forward about ten new shows annually. However, anything on the grand scale of Das Ring Der Niebelungen, Wagner's four-opera epic which the Mariinsky premiered in its entirity this year, will not be on the agenda.
 &quot;I will make it clear to all directors and their teams that during this season I am very much inclined toward [financially] lighter productions,&quot; he said. &quot;All in all, I am sure, it wouldn't hurt to have a slightly calmer season.&quot;
 Among the definite events, the audiences can expect Saint-Saens's &quot;Samson et Dalila&quot; with world-renowned mezzo Olga Borodina in lead role. It will be directed by Charles Rubo who staged acclaimed new productions of &quot;La Traviata&quot; and &quot;Turandot&quot; in previous seasons. Dmitry Chernyakov, responsible for the 2001 rendition of Rimsky-Korsakov's &quot;The Tale of the Invisible City Of Kitezh,&quot; the winner of the prestigious Golden Mask Award (Russia's top performing arts prize) will stage Glinka's &quot;Life For the Tsar.&quot; The Fourth International Ballet Festival &quot;Mariinsky&quot; will also be held from March 5 through March 14 next year.
 In the new season, the theater will more frequently show recently produced shows from the past three to five years, most of which local audiences haven't yet seen, including, for instance, &quot;The Demon,&quot; &quot;Der Ring Das Niebelungen,&quot; &quot;La Traviata&quot; and &quot;The Golden Cockerel.&quot; 
 &quot;In our current circumstances, the most important thing is the attitude of the theater, and not the list of losses,&quot; Gergiev said. &quot;And our attitude is best reflected by the fast restoration of &quot;Mazepa,&quot; which was in ruins a little over a month ago. Having seen that, everyone can develop a fair picture of the effort we put into keeping going.&quot;
 Trade Minister German Gref and Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin attended the opening of the season on October 10th and have confirmed that the government would help the theater pay for the repairs. Between $3 and 4 million from the government's reserve fund will be provided for the Mariinsky's needs.
 The investigation of possible causes of the fire still continues, although it has not yielded results. &quot;I am constantly in contact with St. Petersburg to find out the causes of the fire but all I know is that they still can't rule out arson,&quot; Gergiev said.
 
 <i>
Links: http://www.mariinsky.ru</i>

TITLE: Griboyedov Has Staying Power
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Griboyedov, the local underground club which made news late last month when it was raided by the drug squad, will celebrate its seventh anniversary with a concert and an all-night party this Saturday.
 
Launched on Oct. 18, 1996, the club soon became one of the most popular underground joints frequented by expats, students, artists and musicians.
 From the very start, the club's art policies have been directed by members of Dva Samaliota, one of the newest and trendiest local bands of the early 1990s, notorious for its trademark nonsense-language vocals, which the band sold as &quot;Swahili.&quot;
 Dva Samaliota's drummer Mikhail Sindalovsky, bassist Anton Belyankin and keyboard player Denis Medvedev, who quit the band last year to concentrate on his solo career as DJ Re-disco, continue to work as the club's art directors.
 The innovations that Griboyedov introduced to the local club scene include the system of face control, &quot;extreme-chess&quot; championships (with glasses of vodka and brandy for pieces) and DJ Re-disco's hugely popular retro parties featuring 1960s/80s Soviet pop and disco songs.
 Some of the bands who once performed at the club as up-and-coming acts have become successful, the best example being the massively popular ska-punk band Leningrad.
 For a few years, the club also produced its own mini-almanac called &quot;Pam Pers.&quot; The club started to produce CD compilations called &quot;Griboyedov Music&quot; in 2001. With six volumes released so far, the discs include bands that have played at the venue except for one featuring DJ Re-disco's mix of disco and retro tunes.
 However, Griboyedov has also become infamous for brutal OMON special forces police raids, the most violent and devastating being the one in February 1996, when some of the customers and staff were reported badly beaten and the office furniture and equipment vandalized.
 A week after the most recent, Sept. 26 drug-squad raid, which - according to Griboyedov, did not reveal any drugs in the club - the local Rosbalt news agency published a news item about the raid. 
 Referring to the drug squad's press service, Rosbalt claimed the raid had uncovered 44 grams of heroin and 6 grams of marijuana.
 &quot;We will be suing for libel. No criminal case was started, nothing was seized,&quot; said art director Sindalovsky this week.
 &quot;I don't know whom exactly we'll be suing; our lawyers are now working on it. In theory, we can sue any publication that printed this - and the jury will be sorting out who told whom what.&quot;
 Seven years since its launch, the club is now in the process of rebuilding.
 Though designer Mikhail Barkhin's ambitious project to erect a blue cupola over the bunker that the club occupies has not been fulfilled due to lack of financing, Griboyedov is now undergoing serious reconstruction work aimed at increasing the club's capacity and laying out a small garden with a cafe over it.
 &quot;Both entrances will be wider, we will move the office and wardrobe, so there will be another bar in the place of the old wardrobe, and a wider stage,&quot; said Sindalovsky.
 &quot;We will increase useable space by 50 to 60 square meters, which is plenty for a 250 square-meter club.&quot;
 The anniversary concert will feature some of the bands associated with Griboyedov's history, such as Pep-See, Kacheli, Selyodka, Solnechny Udar and NOM. 
 Despite early reports, Dva Samaliota, whose frontman Vadim Pokrovsky died on Sept. 24, will not be performing.
 &quot;Forty days haven't even passed since his death and it's too early [for the band] to get back on the stage,&quot; said Sindalovsky. 
 

 <i>
Griboyedov's anniversary invitation-only concert will start at 6:30 p.m. Saturday and will be followed by an open all-night party at 11 p.m. </i>

TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: This Wednesday saw the opening of a new club, something that has happened extremely rarely in the past few months.
 
Called <strong>Corinth</strong>, it is a brainchild of local singer and author Julia Belomlinskaya, described in a preface to her recent explicit memoirs, &quot;Bednaya Devushka&quot; (Poor Girl), as a &quot;cult figure of early-1980s St. Petersburg and a living legend of New York.&quot;
 The new club which can hold 300 visitors occupies the basement and part of the first floor of the building at 29 Bolshaya Konyushennaya Ulitsa that formerly belonged to the recently folded Gorodok cafe.
 According to Belomlinskaya, Corinth will feature ethnic music of all kinds, from Celtic to Tuvinian to Jewish. 
 &quot;I want to do something along the lines of Boom - a club that will be exclusive by definition. The fact that ethnic music will be played there should scare away anyone who doesn't fit.&quot;
 Belomlinskaya said she would work in collaboration with Rita Neiman who promotes the Ethic Wednesday program at the Hesed Avraam Jewish cultural center .
 However, on opening night the club was overcrowded and evidently in need of some decoration work. Belomlinskaya was not sure when it will start working regularly.
 In any case, the club scene's central event this week is the seventh anniversary of <strong>Griboyedov</strong>.
 The bunker venue that claims to be the oldest local club functioning on the same place without breaks will throw an invitation-only concert and open all-night party this Saturday. Tickets for the party will cost 400 rubles. See article, this page.
 <strong>Markscheider Kunst</strong>, the local Afro-Caribbean-style band, will perform at Red Club on Friday.
 According to frontman Sergei Yefremenko, it will be the only concert for the next four or five weeks. 
 He said that the band's Zaire-born second singer Seraphim Selenge Makangila will appear on only a pair of songs.
 &quot;It's because we're sick and tired of playing old songs. We are preparing to launch the next album with him,&quot; he said. 
 However, the Friday concert will be based largely on the band's past two albums, &quot;Petersburg-Kinshasa Transit&quot; (1998) and &quot;Krasivo Sleva&quot; (It's Beautiful on the Left) (2002).
 The concert will also premier a video for the song &quot;Muzyka Kvasa-Kvasa&quot; (Kvass Kvass Music) and the documentary &quot;Concert at Moloko.&quot; 
 Called &quot;Na Svyazi,&quot; the band's forthcoming album, which the band worked on from winter to June, will be premiered in Moscow and St. Petersburg in late November. 
 <strong>Billy's Band</strong>, which resumed its local gigs after a hiatus with a show at Red Club last week, will stage its Tom Waits-based performance at GEZ-21, or Gallery of Experimental Sound Saturday.
 &quot;It's a performance in two parts based on songs by Waits,&quot; said the band's singer and double bass player Vadim &quot;Billy&quot; Novik about the show, which is called &quot;Warm Beer, Cold Women.&quot;
 &quot;It shows Tom Waits sitting by the bar and thinking, while beer gets warm and women grow indifferent and cold.&quot; See Gigs for the address.
 With its regular set, Billy's Band will appear at an exhibition opening at the Anna Akhmatova Museum on Friday.
 
 <i>- By Sergey Chernov 
 </i>

TITLE: dinner jazzed up with a little drama
AUTHOR: By Matthew Brown
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Picture the scene: a corner table in a dimly-lit cafe, early evening. A middle-aged man in a trenchcoat, a little worse for wear, grasps the hands of a prim young lady opposite. The waitress brings him a beer and her a cognac. He is loud, sentimental, a little aggressive. She is defensive and nervous. Later, a stout, older lady suddenly enters. The seated couple freeze. She sits with them and demands of the younger woman: &quot;What are you doing with my husband?&quot;. Sensibly, the women agree to leave, to talk it over. The man, swaying, finishes his beer, picks up his briefcase and exits. The waitress promptly clears the table and realizes that nobody has paid. She yelps &quot;But that cognac was Courvoisier!&quot; 
 
These events actually happened during the course of a meal at Gravitsapa, a modest yet comfortable cafe on Pochtamtsky Pereulok where the official entertainment is live jazz, Wednesday to Friday from 8 p.m. We were there too early to sample the program, but were told that it normally consists of a saxophonist or a pianist playing light jazz standards to a backing track - a suitably laid-back approach in this small, well-appointed basement venue.
 The menu features Russian classics with sophisticated pretentions. After swiftly being served tea with lemon (10 rubles, 33 cents) for one of us, and draught Bochkaryov beer (35 rubles, $1.16) for the other, we each selected a salad to start. Having experienced various interpretations of Greek Salad around town (grated cheddar! mayonnaise!), Gravitsapa served up a relatively passable one for 60 rubles ($2): slices of red bell pepper, tomato, and cucumber cradling quite a few pitted black olives and large cubes of feta. Real olive oil and curly parsley completed a nicely prepared starter, although it wasn't very big. Meanwhile, in light of recent news events &quot;Gubernator&quot; - Governor's - salad seemed right at 75 rubles ($2.50). This is a tasty mix of hot, stewed slices eggplant, tomato and yellow pepper, spiced with paprika, and topped with a big handful of walnuts, olives and feta. A dollop of smetana on the side cooled the salad's attractively strong flavors. 
 Enter disheveled man with jittery mistress.
 The main courses on offer include tuna steak, shark steak and the temptation of marbled beefsteak at 180 rubles ($6) for 130 grams or 340 rubles ($11.30) for 350 grams. In the end, however, and being told that a pike-perch in cream sauce, Sudak &quot;Salferino&quot;, (120 rubles, $4) would take 40 minutes to prepare, those old standbys Chicken Kiev (120 rubles, $6) and Chicken Fillet in Sauce (90 rubles, $3), both with fries (25 rubles, 83 cents) were selected.
 When the main courses arrived we were a bit let down by the bog standard presentation of the dishes. The Kiev cutlet was gray-looking, and the complementary three slices of cucumber and tomato each looked very lonely on the plates. The fries had that mouth-burning, McDonald's quality. But the Kiev proved itself fresh and flavorsome, while the Chicken Fillet (six cuts of breast) was saved by its sauce - an aromatic triumph of wine, garlic, dill and green peppercorns. 
 Enter suspicious wife. 
 At this point we couldn't ignore the drama unfolding on the next table. When the women left, and then the man, leaving the waitress with an unpaid check for a very expensive cognac, we stepped in. No we didn't pay for it - one of us stayed to sympathize, while the other tried to catch up with the adulterer. He couldn't be found, but his wife and mistress, quarreling in a dvor next door, agreed to come back and pay the bill together! 
 Gravitsapa styles itself as a 'jazz club', but in fact it is probably simply a good place for a moderately-priced and tasty meal or a few beers after work - or even secret assignations, provided somebody remembers to settle up.
 
 <i>
Gravitsapa Jazz Club, 8 Pochtamsky Pereulok. Tel: 271-7677. Open daily from 10 a.m. to midnight. Thirty-50 ruble cover during live music performances. Menu in Russian only. Credit cards accepted. Dinner for two, with alcohol: 506 rubles ($16.80). </i>

TITLE: The Works of a Lifetime
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A 90-year-old Swiss artist brought philosophy and mysticism to the Marble Palace of the State Russian Museum with an exhibition of his paintings this week.
 
&quot;Victor Ruzo: Life and Work&quot;, showing until Nov. 20, represents nearly 200 paintings from all periods of the artist's career. Entering the display you are surprised to see photographs of paintings, and begin to wonder whether you got the directions right. But the photoprints are but one part of the exhibition.
 On May 23, 1996, Ruzo's family home on Lake Geneva was destroyed by fire, with almost 500 pictures lost in the flames. The artist's youngest daughter, who was blind and paralyzed, died in the fire. Some of the burnt works were photographed, and these prints have become part of the exhibition.
 &quot;Several days after the tragedy I saw a tiny green spot in our dark and gloomy garden. It was a dandelion,&quot; the artist recalls. &quot;I was amazed and then I thought to myself that if this flower grows from nothing, from a dead soil, then I will manage myself,too.&quot;
 The dandelion gave the artist an impulse for a series of paintings, where life emerges from nowhere.
 &quot;We are very excited to host this exhibition of such a 'young' and vigorous artist,&quot; said Yevgenia Petrova, deputy director of the State Russian Museum, emphasizing the word &quot;young.&quot; &quot;The spirit of his works and his being so cooperative, energetic and bright-eyed person reveal a genuine young soul.&quot;
 Victor Ruzo was born on December 22, 1913 in the canton of St. Gallen, in eastern Switzerland. He originally gained fame for his posters but eventually felt he needed to do something more deep and conceptual. &quot;I needed to express myself in a totally different way,&quot; Ruzo said before the opening of his exhibition. &quot;I mean my paintings to be spiritual messages touching on issues of global importance, like, for instance, protest against dictatorship or creation of the world.&quot;
 Quite in line with Ruzo's philosophy, most of his art is very much illustrative, in the most straight-forward way. Thus, his 1993 &quot;The Power of Gold&quot; depicts a golden devil with rolling eyes sparkling red, while &quot;Two Lovers With Lost Heads&quot; shows a headless couple, who lost their heads about over other. 
 Ruzo uses shiny golden metal instead of regular canvas, which he says helps making a stronger impact on the audiences. In many works, the artist uses only one color - black - over the gold surface. Most of the objects are fragmented, as if all covered with scars or wounds. Many figures in his paintings appear to have been sliced to reveal rings like those in the center of a tree: you can trace a life story through them. 
 On display are also portraits of the artist's gurus - Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Picasso.
 One of the most important works by the artist is his famous &quot;turning picture,&quot; &quot;The Turning Picture of the World,&quot; which took fifteen years to complete (1952-1967). The pacifist work touches on the value of human life. The painting is on &quot;display&quot; at this exhibition on video, showing in one of the halls with commentary in Russian.
 The St Petersburg exhibition is a joint project of the town of Montreux and the State Russian Museum. It is part of a series of Swiss arts project to mark Switzerland's historical links with St Petersburg.
 
 <i>
Links: http://www.rusmuseum.ru, http:// www.ruzo.ch </i>

TITLE: Big Time Awaiting Animation
AUTHOR: By Tom Birchenough
TEXT: When Russian studio Argus International picked up the Gold Medal in animation at the New York Film and Video Festival in 1999 for its pilot presentation of &quot;Nutcracker and the Mouse King&quot; (Shchelkunchik I Myshiny Korol), the future of the project looked bright indeed to producer Vladimir Repin.
 
On the strength of that early success, Argus received funding offers from various foreign partners, and settled finally on a deal with Germany's MC One studio. But nearly four years later, the future of the project is uncertain, with the relationship between the two studios mired in a legal dispute that, if not settled in mediation this week, will soon reach the German courts.
 &quot;It's a shame viewers won't see the Russian 'Nutcracker' this year,&quot; Repin said last month. &quot;Our animators have learned a bitter lesson about trying to enter the world market.&quot;
 Instead of a planned premiere on as many as 170 Russian screens this month, and internationally during the run-up to the Christmas season, progress is stalled at Argus' Moscow studios with work on final parts of the film and subsequent voice-overs still to be completed.
 In the dispute, Argus contests that the terms of the original contract were not adhered to by its German partner, while MC One has launched a lawsuit against the Russian company for failing to carry out its side of the bargain.
 According to Repin, the initial production agreement - in which MC One commissioned the full creative work on the film from Argus - was governed by a second contract stipulating that both sides would receive an agreed split from revenue generated from its release and associated marketing income. 
 Repin says he was forced to suspend work on &quot;Nutcracker&quot; when it became obvious to him in May that the terms of the distribution deal were coming into question. Subsequently, MC One launched legal action against Argus for not completing the work on schedule.
 The project was a potential groundbreaker for the Russian animation industry, where production costs are considerably lower than those in the United States and Europe, but where the quality of animation compares favorably with countries such as Korea or India, which traditionally have worked in conjunction with Western studios.
 While other Russian studios have worked with foreign partners, &quot;Nutcracker&quot; - at a projected 80 minutes - would have been the largest such joint project. And with a story that combines elements of the fairy tale by German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann with elements from Pyotr Tchaikovsky's ballet version, in a story updated to early 20th century St. Petersburg, it was well placed to bring considerable returns on the home market too. 
 Another full length animated feature, &quot;Long-Nose the Dwarf&quot; (Karlik Nos), by St. Petersburg's CTB and Melnitsa studios, was the second most successful Russian film at the local box office during the first half of 2003.

TITLE: Con Artists Lurking
AUTHOR: By A. O. SCOTT
PUBLISHER: The New York Times
TEXT: Frankie and Roy, the main characters in Ridley Scott's &quot;Matchstick Men,'' are Los Angeles con men - Roy prefers the term con artist - whose temperamental differences only a screenwriter could devise. (The writers, in this case, are Nicholas Griffin and Ted Griffin, adapting Eric Garcia's novel.) 
 
Frankie, played by Sam Rockwell with his usual snaggle-toothed grifter charm, is an easygoing slob who arrives at his partner's door munching on a cheeseburger, mayonnaise smeared on his chin, crumbs tumbling after him. He must do this to emphasize, by contrast, Roy's compulsive, even pathological neatness. Roy (Nicolas Cage) is a bouquet of blossoming neuroses. He hoots, twitches, sputters and marches through a thousand daily rituals, exhibiting symptoms of Tourette's syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder and sundry other complaints, which he keeps at bay, just barely, with the help of medication. 
 It can be quite enjoyable, if also a little exhausting, to watch Cage act crazy. What fun there is to be had in &quot;Matchstick Men,'' comes mainly from the mad syncopation of his performance. To be effective at his job, which consists mostly of suckering people on the telephone with promises of valuable prizes, he must be suave, meticulous and in control, for which his personality disorder is both a help and a hindrance. To complicate matters further, just as he and Frankie are embarking on a complex and risky long con, Roy, with the help of his new therapist (Bruce Altman), reunites with his teenage daughter, Angela (Alison Lohman), whose mother split up with Roy while she was still pregnant. 
 Roy's zealously maintained domestic order is predictably disrupted by Angela's adolescent anarchy, but just as predictably, her presence opens him up and helps him discover feelings he had repressed or swept aside. The movie's idea of parenthood is a familiar one, at once cautionary and comforting: having a child, it suggests, will wreck your life, but it will also make you a better person. And when Angela tells Roy that, despite what her mother has told her, he's not a bad guy after all. Having subsisted on tuna fish and cigarettes, he starts buying Ben &amp; Jerry's by the quart and sending out for extra-messy pizza when his attempts at home cooking fail. 
 Cage is so adept at playing Roy's quick changes that the illogic of the character is easy to overlook. Lohman shows the same balance of guilelessness and coquetry she brought to &quot;White Oleander'' last year. 
 It is something of a relief that the director has, at least for the moment, set aside the bombast and self-importance that characterized his last three movies, &quot;Gladiator,'' &quot;Hannibal'' and &quot;Black Hawk Down.'' Cynicism alternating with sentimentality is an old Hollywood one-two punch, and few directors throw the combination as deftly as Scott. He adroitly manipulates both our fascination with amorality and our desire to believe in human decency, and he gulls us into thinking we can have it both ways. This makes &quot;Matchstick Men'' both entertaining and empty: an emotional shell game that leaves you feeling cheated even though, on the surface at least, everyone is a winner.

TITLE: the mother of all memoirs
AUTHOR: &quot;Madam Secretary: Accidental History&quot;
PUBLISHER: by elaine sciolino
TEXT: My all-time favorite encounter with Madeleine Albright was our landing on the carrier Constellation in 1996. She was ambassador to the United Nations and visiting San Diego - part cross-country speaking tour and part campaign to snag the job of secretary of state. Landing on an aircraft carrier is one of the most dangerous exercises in the military. So Albright was offered a much gentler option that would have avoided the zigzag banking. She would have none of it. She insisted on landing just the way the Navy did - a perilous 130-mile-an-hour dive and a violent stop on a four-and-a-half-acre steel deck in the middle of the ocean in two seconds. When she emerged from the plane, in protective goggles, helmet, orange life vest and matching lipstick, she was grinning. ''That was fantastic!'' she squealed. She probably would have sat in the cockpit like President Bush if the Navy had let her. 
 
Work harder, be tougher, have fun. That could be Madeleine Albright's mantra in work and in life. Now she has given us her memoir, although it is unlike any other by a secretary of state. She tried on the memoirs of her predecessors for size, and they just didn't fit. Her book, she writes, is &quot;a personal account, not a history of the Clinton administration foreign policy or even a remotely comprehensive chronology of world affairs at the end of the last century.'' Written with Bill Woodward, one of her speechwriters, &quot;Madam Secretary'' is not a road map for future generations of statesmen. Rather, she writes, one of her goals was &quot;to be sure the main character didn't bore people to death.'' 
 It will make a great Mother's Day present. 
 Albright's story goes like this: Daughter of Czech immigrants comes to America; studies at a first-rate college on scholarship; marries a handsome, well-born, rich, talented journalist who also happens to be the heir to a vast newspaper empire; raises three daughters; is betrayed when she is left for a younger woman; throws herself into teaching and politics; becomes the first female secretary of state in American history; discovers that despite her Roman Catholic upbringing, her heritage is Jewish and three of her four grandparents died in concentration camps. 
 It is an accidental history. Albright believes that if she had still been married, she never could have risen to such a lofty post. Marriage was so important to her, she confesses, that if she could have persuaded her husband to stay, she &quot;would have given up any thought of a career.'' The divorce was traumatic. (The book even includes the cut-to-the-bone moment when her husband tells her that if he wins the Pulitzer Prize, he will not leave her; he didn't and left.) It merits twice as many pages as the discussion of the genocide in Rwanda and the failure of the United States and the international community to act, which she calls her biggest professional regret. (The betrayal did not lead her years later to abandon President Bill Clinton when he finally called his cabinet together to give them the &quot;explanation'' he said he owed them for having misled them about Monica Lewinsky. &quot;I did not think it was the cabinet's role to play pastor,'' she writes. &quot;I had learned from my own experience not to be surprised when a man lies about sex. In any case I felt no sense of personal grievance.'') 
 One cannot imagine Henry Kissinger, also an immigrant, writing about his identity issues, or James A. Baker III, a master compartmentalizer, writing a &quot;to do'' list like this one: &quot;1) Call Senator Helms; 2) Call King Hussein; 3) Call Foreign Minister Moussa; 4) Make other Congressional calls; 5) Prepare for China meeting; 6) Buy nonfat yogurt.'' And Albright is surely the only secretary of state to have ever sewn her own clothes. 
 The book captures the tension between insecurity and ambition. Albright longed for acceptance, and found it important to win the approval of the men in her life. &quot;Whether father or professor,'' she says at one point, &quot;I had to please.'' Moving to Washington soon after her marriage, she knew she needed not only &quot;proper credentials'' (her doctorate) but also the backing of someone important. She threw herself into fund-raising and bonded with Senator Edmund S. Muskie, who later became her boss. She also did a lot of what she calls &quot;mother things'' - sewing costumes, poring over homework and arranging car pools, although all the time with good household help. 
 Albright once told me, &quot;I'm not that smart; I work very hard,'' a stark admission she says here she came to regret. Yet her memoir underscores just how hard she worked to get where she did. Embarrassed a bit by her parents' &quot;European'' customs and food habits, she worked hard to look all-American. As a graduate student at Columbia University, she wrote a dissertation, on the Soviet diplomatic service, for a master's degree even though it was not required, &quot;to have something tangible'' in case she could not complete her Ph.D. thesis on the role of the Czechoslovak press during Prague Spring. And the only way she was able to write her thesis as the mother of three (despite good help) was to get up every morning at 4:30 for three years. 
 At the book's end, she says that among the things she wants people to remember about her is &quot;I did the best with what I was given.'' In fact, she makes no effort to hide her ambition, openly admitting that she campaigned hard for the job of secretary of state. When one &quot;rival camp'' was poised to tell reporters that a female secretary of state would have a hard time working with conservative Arab leaders, for example, Albright and her inner circle &quot;immediately directed reporters'' to Arab diplomats who knew her at the United Nations who said that wasn't so. 
 Memoirs by important players in official Washington are sometimes a means of settling scores. Albright is not cruel, but details about the people she dealt with trickle out. Yasir Arafat was wonderful at amusing Albright's grandchildren at her vast farm in Virginia, but incapable of making strategic compromises for peace. Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel was patronizing, prickly and a micromanager. She describes one conversation with Syria's foreign minister, Farouk Shara, about the leap of faith required for negotiating peace with Israel, in which they used getting married as a metaphor. It is no secret that she and Anthony Lake, the national security adviser in the first Clinton administration, didn't like each other. She recalls how resentful she felt in meetings when Lake &quot;drummed his fingers on the table while I spoke or looked at his watch.'' After one &quot;screaming match'' with Lake, she went home and knitted two tomato-red caps for her grandchildren. 
 As secretary of state, she (and the Clinton administration) left behind a mixed legacy. She was the first secretary of state to visit North Korea, and she criticizes the Bush administration for abandoning the Clinton engagement strategy. She tried to lure Iran's Islamic Republic into a dialogue through a cautious policy of engagement. Yet her insistence on trying to force a peace deal over Kosovo led to a NATO-led war against the Serbs that was popularly known as &quot;Madeleine's war.'' And the failure of down-to-the wire peace negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis was, she writes, her &quot;greatest disappointment as secretary.'' 
 As for Iraq, her position is unsatisfying. She defends the Clinton policy of containing Saddam Hussein with a blend of sanctions and air strikes, but also does not want to look soft: &quot;Although I expressed many doubts about the Bush administration's diplomatic timing, tactics, rationales and postwar plans in the months before and after the 2003 war, I could not question the goal of ousting Saddam Hussein.'' Clearly, she believes that the Clinton administration's foreign policy record was a success. But the reader is left with no vision, no creative architecture for dealing with future global crises. Perhaps one does not exist. Albright's one attempt to put a label on what the administration was doing - &quot;assertive multilateralism'' - was severely criticized, and she concedes it was a mistake. &quot;Determined to do the right thing but in a tough-minded way'' is how she defines the goals of the Clinton era. 
 Still, the advantage of a down-to-earth memoir by a secretary of state is that the tone may attract readers. Outreach was a hallmark of Albright's eight years in the Clinton administration - it is also a hallmark of this memior.
 
 <i>
Elaine Sciolino is The New York Times's Paris bureau chief. Her latest book is ''Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran.'' </i>

TITLE: remembering serebryakova's art
AUTHOR: By Sveta Graudt
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A brown-eyed young woman brushes her long hair in front of a dressing table covered with hair pins and bottles of perfume. That's the image most people associate with Russian painter Zinaida Serebryakova, but the picture won't go on show at a retrospective of her work opening in Moscow next week.
 
&quot;Perhaps we were wrong. But we decided that it is far more important and valuable to show what few people have seen,&quot; said Natalya Ryurikova, curator of the exhibition &quot;Known and Unknown Zinaida Serebryakova,&quot; which opens at Moscow's Dom Nashchokina gallery on Tuesday.
 Instead, the famous self-portrait &quot;At The Dressing Table&quot; will stay in its home in the Tretyakov Gallery, while the exhibition will show around 70 lesser-known works from the museums of such far-flung cities as Novosibirsk, Odessa and Nizhny Tagil in the Urals in the first major Russian show of Serebryakova's works since 1986.
 Serebryakova was born in 1884 on her family estate near Kharkov, in today's Ukraine, into one of Russia's most famous art dynasties: Her father Yevgeny Lanserye was a well-known sculptor, and her uncle was the watercolor painter and stage designer Alexander Benois. One of Serebryakova's brothers, Nikolai, was a talented architect, while her other brother, Yevgeny, became a well-known illustrator and designer in Soviet times.
 After studying drawing in St. Petersburg - the Russian Museum currently exhibits many of her most celebrated works - Serebryakova began her professional career in 1910 by showing &quot;At the Dressing Table&quot; at an exhibition mounted by the Union of Russian Artists. Her debut work was immediately snapped up by the Tretyakov Gallery.
 However, the Russian Revolution and the death of her husband in 1919 left Serebryakova in a difficult position. Five years later, Serebryakova traveled to Paris and only two of her four children were able to join her. The other children stayed with their grandmother in Soviet Russia, and did not see their mother again for 40 years. 
 Serebryakova lived a lonely life in Paris, never remarrying and sending her earnings to her children. Her paintings often reflected her nostalgia for Russia, such as &quot;Russian Banya,&quot; painted in 1926, but trips to Morocco also informed her work. 
 The Moscow exhibition will show the artist's correspondence from Paris, as well as pictures of the artist and her family, including a painting of her sons, &quot;Boys in Sailor Suits&quot; (1919), depicting two young boys in striped vests and blue shorts by the window, and her &quot;Self-Portrait in a Scarf&quot; (1911), where she shows herself as a smiling young woman in a turban constructed out of a blue and red scarf.

TITLE: the word's worth
AUTHOR: By Michele A. Berdy <i>
TEXT: Zapravit salat</i>: to dress a salad.
 
The first time I stood in a Russian kitchen to make dinner, I had no trouble with the pots and pans, and gas range. The problem was that I had no idea how to describe what I was doing. I wanted to say, &quot;You brown this and then mix in the other ingredients.&quot; Instead I said, <i>&quot;Nu, nado snachala, m-m-m, zharit eto, no ne ochen, a potom polozhit tuda vsyo ostalnoye.&quot;</i> Which back-translates as, &quot;Well, at first you, um, you fry but not much, and then you put in there everything else.&quot; 
 This didn't exactly fill my guests with confidence.
 Actually, Russian culinary terms are simpler than their English counterparts - how many of us really understand the difference between fricasseeing and stewing? In Russian, <i>gotovit</i> is used for any kind of cooking. <i>Ya gotovila uzhin</i> (I made dinner). For anything you cook in water or liquid, you use <i>varit</i>; for anything you fry in some kind of oil, you use <i>zharit</i>; and for anything that is cooked in a pot with the top on, in the oven or on the stovetop, you use <i>tushit</i>. 
 All the subtleties get expressed with prefixes and a bit of further explanation.
 For example, the sentence that stumped me might be better translated: <i>&quot;Snachala eto nado obzharit, a potom smeshat vse ostalnye ingridienty.&quot;</i> If a guest thinks you haven't cooked something long enough, they might say: <i>&quot;Nado eschyo dozharit kotlety - oni s krovju&quot;</i> (You need to fry the cutlets some more - they're still too rare). If you want to stew something over a low flame, you could say, <i>tushit myaso s ovoschami na slabom ogne</i> (braise meat with vegetables over a low flame). 
 <i>Otvarit</i> would mean to blanch something; <i>svarit</i> is to boil it totally. <i>Svarit kartofel v mundire</i> is &quot;to boil potatoes in their jackets&quot; (<i>mundir</i> literally means a &quot;full dress uniform&quot;). You can bake potatoes in their jackets in the oven, too, and serve <i>pechyony v kozhure kartofel</i> (baked potatoes). 
 If you want to dice something, you say, <i>narezat kusochkami</i>; to mince is <i>narezat melkimi kusochkami</i> (literally, &quot;in very small pieces&quot;); to cut something into julienne strips is <i>narezat solomkoj</i> (literally, &quot;like a matchstick&quot;). 
 Be careful about &quot;false friends&quot; here: <i>zhulien</i> is the ubiquitous Russian dish of mushrooms with a white sauce and cheese. <i>Razrezat</i> (to cut something up completely) is the verb you use when you're taking apart a chicken or filleting a fish. You can also say, razdelat rybu v file. 
 Once you're ready to serve, you have to do the final touches. <i>&quot;Chem ty budesh zapravlyat salat?&quot;</i> (How are you going to dress the salad?) At first I thought this was an odd verb to use (you use the same word to describe tucking your shirt in or filling your car with gas), but then &quot;dressing a salad&quot; is odd as well. 
 And then there's dessert (<i>sladkoye</i>). When you are baking a yeast dough, you say: <i>vymesit/vybit testo na stole poka ono ne nachnyot otstavat ot ruk</i> (knead the dough on the table until it doesn't stick to your hands). In Russian, dough doesn't rise, it &quot;gets there&quot;- <i>testo podoshlo</i>. 
 Once you get ready to serve your dessert, be careful with your language: there are a lot of false friends in the sweets category. <i>Keks</i> for Russians is more like a muffin than an American cake. <i>Biskvit</i> is, alas, not a biscuit, but a sponge cake. And when you are enjoying dessert, if someone says: <i>&quot;Oi! Kofe ubegaet!&quot;</i> - it doesn't mean your coffee has sprouted legs and is dashing out the door. It means the coffee is boiling over.
 
 <i>
Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter. </i>

TITLE: Safe Return for China's First Man in Space
AUTHOR: By Joe McDonald
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIJING - China's first astronaut in space returned safely to Earth on Thursday when his craft touched down as planned after 21 hours in orbit. Mission control in Beijing declared the landmark debut flight &quot;a success&quot;- and the government immediately started discussing the country's spacefaring future.
 
The capsule carrying Lieutenant Colonel Yang Liwei touched down on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia in northern China at dawn Thursday, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Minutes later, Yang grabbed the capsule hatch with his hand, pulled himself out and waved at rescuers, though footage showed him appearing a bit dazed.
 &quot;It is a splendid moment in the history of my motherland and also the greatest day of my life,&quot; Yang, a 38-year-old former fighter pilot, said immediately after emerging, according to the government.
 Within hours, officials announced that China's space dreams would continue with another Shenzhou mission, possibly within two years. They said China also had plans to eventually send up a space station, but they ruled out building a space shuttle.
 Shenzhou 5 landed at 6:23 a.m., 5 kilometers miles from its target, the government said.
 &quot;The spaceship operated well,&quot; the taikonaut said in his first publicized comments, reported by Xinhua. &quot;I feel very good and I am proud of my motherland.&quot;
 Taikonaut is an English nickname based on the Chinese word for space, &quot;taikong.&quot;
 After a physical exam, the government said Yang's condition was &quot;good.&quot; He flew to Beijing less than two hours after landing as space fever spread and thousands gathered at Beijing's Millennium Monument for a celebration.
 &quot;See how China is growing and developing? Now everybody is watching,&quot; said Zheng Tao, a machinery salesman from the western Chinese city of Yinchuan.
 Li Jinai, the head of China's manned space program, called Yang a &quot;space hero.&quot;
 The completed mission was the crowning achievement of an 11-year, military-linked manned space program promoted as a symbol of national prestige both at home and abroad. China's premier, Wen Jiabao, immediately spoke to Yang from Beijing and offered his congratulations.
 &quot;Great Leap Skyward,&quot; the state-controlled newspaper China Daily enthused Thursday morning.
 The Chinese government also quickly announced plans to eventually establish a permanent space station - and launch another Shenzhou capsule within a year or two. This week's triumph, they said, is only the first step.
 Xie Mingbao, the director of China Manned Space Engineering Office, told reporters that another Shenzhou capsule would probably be launched &quot;in one or two years' time.&quot; Though he didn't say so explicitly, such a launch would almost certainly be manned.
 Yang's flight came four decades after the former Soviet Union and the United States pioneered manned spaceflight. Soviet cosmonaut Yury Gagarin orbited the Earth in April 1961. Less than one month later, the United States launched Alan Shepard.
 Shenzhou 5 orbited the Earth 14 times. 
 Though the government has been secretive about its space program, it offered frequent glimpses of Yang during the trip.
 Even before the safe landing, congratulations poured in from abroad.
 &quot;It seems we have a new rival,&quot; said Hiroshi Inoue, a spokesman for Japan's space agency. 
 &quot;But since this is not a war, China is not a threat. This could be beneficial to the space development technology for the rest of the world,&quot; he said.
 NASA, whose space shuttle Columbia was lost in February, called it &quot;an important achievement in the history of human exploration.&quot;
 Aboard the international space station, U.S. astronaut Edward Lu, whose parents were born in China, spoke in Chinese as he addressed these wishes to Yang: &quot;Welcome to space&quot; and &quot;Have a safe journey and I wish you success.&quot;
 His colleague, Russian cosmonaut Yury Malenchenko, told Mission Control in Houston: &quot;I am glad to have somebody else in space instead of me and Ed. Also, I know it was great work by thousands and thousands of people from China.&quot;

TITLE: Palestinians Nab Killers Of Guards
TEXT: GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - Palestinian police arrested five members of a militant group early Thursday in connection with a deadly attack on a U.S. diplomatic convoy, security officials said. Witnesses said a gunfight erupted during the raid.
 
The five are members of the Popular Resistance Committees, a group that consists largely of former Palestinian security officials and disgruntled members of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, the security officials said.
 The five were arrested in the Jebaliya refugee camp, which is near the site of Wednesday's attack. The bombing killed three American security guards working for the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv.
 One of those arrested was identified as Ahmed Saker, 25.
 Palestinian witnesses said that when Palestinian police came to Block 8 of Jebaliya to make arrests, a gun fight erupted. There were no reports of injuries.
 Palestinian militant groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, have been quick to distance themselves from the attack, and the Popular Resistance Committees issued a statement saying it was not involved.
 The group was formed at the end of 2000, three months after the outbreak of Israeli-Palestinian fighting. 
 The group does not have a political ideology, but believes the use of force is the only way to end Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In the past three years of fighting, the group has blown up three Israeli Merkava tanks with powerful remote-controlled bombs-the same method used in Wednesday's attack.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>N.Y. Ferry Disaster
 </b>

NEW YORK (AP) - Police are investigating whether a Staten Island ferry pilot fell asleep during a routine trip across a windy New York Harbor before the mighty vessel slammed into a pier, killing 10 people and injuring at least 42 others, including three who lost limbs.
 The pilot bolted the scene so quickly that he left behind his gear and his keys, then broke into his house where he slit his wrists and shot himself with a pellet gun, a law enforcement source said.
 The pilot, identified by the source as Richard Smith, was in critical condition after surgery at St. Vincent's Hospital, the same place where 22 victims were rushed after the Wednesday crash.
 
 
<b>B.B. King Wins Award
 </b>

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Blues legend B.B. King and Hungarian-born composer Gyorgy Ligeti have each been selected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Music to receive the prestigious 2004 Polar Music Prize. Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf will present the awards at a May 24 gala in Stockholm.
 The citations, issued by the Royal Academy on Thursday, praised King for "his achievements in spreading the blues throughout the world," which "proved of fundamental importance to the development of modern popular music." 
 King will perform at the Stockholm Concert Hall May 22 in conjunction with the ceremony.
 
 
<b>Microsoft Fixes Flaws 
 </b>

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday announced five new "critical" flaws in its software and provided patches to stop hackers accessing computers through a malicious program similar to the devastating Blaster worm.
 The announcement, part of an initiative to notify computer users of patches on a more regular basis, applies to a wide range of Microsoft software.
 The software, detailed on the web site http://www.microsoft.com/security, includes Microsoft's Exchange e-mail server, Windows operating system, Windows Messenger service and multimedia software for Web browsers.
 
 
<b>No Free Trade Deal
 </b>

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan and Mexico have failed to clinch a free-trade agreement between the two countries despite extensive talks among their ministers, Japan's top government spokesman said Thursday.
 The two sides had aimed to finalize a deal during a visit by Mexican President Vicente Fox, but "ran out of time," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda said.
 Fox and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi had agreed earlier Thursday to try to conclude an FTA within the day despite remaining gaps over the politically sensitive farm sector.
 
 
<b>'All of us Are Hurt'
 </b>

MONROVIA, Liberia (AP) - Liberia's newly inaugurated interim leader challenged the wisdom of a war-crimes court for the virtually limitless atrocities of his country's conflicts, saying Wednesday it would do nothing to heal the wounds.
 Gyude Bryant spoke to reporters on his first full day in office, after swearing-in Tuesday.
 Rights groups have urged prosecution for the unchecked abuses in 14 years of power struggles.
 "All of us are hurt," said Bryant, "I find it difficult to reconcile reconciliation and retribution." 



TITLE: Burke Stars as Coyotes Beat Off Panthers
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SUNRISE, Florida - Sean Burke made sure the Coyotes would have their best start since moving to Phoenix. 
 
Burke made 29 saves and Shane Doan and Radoslav Suchy scored Wednesday night to lead the Coyotes to a 2-1 victory over the Florida Panthers. 
 Phoenix, out of the playoffs last season, improved to 3-0 for the first time since the 1987-88 season when the franchise was the Winnipeg Jets. The Coyotes, who moved to Phoenix in 1996, opened this season with a 2-1 overtime victory over St. Louis and a 2-0 win against Anaheim. 
 &quot;As well as we're playing, Burkey has been our best player every night,'' Doan said. &quot;The blue line is making smart decisions, but Burkey has been there to make the big save.'' 
 Phoenix will be shooting for the first 4-0 start in franchise history Thursday night at Tampa Bay. 
 &quot;The first three games, we got good bounces, played well and capitalized at the right time,'' Burke said. &quot;As a veteran player, I've seen a lot. We were only a goal away from this being a loss. We're not going to get too high about it, but we're enjoying it right now.'' 
 Mike Van Ryn scored for Florida on a six-on-four after the Panthers pulled goalie Roberto Luongo for an extra skater with 3 minutes and 40 seconds left in the period. 
 Florida missed a chance to stay unbeaten after four games for the first time since 1999. The Panthers, the second-lowest-scoring team in the NHL last season, has only seven goals this season. 
 &quot;When you face a goaltender like this, you have to have a shot mentality and a rebound mentality,'' Florida coach Mike Keenan said. &quot;Deflections, screens, tips, puck action, basically. That was just a good example of not having that mind-set and using that mentality.'' 
 Luongo made 34 saves for Florida, which was outshot 36-30. 
 Burke, who has allowed only two goals in three starts, played for Florida for two seasons before being traded to the Coyotes in 1999. 
 But he said facing his former team wasn't a motivating factor. 
 &quot;I've been on seven teams; that kind of wears off because we're always playing an ex-team,'' Burke said. &quot;What was more motivation tonight is this was a game we really wanted to have. We didn't want to go into Tampa not having had a very good night.'' 
 Doan's goal at 7:57 of the second period came off a faceoff. Tyson Nash got control of the puck and fired a wrist shot that was stopped by Luongo. Doan grabbed the rebound and flipped a backhand over Luongo, who was on his back. 
 Suchy made it 2-0 at 3:52 of the third when he beat Luongo over the left shoulder with a slap shot through a screen from the blue line. 
 &quot;That was a big goal,'' Coyotes forward Daymond Langkow said. &quot;It wasn't the hardest shot, but it was a good play, a perfect shot.'' 
 Van Ryn scored when his slap shot from the point hit a stick above the circle and went over Burke's left shoulder. 
 &quot;They're young and fast,'' Van Ryn said of the Coyotes. &quot;They outworked us for a lot of the game. They played a good game and we didn't play our best game. We gave up too many opportunities. We worked way too hard tonight. The score didn't dictate that game. He (Luongo) kept us in the game. We have toplay better in front of him.''

TITLE: Chicago Cubs Fail At Finish
AUTHOR: By Ben Walker
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CHICAGO - Only the Chicago Cubs could write a twisted ending like this. And only a team like the Florida Marlins could make it seem so cruel. 
 
Given one final chance to beat the demons of their past and the Marlins, the Cubs couldn't get it done. Kerry Wood failed to hold an early lead and Wrigley Field fell silent as Florida capped its stunning comeback with a 9-6 win in Game 7 on Wednesday. 
 &quot;The Cubs were America's favorite. I think we're the darlings of the baseball world now,'' Marlins manager Jack McKeon said. 
 Destiny? Fate? Whatever. The Cubs were unable to end their long, strange drought because Most Valuable Player Ivan Rodriguez, Miguel Cabrera and those remarkably resilient Marlins won their third straight game to clinch the National League pennant. 
 &quot;Nobody expected us to be in the World Series,'' Rodriguez said. The wild-card Marlins will head off to face Boston or the New York Yankees on Saturday night. 
 Even more stinging for Cubs' fans is that this marks Florida's second World Series trip in only 11 years of existence. Chicago has been absent since 1945, prompting the team's sad little motto of &quot;Wait 'Til Next Year.'' 
 &quot;I felt I let the team down, the organization down and the city of Chicago down,'' Wood said. &quot;I choked.'' 
 Cubs manager Dusty Baker was not nearly as harsh. 
 &quot;We didn't lose the pennant, the Marlins won it,'' he said. &quot;We were close and the Marlins took it from us, it's as simple as that.'' 
 Baker's 4-year-old son Darren added a final word when his dad was done talking. &quot;The Cubs will win next year,'' he said. 
 Home teams had won 12 of the last 13 times a post-season series went to Game 7. But the Marlins became just the sixth team ever to overcome a 3-1 deficit in a best-of-seven series. 
 &quot;We shocked the world! We shocked the world!'' Marlins leadoff man Juan Pierre said. 
 Even after being shut out in Game 5 by Josh Beckett, Sammy Sosa and the Cubs were in excellent position as they returned home. But aces Mark Prior and Wood lost on back-to-back days for the first time this season and suddenly a sure thing had turned sour. 
 &quot;Those are two tough guys to beat, I'll tell you what,'' Beckett said. &quot;We got a break. Things work out for a reason, I guess.'' 
 A sellout crowd of 39,574 minus the infamous Steve Bartman - a fan who controversially deflected a foul ball during the Marlins' eighth-inning rally in Game 6 (he was at home with a police guard) - had the old ballpark shaking as Wood and Moises Alou homered for a 5-3 lead. 
 But Wood could only flip his glove into the stands when the Marlins rallied. They scored three runs in the fifth, Luis Castillo hit an RBI single in the sixth and Gonzalez added insurance with a two-run double in the seventh. 
 Brad Penny won with an inning of scoreless relief for Mark Redman. 
 Beckett came out of the bullpen and pitched four innings of one-hit ball on two days' rest, allowing only a homer by pinch-hitter Troy O'Leary. Ugueth Urbina worked the ninth for a save. 
 Florida has never lost a post-season series in its young history, going 5-0. That includes a thrilling Game 7 victory in 11 innings over Cleveland for the 1997 title. 
 At 72, McKeon is the oldest manager to reach the World Series. 
 That seemed farfetched when the Marlins were 19-29 back in late May, but McKeon, who had replaced the fired Jeff Torborg earlier in the month, somehow steered them this far. 
 &quot;I told them the first meeting that if they worked hard, they'd be playing in October,'' he said. 
 Cabrera and Rodriguez once again played starring roles for Florida. Cabrera, a 20-year-old rookie, hit his third homer of the series and drove in four runs while Rodriguez singled home a run that gave him an NLCS-record 10 RBIs. 
 Down 5-3 in the fifth, Rodriguez doubled home a run and Cabrera tied it with an RBI grounder. 
 Derrek Lee, whose double keyed the eight-run rally in Game 6, followed with a single that put Florida ahead 6-5. 
 The Cubs had been hoping this would be the year they got a chance to win their first Series championship since 1908. 
 Instead, add this failure to all of their previous disappointments. 
 That includes losing Game 7 of the 1945 World Series at Wrigley Field to Detroit. 
 Baker was trying to become the first manager in history to lead two different teams to the World Series in consecutive years. 
 Rather, he fell short, just as he did last year when his San Francisco Giants lost the last two games of the World Series at Anaheim. 
 &quot;Was it disappointing? Yes, it's disappointing,'' Baker said.

TITLE: Barcelona, Liverpool Show Style in UEFA Cup Games
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: LONDON - Former European champions Barcelona and Liverpool turned on the style in the UEFA Cup on Wednesday to ease into the second round with big wins over East European opposition. 
 
Barcelona, helped by a hat-trick from Brazilian forward Ronaldinho, two apiece from Luis Enrique and Javier Saviola and another goal from Thiago Motta, crushed Slovakia's Puchov 8-0 at the Nou Camp to go through 9-1 on aggregate. 
 Liverpool enjoyed a comfortable passage at Anfield, thumping Slovenia's Olimpija 3-0 for a 4-1 win over the two legs. 
 &quot;Once we scored, we looked extremely comfortable and with the passing and the movement we played some very good stuff,&quot; a delighted Liverpool boss Gerard Houllier said afterwards.
 Explaining his decision to make 23-year-old Steven Gerrard the club captain in place of Finnish defender Sami Hyypia, Houllier added: &quot;Stevie now is mature and we thought that as an English club it was better to have an English captain.&quot;
 A night of UEFA fixtures across Europe did not pass without incident off the pitch as English and Polish fans were arrested in the Netherlands. 
 Dutch police said 94 fans, 87 of whom were said by police to be Newcastle United supporters, were arrested in Breda after riots broke out in the city centre before NAC's match. 
 Dutch police also arrested 41 Polish fans of Wisla Krakow earlier on Wednesday after they found two axes, a garotte, three switchblades, kitchenknives, and other weapons on their bus travelling to the game against NEC Nijmegen. 
 Barcelona had not previously won at the Nou Camp this season and their slow start had prompted coach Frank Rijkaard to call for patience from the club's discontented fans. 
 But Ronaldinho, who had been doubtful for the game after picking up a leg strain, silenced the doubters in a paltry 15,000 crowd with an early goal after seven minutes. 
 He added a second 13 minutes later, and a third goal four minutes before the break from Thiago Motta put Barca's passage beyond doubt after their surprising 1-1 first-leg draw. 
 Ronaldinho completed his hat-trick on 57 minutes before two each for Luis Enrique and Saviola completed the rout. 
 Liverpool also made a quick start against Olimpija of Slovenia. French teenager Anthony Le Tallec, who joined from Le Havre in the close season and was replacing injured striker Michael Owen, scored his first goal for the club on 30 minutes. 
 Emile Heskey added a second shortly after and Harry Kewell volleyed home the third goal two minutes into the second half. 
 Borussia Dortmund, the 1997 European champions, also eased through against Austria Vienna, midfielder Lars Ricken giving the German side a 1-0 home win for a 3-1 aggregate victory. 
 But it was a miserable night for two other Bundesliga sides, with Hertha Berlin and Hamburg SV dumped out of the competition. 
 Hertha, struggling in the league after failing to win in their first eight games, went out to Poland's Groclin Grodzisk, increasing the pressure on coach Huub Stevens. 
 An 84th minute goal from Grzegorz Rasiak gave Groclin a 1-0 home win after a goalless first leg. 
 Hamburg, also in the lower half of the German first division, were hammered 3-0 in the Ukraine by Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk to go out 4-2 on aggregate. 
 The 1983 European champions fell behind to an early goal from Dmytro Mikhailenko and strikes after the break from Olexander Rykun and Oleg Venglinsky sealed their fate. 
 Parma and Perugia progressed at the expense of Metalurg Donetsk and Dundee respectively, but fellow Serie A side Udinese lost 2-1 at home to Austria's Salzburg and went out on the away goals rule. 
 Turkey's Genclerbirligi gained a modicum of revenge for the national side's failure to qualify automatically for next year's Euro 2004 finals after a goalless draw with England on Saturday by putting out premier league side Blackburn Rovers. 
 Genclerbirligi, leading 3-1 from the first leg in Ankara, fell behind to a Matt Jansen goal on 65 minutes but Mustafa Ozkan earned a 1-1 draw with an equaliser a minute later. 
 But Blackburn threw their lead away inside a minute when Steven Reid carelessly conceded possession in his own area, allowing Mustafa Ozkan to fire a low shot underneath Brad Friedel.
 Harald Brattbakk hit a hat-trick for Rosenborg Trondheim who romped to a 6-0 win over Latvia's Ventspils to complete a 10-1 aggregate victory. 
 The Norwegian champions are playing in the UEFA Cup after failing to qualify for the group stages of the Champions League for the first time in eight seasons. 
 Swiss league leaders Basel scraped into the second round thanks to a &quot;silver goal&quot; from Marco Streller against Turkey's Malatyaspor. 
 Basel, who have chalked up a record 13 straight wins in their domestic league, won the first leg 2-0 away from home but two goals from Celalettin Kocak on Wednesday levelled the tie and sent the game into extra-time. 
 Streller's goal five minutes into the first extra period put the Swiss side back in front on aggregate and they held on until the half was over, when the match finished under UEFA's &quot;silver goal&quot; rule.

TITLE: Italy Advances as Tonga Bows Out of Cup
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: CANBERRA, Australia - Italy took a step closer to a cherished World Cup quarterfinal spot Wednesday, making Tonga's dream of advancing to the next round all the more difficult in the process.
 
Flyhalf Rimo Wakarua kicked 21 points and set up a try on his international debut to give Italy a vital 36-12 win over Tonga.
 Center Manuel Dallan scored one try, while brother and winger Denis notched two for Italy at Canberra stadium in the Australian capital as the Italians rebounded from their 70-7 loss to the All Blacks on Saturday.
 &quot;It was an important win for rugby in Italy,&quot; Italy coach John Kirwan said. &quot;We managed to get a good win tonight and I think it's important that all of Italy share that, but we must go back to work tomorrow. we still have two games to go.&quot;
 Italy now sits in third place in Pool D with four points. New Zealand and Wales share the top spot on five after earning a bonus point each for scoring four or more tries in a single match, while Canada and Tonga are yet to earn a point.
 &quot;I think that we won a very difficult match because for each team it was important to win to continue in the World Cup so I am very happy,&quot; said Italian captain and scrumhalf Alessandro Troncon.
 The Tongans were surprised by Italy's heavy reliance on a kicking game.
 &quot;(Wakurua) dictated a lot of the play with his kicking and turned us around,&quot; Love said. &quot;I didn't bank on Italy coming out with a good kicking game the way they did. It took us a while to regroup.&quot;
 The game degenerated as the match wore on with Villiami Vaki conceding a penalty and earning 10 minutes in the sin bin for a professional foul in the 67th minute. Wakurua slotted the goal to make it 22-12.
 Denis Dallan scored a decisive try in the 73rd minute, Wakarua converting to put the game out of Tonga's reach.
 Tonga faces a tough preparation for its crucial match against Wales on Sunday, with Afeaki still to be assessed for a leg injury and a head knock, and Fenukitau suffering a disclocated right shoulder, along with a litany of cuts and bruises throughout the team.
 Tonga, dressed in their traditional all-red strip, opened proceedings with intimidating sipitau, a war cry similar to the All Black haka.
 
 <strong>
Fiji 19 - USA 18</strong> The unsung American Eagles were despondent after their one-point loss to Fiji, but there was praise for their efforts which gave the World Cup its first cliffhanger after a succession of blowouts.
 
&quot;Yanks Give Cup a Real Kick-Start,&quot; headlined the Daily Telegraph of the 19-18 Pool B thriller in Brisbane.
 &quot;The one ingredient the World Cup had been lacking arrived on the tournament doorstep delivered by the most unlikely source,&quot; the paper said.
 Fiji were made clear favourites despite their thumping by France in their tournament opener and the two-match ban on star winger Rupeni Caucaunibuca.
 Their running skills had the north Americans struggling to cope at times, but with a combination of grit and determination they managed to take the match down to the wire and came up just short when Mike Hercus' last-gasp conversion for the win fell agonisingly short.
 Prior to the Brisbane game, World Cup officials had been at pains to defend the validity of the 20-team tournament format after the likes of Georgia, Namibia, Uruguay and even Italy suffered lopsided defeats.
 And up until now, the United States had hardly set the world on fire at the World Cup finals playing nine times and winning just once.
 So the scare they gave Fiji qualifies as one of the greatest performances in US rugby history.
 The Americans were rightly proud of it.
 &quot;No-one in the world of rugby gave us a chance, but we came out with a good game,&quot; said veteran US skipper Dave Hodges. &quot;Physically, we can match it with anyone.&quot;
 The Americans are now confident they can go on and get a result in their next match against pool second seeds Scotland, who had their hands full for most of their opening game against Japan.
 World Cup officials will also be hoping that the US-Fiji game will act as a catalyst for tighter, more exciting games for the rest of the tournament.
 With the way the playing schedule was drawn up, most of the first week's games were always going to be mis-matches with the top two seeds in each pool not playing each other until later on.
 That process gets underway in Perth on Saturday when England take on South Africa in by far the biggest matchup of the first round.
 It's a game which will make headlines worldwide and should provide enough talking points to launch the finals into their second week when big games are coming up such as France-Scotland, Italy-Wales and Italy-Canada.
 The Americans are in action again against Scotland on Monday.

TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: <b>More Semen Found
 </b>

EAGLE, Colorado (AP) - A two-day preliminary hearing jammed full of revealing details about rape suspect Kobe Bryant of the L.A. Lakers and his accuser ended last Wednesday with one more startling revelation - that the panties the woman wore to her rape exam had the semen of another man on them. 
 Both sides claimed victory, with the prosecution saying it presented clear evidence the woman was raped and the defense contending she lied about a sexual encounter with a celebrity she was more than eager to meet. 
 "She is not worthy of your belief,'' defense attorney Pamela Mackey said. 
 
 
<b>Euro Prep 
 </b>

LONDON (Reuters) - England's national soccer side will play a friendly against Denmark on November 16 at Manchester United's Old Trafford ground as part of their preparations for Euro 2004, the Football Association (FA) said Wednesday. 
 England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson, whose men qualified for next year's tournament in Portugal with last weekend's 0-0 draw in Turkey, told the FA's website: "Denmark are a passionate football nation with a proud tradition."
 He then went on to say " They won the European Championship in 1992 and their qualification for Euro 2004 shows that their current team is very strong."