SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #936 (4), Tuesday, January 20, 2004
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TITLE: Police Want 50,000 Security Cameras
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg police want to install 50,000 security cameras to monitor and prevent crime in the city - if City Hall can find the at least $250 million needed to buy and operate them.
The city would need that number of cameras if they are to use the new technology effectively, officers say.
"It would be a logical step in our efforts to make the city safe," Spokesman Pavel Rayevsky said Friday in a telephone interview. "We would need several thousands cameras in the city. There are no concrete plans on how this could be financed yet, but governor [Valentina Matviyenko ] is working on that."
Black-and-white security cameras cost about $5,000 each, while ones with color displays cost $15,000 each and plus about $2,000 per month to operate, he said.
"While some people will say the cameras could compensate for the lack of policemen in the city, that's not quite right," Rayevsky said. "Introducing the cameras is likely to lead to staff cuts because we will receive objective information about what's going on, while the information that we receive at the moment is more subjective."
Rayevsky said the city has about 35,000 police staff.
According to the Moscow Helsinki human rights group, cameras in the capital are generally operate in metro stations.
While cameras seem to be a useful tool in the fight against crime, they are also open to misuse, human rights advocates say.
"The problem is not the collection of information, but in the way the information can be used," Sergei Lukashevsky, the head of the Helsinki group's monitoring programs' department said Friday in a telephone interview. "It is a well-known fact that you can buy [police] data bases at a flea market and use the information in an illegal way."
The situation would be different if the public was able to oversee the activities of law enforcement bodies, as is the case in western countries, he added.
"In western countries the public can inspect materials gathered during investigations, while in Russia everything linked to law enforcement is a secret," Lukachevsky said.
Police spokesman Rayevsky said camera monitoring systems had proven quite effective in large cities including London and New York.
"In London they can observe what is happening on every street in the city center," he said.
London spends about $900 million annually to service their cameras, which is 10 percent of the city's total security-camera expenditure; the rest is spent by private companies on internal security or by local communities, Rayevsky said.
In St. Petersburg, a few security cameras are already operating, including many to catch shoplifters and in the Petrovsky Stadium. However, for such a system to work more effectively, the police would create a department that would be able to receive and analyze information about reported crimes, he added.
Meanwhile, Interfax quoted Vice Governor Andrei Chernenko, who is responsible for law enforcement, as saying Friday that City Hall has another high-tech approach to tackle crime - the introduction of electronic personal identity cards for citizens.
"An electronic identity card is the first step to an electronic passport," Chernenko said. "By Feb. 3, when this matter will be discussed at a meeting of the city government, we will have developed a concept so that the project will be able to be tabled to the government and the city communications committee in early April."
"Introducing the cards is technically possible," he added. "All we need now is the political will."
"The question is whether spending all this money [on technology] can be justified," said Yury Vdovin, deputy head of the St. Petersburg branch of international human rights organization Citizen's Watch. "Cameras may well be useful if they allow the police to monitor crowds of people. But, in any case, it should be considered whether human rights could broken this way."
"As for the electronic cards, it would be wrong to introduce them before Russia has a law on protecting electronic information about citizens," Vdovin said Friday in a telephone interview. "We don't have such a law and this means the information can be used to harm the public."
TITLE: City Scientists Say Red-Sea Miracle Can Be Explained
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: "And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided. And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon dry ground: the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left."
Exodus 14
Two Russian mathematicians have attempted to explain the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea, which according to the Old Testament and the Torah allowed the Jews to escape slavery in Egypt.
The Egyptians who followed them were drowned in the waves as they attempted to follow, the Bible story says.
St. Petersburg mathematician Naum Volzinger, who wrote a study in collaboration with colleague Alexei Androsov, who lives in Hamburg, is a senior researcher with the Institute of Oceanology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
He said the Red Sea might have parted under special conditions, which their study has discovered.
The study focuses on a reef that runs from the well-documented starting point of the Jews to the north side of the Sea. In Biblical times the reef was much closer to the surface, Volzinger said Monday in a telephone interview.
The study took almost six months to complete and was a purely mathematical task, he said.
Called "Modeling of the Hydrodynamic Situation During the Exodus," and published in the Bulletin of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
"In purely professional terms, I can say that it was done through a system of differential equations," Volzinger said.
Put simply, the task facing the scientists was to establish the conditions under which the waves might have parted.
The questions the Russian researchers were interested in for the Exodus study were, for instance, the speed of the wind and the strength of the storm needed to leave the reef high and dry at low tide; how long would the reef stay would dry and how quickly the waters would return.
"If the [east] wind blew all night at a speed of 30 meters per second then the reef would be dry," Volzinger said. "It would take the Jews - there were 600,000 of them - four hours to cross the 7 kilometer reef that runs from one coast to another. Then, in half an hour, the waters would come back."
At the Institute of Oceanology, Volzinger researches various ocean phenomena, including flooding and tidal waves.
The miracle of the parting of the sea is mentioned in the Shema, one of the most important Jewish prayers, which is said by religious Jews three times daily. Not only did the Jews cross the sea to escape from slavery in Egypt, but the Egyptians who followed them drowned in the sea, according to the book of Exodus in the Old Testament and in the Torah.
Mark Grubarg, the head of the Jewish community in St. Petersburg, said the spiritual value of this miracle is immense for Jews.
"Jews were the first nation in history to accept monotheism but they could hardly assert it while in slavery in Egypt," Grubarg said. "God told them to return to the Promised Land, and this is why it was so important. When the Jews reached the sea, they needed a miracle to complete their journey, and they were granted that miracle as a reward for their strong faith. The idea of monotheism is reflected in the Shema prayer."
This extraordinary event has long preoccupied people's minds: Medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas said the parting of the Red Sea was possible.
A number of researchers around the globe have tried to determine the probability of such an event taking place and to calculate the odds but now Volzinger and Androsov decided to focus on what it would take for the miracle to happen.
Volzinger said he and Androsov studied the issue "strictly from Isaac Newton's point of view" as he puts it. "I am convinced that the God rules the Earth through the laws of physics," he smiles. Yet he acknowledges the religious importance of the miracle. "To fulfill their historical mission, the Jews needed to return to a free land," the scientist said.
"The miracle really did influence the formation of the nation's character, strengthening the belief in their historical path," Grubarg said.
When the Jews reached the shores of the Red Sea they were divided as to what to do next. One quarter wanted to return to Egypt, longing for guaranteed meals despite the humiliation of slavery; another quarter considered a hand-to-hand fight with the enemy; another quarter resorted to prayers, and only the remaining 25 percent believed they should head towards their land across the sea - because God told them to do so.
"There is so much wisdom to learn from that episode - from just how easily many of us can forget and even accept the horrors of slavery to the importance of being able to listen to God and follow him without any doubts," Grubarg said. "Naturally, for us, the parting of the Red Sea was a miracle and nothing else."
Volzinger said he hasn't yet informed any religious organizations about the scientists' findings and they haven't had any reaction yet.
But the parting of the Red Sea, Volzinger argues, isn't likely to happen again. The reef has now been severed to create a passage for ships and the water is now much deeper. Unless, that is, another miracle occurs.
TITLE: City Crime Not What Once Was - Author
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg is no longer Russia's criminal capital - this is the good news announced in a new book called "Banditsky Peterburg 1703-2003," by the city's most famous crime reporter Andrei Konstantinov.
"The 'Banditsky Peterburg,' the history of which we followed attentively since the beginning of the 1990s ... doesn't exist anymore," Kostantinov writes in the preface.
"The period of gangster wars is over, and, above all, the most criminal groups, which were the reason for the notion [that the city was the criminal capital] are no longer here," he writes.
Konstantinov, who heads the city's Agency of Journalistic Investigations, is reputed to be the city's best informed journalist on the local criminal world.
His 1998 book "Banditsky Peterburg" inspired a hugely successful television series featuring some of the country's best actors. It was rescreened numerous times on several channels. The soundtrack became a popular hit.
The new book updates the 1998 book, but also goes back to the crimes committed when the city was founded.
In 1990s St. Petersburg was stigmatized as the country's criminal capital after several murders of prominent federal politicians and city administrators, including Mikhail Manevich, head of the city's property committee, in 1997 and State Duma deputy Galina Starovoitova in 1998.
Local businessmen and criminals were also frequent targets of contract killers.
Konstantinov estimates that in the last decade, which he calls "the period of gangster wars," about 5,000 people were killed in criminal conflicts in St. Petersburg.
The list of murders in the city from 1993 to September 2003 provided by Konstantinov indicates that people holding high office in business or the local administration were killed in St. Petersburg every week and sometimes more often.
However, the new book, which covers 300 years of crime in St. Petersburg, suggest that the last 10 years of unprecedented criminal activity in the city was not unique.
Konstantinov says the city's history was punctuated with the dark moments from the very beginning.
The city's criminal rating was especially high in 1741 when Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, took the throne. Her guards, who helped her to get the crown, considered they could do whatever they liked.
Konstantinov said the guards robbed people on the streets and sometimes broke into the homes of wealthy people and killed whole families.
At that time, so-called "sly" wayside inns appeared on the roads leading to St. Petersburg. Far from populated areas from where help might come, these were almost factories of death for foreigners traveling to or from the city.
A century later, another landmark in the criminal history of St. Petersburg was reached when the city became overrun with female criminals, many of whom worked as prostitutes.
Konstantinov writes the city had 148 registered brothels in 1853, By 1880, the city had more than 6,000 prostitutes.
Trying to explain why this was so, the author suggests female criminality might have something to do with passive roles that the society assigned to local women at that time.
"Not being satisfied with playing those roles, ladies with an 'active life position' turned into prostitutes, scoundrels or thieves," Konstantinov writes.
The absolute queen of the city's criminal world at that time was infamous Sonka the Gold Hand. To use modern language, the Gold Hand could be called a criminal sex bomb.
This beautiful and very elegant woman, who knew several foreign languages, was an extremely successful thief.
One of her favorite methods was called "Good Morning."
Dressed in fine clothes, Sonka stayed in the city's best hotels, studied their layouts, and paid close attention to visitors. She would then go to their rooms early in the morning in search for precious things. If a man woke up suddenly she would pretend mistakenly entered the wrong room. Sometimes she slept with the men in the room.
The Bolshevik revolution became an impulse for another wave of criminality in the city. This was the era of Lyonka Pantelyeyev, the superstar of the local criminal world , whose robberies kept the whole city in fear.
However, the biggest part of the two-volume book by Konstantinov is dedicated to the city's recent criminal history, which the author himself witnessed.
"Gloomy times," Konstantinov writes, describing the St. Petersburg of the early 1990s.
"People were afraid to go outside at night. They were afraid to drive their miserable Moskvich cars.
They feared that they could occasionally scratch a bandit's Mercedes ... and after that your life would be ... over," he wrote.
"A couple of bandits would get out of their Mercedes and break a couple of your fingers [if they saw you were not able to pay], and that was if you were lucky. If you had a small business in a kiosk, they could take all your stuff; if you entered a cafe with a beautiful woman they could just violently take her and drive away," Konstantinov wrote.
Konstantinov writes about a man called Anton, nicknamed "Karabas" by the author, who in 1993 kept a farm for slaves outside St. Petersburg. It was a sort of informal labor colony for hostages, who didn't pay their debts, or for bandits who misbehaved.
Anton made those people work until they had served their time or had paid off their debts.
Konstantinov met the city's organized crime bosses, including the recently murdered "Kostya the Grave" and Ruslan Kolyak. Some he managed to interview "for posterity," and his unique interviews are reproduced in the book. Kolyak was a colorful representative of St. Petersburg's criminal world who survived nine attempts upon his life, but was finally killed last year.
Konstantinov says Kolyak, who was a very emotional person, had vowed to kill the author, but said that he didn't do it only because of Konstantinov's "advanced abilities, intellect and talent."
The book also has an interview with Vladimir Barsukov, also known as Kumarin, whom Konstantinov describes as a businessman.
Konstantinov said that when telling stories of those people, he never aimed to advertise them, but that they belonged to the city's history, and he also tried to show them from a human point of view.
Konstantinov said the criminal situation in the city was under control by the end of 2003.
The end of St. Petersburg's criminal status can be explained by a general improvement in the country's economic situation in the country compared to the decade of chaos, which provoked the rise of boundless criminality in the early 1990s.
The world of organized criminality has changed today - when part of that world legalized into respectable businesses and doesn't want to go back to its dark past, while the other part has turned to drugs, he writes.
TITLE: Speaker Mironov Has Signatures to Run
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Sergei Mironov, speaker of the Federation Council and co-chairman of the Party of Life, has gathered 2.36 million signatures that will enable him to register as a candidate in the March 14 presidential elections, he said Monday at a city news conference.
More than 1 million signatures have already been "checked and filed" by the regional headquarters of the Party of Life, Mironov said.
"I am for President [Vladimir] Putin's policy, but I am an independent politician who has his own position, which can be different from the president's steps and intentions in some way," he said.
"I know what I am talking about after visiting 57 regions [of the Russian Federation]," Mironov said. "If the president, taking international experience into account, believes it is possible to solve social issues while the economic situation is in the process of improving, my point of view is different. If Russia doesn't solve its social issues now, there won't be anyone to solve them in the future. Everybody will simply die."
The federal budget should be boosted by funds received from privatizations, he said. Pensions for World War II veterans should be at least three times the minimum wage, he added.
The Federation Council's social policy committee made these recommendations at a meeting in St. Petersburg on Monday. The recommendations were sent to Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov.
Mironov said sources of funds that could be used to boost welfare payouts could include taxes on oil extraction. Such a tax could return up to 500 billion rubles ($17.2 billion) of additional income to the federal budget, he said.
Another 1 billion rubles ($34.5 million) could be raised if Russia introduced a state monopoly on production of ethyl alcohol.
A third measure to raise money would be to reform timber exports.
"It gets literally stolen in a bad way," he said. "We have to put exports of our bioresources in order, with timber being addressed first. This way we could raise an additional 400 million rubles ($13.7 million)."
About 31 million Russians live below the poverty line in Russia.
The Party of Life got 5.21 percent of votes in the State Duma elections in St. Petersburg, while nationwide it gathered just 1.91 percent.
"He [Mironov] doesn't play any games, but just salutes [the Kremlin]," Tatyana Dorutina, chairwoman of the League of Women Voters said Monday. "For a politician of the level of the head of the Federation Council this a shameful thing to do.".
"He heads the Party of Life," she said. "Any political structure has its political goals and the goal of supporting the president is the United Russia party's business. If he wants to support Putin, he should merge with United Russia in joint ecstasy and not confuse voters, which he does."
By participating in the presidential elections Mironov is trying to achieve his own political goal to get closer to the higher circles of the elite, said Yury Korgunyuk, political analyst at the INDEM political research foundation.
"Mironov's game is so small, that it's even hard to comment on," he said Monday in a telephone interview. "He is not happy because he is not in the [political] top 10 and he wants to get a ticket to get there."
TITLE: Proceedings Start Over Conscripts Who Fell Ill After Flight
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW - Military prosecutors opened criminal proceedings Monday against three high-ranking military officers in connection with an outbreak of severe respiratory illnesses among border guard conscripts who were forced to stand outside in freezing temperatures while their plane was being refueled.
One of the conscripts died and 90 others fell gravely ill with pneumonia and other respiratory illnesses in Magadan earlier this month.
Mikhail Chizh, acting unit commander of the Siberian Military District, Vladimir Satsaa, acting assistant to the chief of the Far Eastern Military District's military transportation service, and Oleg Kostryukov, acting head of the Magadan border unit, face criminal charges, the Chief Military Prosecutor's Office said.
"Investigators have started criminal proceedings against three high-ranking military officials in connection with the large number of new recruits being taken ill," a spokesman for the military prosecutor said. The three officers had not been charged.
The Chief Military Prosecutor's Office said charges also could be filed against four other high-ranking officers and their subordinates.
In all, more than 250 officials, including 22 generals, have been interrogated in the case. President Vladimir Putin ordered an investigation into the incident Thursday.
Doctors believe the conscripts became chilled after being forced to stand outside in thin clothes during refueling stops on a long flight from Moscow to the Far East in mid-December.
The events became public only after Vladimir Berezin, a conscript from Lyubertsy in Moscow's southern outskirts, died from double pneumonia. His mother disclosed the details of the episode and sparked a national outcry.
Rights groups seized upon it to highlight the notoriously harsh conditions in the army, where bullying by senior officers is widespread.
"These boys defend our country, and those who have stars, especially big stars, are the ones who frighten others and get paid," said Tatyana Kuznetsova, a member of the Soldiers' Mothers Committee, referring to stars on epaulettes denoting rank.
(AP, Reuters)
TITLE: Racism Case Investigated
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The City Prosecutor's Office has initiated a criminal case against Yury Belyayev, head of the Party of Liberty and editor of newspaper Express Khronika for allegedly publishing an article inciting attacks on ethnic Caucasians, Interfax reported Monday.
Last year the Admiralteisky District Prosecutor's Office refused to open a criminal case over the same article following a complaint by Mikhail Amosov, head of the Yabloko faction in the Legislative Assembly. The decision by the district prosecutor's office was rescinded by the City Prosecutor's Office after Amosov insisted that the original decision was unfounded and illegitimate, the report said.
The article called Boyevoi Dukh, or Fighting Spirit, was published in the paper, 10,000 copies of which were distributed in the city free of charge.
Investigators will also consider annulling the Party of Liberty's registration, said Nikolai Vinnichenko, the city prosecutor. "We are examining this group's activities," he said.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Intruders Shot Dead
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - A pensioner in the Leningrad Oblast has shot dead two men who tried to break into his house, Interfax quoted the city and oblast police as saying Monday.
The shooting took place at 3:30 a.m. in the town of Lyuban after a group of four men tried several times to break in. The pensioner, aged in his late 50s, fired a hunting shotgun at them several times, the report said.
As a result two men died, one unidentified man apparently aged 35 to 40 and another born in 1975. The other two left the scene without trace.
A criminal case of multiple murder has been opened and the pensioner has been detained, the report said.
Royal Victims Honored
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - A memorial to members of the four grand dukes of the Romanov family who were shot in the Peter and Paul Fortress in 1919 will be unveiled on Jan. 30, Interfax reported Monday.
The director of the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg, which is located in the fortress, said that a memorial plaque will serve as an act of repentence for the murders by the Bolsheviks of the four grand dukes on Jan. 24, 1919, just like the planned return of the remains of Tsarina Maria Fyodorovna from Denmark this year.
Germans Mark Siege
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - A photographic exhibition in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the lifting of the siege of Leningrad during World War II will be held at the village of Sologubovka, 70 kilometers from St. Petersburg, where the biggest cemetery in the world of German dead from the war is located.
Interfax reported Monday that the exhibition will feature more than 100 black-and-white photographs by leading German photographers and archive photographs from the war.
The cemetery holds the graves of 20,000 soldiers, half of whose names are not known. Germany was allowed to create the cemetery on condition that Soviet memorials in Germany be maintained, the report said.
Academic Shot Dead
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - A former head of department at the St. Petersburg Institute of Fire Prevention was gunned down in the city early Friday in what police said was an apparent contract hit.
Igor Skopylatov, 44, was found dead in the doorway in his apartment block in the central city with two bullet wounds. He had been shot twice in his head and chest. Police found Skopylatov dead after neighbors heard shots and raised the alarm, Interfax reported.
Since 2001 Skopylatov had worked at Smolny Universitet, a company that owns rights to at least a dozen commercial colleges in St. Petersburg, Gazeta.ru reported.
Prosecutors were investigating Skopylatov in connection with alleged fraud and theft of 850 million rubles of company funds from students' tuition.
Oblast Shuffles Posts
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Yevgeny Petelin, head of the Leningrad Oblast governor's administration, has been named a vice governor, Interfax reported Monday citing the governor's press service.
Petelin will continue to run the governor's administration but will also be responsible for a series of matters connected with local self-government.
The oblast's state service for local self-government has been transformed into the committee for cooperatopion with organs of local self-government.
TITLE: Siloviki's Pyramid Of Power Revealed
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - After quietly installing loyalists in a number of senior federal and regional posts, the Kremlin's siloviki clan has built a formidable pyramid of power that is reshaping the face of politics, political analysts said.
"The strength of the clan is in its pyramid-like structure. It is a very powerful hierarchy," said Nikolai Petrov, an analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center.
The former and active officers of military, security and law enforcement agencies started building and expanding their clan long before the Russian and Western media started referring to them as the siloviki in their coverage of the ongoing crackdown on Yukos.
At the top of the pyramid are Igor Sechin and Viktor Ivanov, deputy heads of the presidential administration, according to Petrov and Vladimir Pribylovsky, president of the Panorama think tank.
The clan's top brass is also believed to include Federal Security Service chief Nikolai Patrushev and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov. The two men's influence, however, is largely confined to their agencies, Petrov said. In addition, Ivanov, a former KGB officer, has the mammoth task of reforming the armed forces, limiting his opportunities to dabble in other areas, he said.
Given Putin's KGB background, it came as no surprise that he picked these and other career security service officers to fill a number of key posts in his administration and the government. It is unclear, however, whether Putin knew that the officers would form a clan in his retinue that would be balanced by liberal-minded economists and lawyers that he once worked with in the St. Petersburg mayor's office.
In any case, the newly promoted former KGB veterans were ambitious, and they started working quietly if not tediously at least four years ago to expand their influence.
They have installed former colleagues and loyalists as deputy heads at '"virtually all" federal agencies, Petrov said.
These officials, who make up the middle level of their pyramid of power, are in position to supervise Yeltsin-era officialdom and gain experience before taking over the top posts, he said.
One key agency that the siloviki have apparently managed to bring under their control is the Prosecutor General's Office, which filed fraud charges against Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky this fall. Petrov and Pribylovsky said Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov, who was widely thought to be part of former President Boris Yeltsin's inner circle known as the Family, has most likely defected to the rival siloviki clan. "I think he is flexible enough," Petrov said.
In other examples, Nikolai Negodov, who has a KGB background, currently holds the post of deputy transportation minister, while Vladimir Yakunin, reportedly a former KGB officer, is first deputy president of the Russian Railways Co., the recently formed state railroad monopoly.
Negodov served in the KGB from 1977 to 2000, according to a comprehensive database of who's who in Russian politics compiled by the Panorama Information and Research Center. The Transportation Ministry's web site says Negodov served in the armed forces during that time.
Yakunin was named a possible replacement for former presidential chief of staff and Family man Alexander Voloshin by the local media last fall. He worked in the Soviet mission at the United Nations from 1985 to 1991 and, according to a 2000 report in the Versia newspaper, owns a dacha next to Putin's in the Leningrad Oblast.
Some state agencies have been tougher to take control of. The Interior Ministry, despite being led by siloviki sympathizer Boris Gryzlov, is so riddled by corruption that orders from on high often go unfilled, Petrov said. In 2001, FSB officer Konstantin Romodanovsky was named chief of internal security at the ministry in an attempt to improve discipline by weeding out "werewolves in epaulets" - corrupt officers making money on the side through extortion and bribes.
Romodanovsky, who holds the rank of lieutenant general, told Izvestia in September that the FSB had assigned him to the Interior Ministry but, while he is still an FSB officer, he reports to Gryzlov.
In one case, the siloviki decided last spring that it would be easier to disband an agency than spend time cleansing it, Petrov said. The agency was the Tax Police, whose 40,000 employees and huge amount of equipment was rivaled only by the FSB. The Tax Police functions of sniffing out tax fraud went to the Interior Ministry, while most of the personnel and equipment were handed over to a new anti-drugs agency, headed by a siloviki man, Viktor Cherkesov. This reorganization allowed the siloviki to screen out unreliable employees without consuming too much time and effort, Petrov said.
The siloviki's invasion of the higher echelons of power has had a trickle-down effect, Petrov said. "They brought the clan with them by appointing their allies to run lower-level departments."
Konstantin Simonov, director of the Center for Current Politics in Russia, said, however, that some ministries have remained independent, pointing to the Emergency Situations Ministry as an example.
At the base of the pyramid, the siloviki are able to control regional affairs through presidential envoys in the federal districts (four of the seven have military or police backgrounds), governors or the chiefs of regional law enforcement agencies.
Seventy percent of the staff hired by the presidential envoys have military or security service backgrounds, according to the findings of a sociologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Olga Kryshtanovskaya.
The siloviki have helped ensure loyalty at the regional level by reshuffling the heads of local police, defense and security agencies, Petrov said. For example, Konstantin Chaika, chief prosecutor of the Kamchatka region, has been promoted deputy general prosecutor for the Far East Federal District, while Nikolai Vachayev has taken over the Interior Ministry's Primorye branch after being a deputy head of the ministry's Krasnoyarsk branch.
More than 2,000 former security service employees have been appointed or elected nationwide with the Kremlin's support over the first three years of Putin's presidency, Novaya Gazeta wrote in August. Security and military officers hold a quarter of all senior government posts, while former KGB generals are now the governors of Smolensk, Ingushetia and Voronezh.
The potential for this pyramid of power to grow further, however, is severely limited, because its main resource for loyalists - the FSB - has been all but depleted, Petrov said. "They have drawn out too many people," he said.
He said the siloviki have been dealing, in part, with this problem by shifting people, as was the case with Sergei Ivanov, who served as head of the advisory Security Council from 1999 before becoming defense minister in 2001. In addition, it has been trying to boost reserves by putting junior FSB officers on fast career tracks, he said.
The siloviki rely on a variety of sources for financing, the most sizeable of which are large state-owned corporations such as Gazprom and Rosneft, analysts said. Cash is also generated though businesses set up with the help of the FSB, a handful of inconspicuous siloviki-connected organizations such as the Fund for Support of Veterans of Law Enforcement Agencies, and fundraising efforts by presidential envoys, they said.
Analysts suggested that a few loyal bankers help the siloviki arrange financial transactions and store money in confidential accounts. Sergei Pugachyov, a founder of Mezhprombank, is suing Family-connected spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky for claiming that he is one of those bankers.
Before this month's State Duma elections, the siloviki's main political arm was Gennady Raikov's People's Party, Simonov said. But "the main thing is control over United Russia, and the fight for it is still going on," he said.
The clan is also caught in a series of internal struggles that weaken its potency. Within the Interior Ministry, newcomers from Putin's elite are locked in a battle with the old guard, while branches of the FSB are continuously plotting intrigues against each other, Petrov said.
Still, the clan has shown that it can find common ground and "unite against an external enemy," as the Yukos case demonstrates, Petrov said.
Igor Sechin, 43, set out to be a philologist specializing in French and Portuguese but ended up being a St. Petersburg bureaucrat who rode on Vladimir Putin's tails to the Kremlin.
Sechin graduated with a degree in philology from Leningrad State University in 1984 and, according to media reports, was almost immediately recruited by the KGB.
He went to work as a translator at a branch of a Soviet equipment export company, Tekhnoexport, in Angola for two years, according to the Panorama Information and Research Center's database of who's who in Russian politics. Some media reports identify the country as Mozambique.
Following the work in Africa, Sechin served in the army for two years and then became a civil servant, joining in 1988 the Leningrad city executive committee, the Communist analogue of a city government.
He first acted as an expert on foreign economic relations and later, in 1991, was appointed as an assistant to Vladimir Putin, according to Panorama. Putin at that time was the head of St. Petersburg's external relations committee.
When Putin was appointed deputy head of the presidential property department in 1996 and moved to Moscow, Sechin followed to serve as the deputy head of the department's section for managing property abroad.
Putin took over the helm of the Kremlin's Main Control Directorate the next year, and Sechin became head of the directorate's general issues section.
Sechin moved with Putin again in 1998, when his boss was named first deputy head of the presidential administration. Sechin oversaw staffing and general affairs for Putin, according to Panorama.
When Putin became prime minister in 1999, he appointed Sechin as the head of his secretariat, charged with screening appointments and documents for signing. In three months, Sechin was promoted to the post of first deputy head of the Cabinet's general affairs department.
On Dec. 31 of that year - the day President Boris Yeltsin resigned and Putin became acting president - Putin made Sechin the deputy head of the presidential administration in charge of the secretariat, a post that he has held ever since. His duties include deciding whom the president meets with and which documents he sees.
When contacted by The Moscow Times, former colleagues in St. Petersburg City Hall were reluctant to share their impressions of the man who with deputy presidential administration head Viktor Ivanov leads the Kremlin's powerful silovoki clan of former KGB and military officers. Some, however, described him as having a sense of humor.
Viktor Ivanov, 53, is a tough KGB veteran who has a 10-year gap in his work record and has never specified how he met Vladimir Putin.
He graduated with a degree in radio engineering from the Leningrad Electrotechnical Institute of Communications in 1971 and went on to work for six years as an engineer at research and production company Vektor, according to the Panorama Information and Research Center's database of who's who in Russian politics.
He was reportedly recruited by the KGB while at Vektor. In 1978, he completed a year of studies at the Higher Courses of the KGB, a KGB academy, according to Panorama.
He then started a career in the KGB, but Panorama's records have no information about exactly where he was stationed.
"Gaps in the biographies of KGB people occur often because they have never made this information public," Panorama director Vladimir Pribylovsky said. "We are only able to use what has been published."
Between 1978 and 1988, Ivanov's only known deployment was in Afghanistan, in 1987 and 1988, as part of the fight by Soviet troops there.
From 1988 to 1994, he served in the Leningrad security services, including a stint as the head of its anti-contraband unit, various records show.
It is there that he might have first crossed paths with Putin. The two men might have become acquainted when Putin, then a KGB spy in East Germany, visited his hometown of St. Petersburg or after Putin became a city official, Pribylovsky said.
Retiring from the security agency as a colonel in 1994, Ivanov embarked on a public career in St. Petersburg City Hall. He was hired on a recommendation from Putin, Vlast magazine reported in 2001.
Ivanov was made head of a department responsible for contacts with police and security agencies, according to Panorama.
He quit in 1996 when Vladimir Yakovlev beat incumbent Mayor Anatoly Sobchak in gubernatorial elections and wound up a general director of Polyus, Panorama's records show, without providing any details about the company.
An Internet search turned up a web site for a Moscow-based company called Polyus that produces satellite antennas and stations. The web site says Polyus produced its first antenna in 1996.
Ivanov returned to the security service in 1998, heading the department for internal security at the Federal Security Service's Moscow headquarters. In 1999 and 2000 he served as deputy FSB head in charge of economic security.
On Jan. 5, 2000, six days after Putin became acting president, he appointed Ivanov as deputy head of his administration in charge of personnel issues. Ivanov has held the post ever since.
Former colleagues in St. Petersburg's City Hall describe Ivanov - who with deputy presidential administration head Igor Sechin leads the Kremlin's powerful silovoki clan of former KGB and military officers - as a man who shows little emotion.
An expert on Russia's political scene, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Ivanov was "authoritarian" and "has always been staunchly opposed to corruption."
Ivanov played a key role in the controversial disbandment of the presidential pardons commission, a group of respected laymen headed by writer Anatoly Pristavkin that sent recommendations to the president on which inmates should be released early, local media reported. According to a 2001 report in Vremya Novostei, Ivanov sent Putin a special report accusing the commission of making improper recommendations. Despite broad public support for the commission, it was disbanded later that year.
Ivanov actively lobbied for a law that toughened citizenship rules in 2002, according to Panorama. Parliament softened the law last fall.
TITLE: Cabinet Considers Universal ID Numbers
AUTHOR: By Caroline McGregor
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Americans have a unique social security number. Brits have a national insurance number. Within two years, each Russian could have a universal identification number, under plans submitted Thursday to the Cabinet by the Economic Development and Trade Ministry.
The numbers are designed to improve efficiency, but civil rights defenders fear that with the cross-referencing of financial, police and employment records that ID numbers would allow, the government's master list would give room for abuse and intrusion into private lives.
Today, there are 18 different national databases, with government agencies from the Interior and Tax ministries to the Central Elections Commission and State Pension Fund keeping their own catalogues of citizens' personal information.
These databases "don't coincide with each other," said Andrei Sharonov, the first deputy economic development and trade minister who presented the project, according to the www.government.ru web site.
Russians now have multiple identity numbers, on passports, on registration documents and on tax filings, and this inefficiency creates many bureaucratic headaches.
Correcting that, though, also presents a headache. Creating a single database of records is an enormous task, logistically and financially.
Denis Zenkin, the head of corporate communications for Kaspersky Labs, a leading provider of information security software, said the country will need huge investments in computer infrastructure to put a nationwide system within reach.
"We doubt it's possible in the next five years," said Zenkin, whose company has been a consultant on the Sharonov project. "It can be done in more developed regions, in Moscow, in St. Petersburg, but not if you're talking about the provinces."
Numbers will be assigned to future newborns at birth, and to everyone else when they next request a passport, for example, or register a marriage.
To quell jitters, Sharonov emphasized Thursday that it is not people but records that will be assigned numbers.
Alexei Kornev, the head of the Partner association of lawyers, told Gazeta that the project violates citizens' rights. "We are put under permanent control by the special services and state organs, which can easily rummage through anyone's dirty laundry."
It is still too early to estimate how much the project may ultimately cost, Zenkin said. The ministry has until May 1 to submit a more concrete concept of what data will be kept, who will keep it and who can access it.
The Tax Ministry may be made the custodian, Sharonov said, or a new federal agency may be created for the purpose.
The specter of a unified system that provides a ripe target for agile hackers and black marketeers is unsettling to some in a country where discs of confidential data from traffic police and telecom providers are readily available.
Zenkin said he was confident it would be well guarded.
"In Russia, state establishments are much better defended [against hackers] than in the United States," he said. There, government bodies are vulnerable because they are connected to the Internet, while here, the government is linked only to its own intranet.
Information could only be leaked with an insider's help, he said, adding that "state security services have always been top notch."
TITLE: Old U.S. Plans to Attack Soviet Union to Be Displayed
AUTHOR: By Carl Hartman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - Ever wonder what's in the Pentagon's old war plans? Why, for instance, "Project Cornflakes" was a go in World War II, but Cold War-era plans dubbed "Dropshot," "Broiler," "Sizzle," "Trojan" and "Shakedown" stayed on the drawing board?
An upcoming "Top Secret" exhibit at the U.S. National Archives building, which houses the revered copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, may answer some questions.
Using a new interactive computer program, visitors will be able to inspect spy documents and war plans once limited to officials with special security clearances. While the exhibit itself won't open until autumn, the Archives recently posted on its web site (www.archives.gov) a preview of the offerings. Among them:
n A 1946 memo from a U.S. naval attache suggesting America could win its postwar power struggle with the Soviet Union by using atomic bombs to stem the communist threat.
n The "Zimmerman Telegram," a coded 1917 message from German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmerman to a Mexican official offering to help Mexico regain New Mexico, Texas and Arizona from the United States. The British intercepted the note, deciphered it and gave it to President Woodrow Wilson. Congress declared war on Germany a month later.
n Documents from "Project Cornflakes," a World War II operation by the Office of Strategic Services - forerunner to the CIA - that dropped anti-Nazi propaganda over Germany.
Each year the National Archives declassifies hundreds of thousands of pages of documents as part of a regular review of old records or because of Freedom of Information Act requirements.
The challenge, curator Bruce Bustard writes in the preview article, was to make the documents accessible to visitors in a way that "replicates the thrill and sense of discovery researchers feel" when they open boxes containing declassified material.
The viewer of the Zimmerman telegram, for example, will see the telegram sent by the Germans to Mexico City: groups of numbers on a standard Western Union form. The meaning of the numbers will also be explained. For example, "264777" means "Texas."
On the naval attache's war plan, the words "Top Secret" are stamped at the top and bottom of each page. The cover sheet carries a note on the declassification.
What the Archives settled on was a computer-accessed system. Visitors to the Archives building will view the documents by touching a screen. Bustard said details have not been settled, but he wants to give the viewer the feeling that he or she is opening a box of archives.
One such "box" contains the 1946 memorandum - seven typewritten pages, double-spaced - written by Rear Admiral Houston Maples, naval attache at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, to Admiral Chester Nimitz, chief of naval operations, about the threat posed by the Soviet Union after World War II.
Though America and the Soviet Union had been allies during World War II, in the postwar period they secretly plotted against each other in what became the Cold War.
Maples foresaw a Soviet drive through Western Europe by 1951. Fearing that Western forces would not be able to hold the continent, Maples predicted that America would prevail because the United States had the atomic bomb and the Soviets were unlikely to have the weapon within five years. That prediction turned out to be wrong: The Soviets developed the bomb in 1949.
"Our possession of the atomic bomb gives us the most destructive weapon in existence," Maples wrote. "In addition, our superiority in technical, organizational and industrial capacity will enable us to develop faster and produce in greater quantities, improved and new weapons. ... We conclude that the fall of the communist regime will bring about the capitulation of Russia."
Maples did not give his plan a name. But various scholars have reported on more than a dozen U.S. war plans against the Soviets, with names like "Dropshot," "Broiler," "Sizzle," "Trojan" and "Shakedown."
Several outdated war plans were declassified in the 1970s and 1980s. Maples' plan lost its "top secret" classification in 1976.
David Alan Rosenberg, who co-edited the 15-volume "America's Plans for War Against the Soviet Union, 1945-1950," said in an interview that General Leslie Groves, commander of the Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bomb, made a list of Soviet cities that could be targeted by such bombs.
The "Top Secret" exhibit will open next fall near the building's rotunda, where the recently refurbished Declaration of Independence and Constitution are on display.
TITLE: Much to See in Finland's Clean, Seaside Capital
AUTHOR: By Catherine Santore
TEXT: In the humming quiet of a spacious tram, three teenage girls giggle in grammatically perfect, accented English.
If you think that these are friends from different countries communicating in a language that they all have in common, think again.
They're Finns, and for Finns it's cool to throw a few English sentences into conversation.
For travelers fearful of mastering enough Finnish to eat, sleep and be smiled at, every resident of Helsinki seems to speak English fluently.
Not only is the population well educated, but the city is also so smoothly run, you'd think it gets oiled every Sunday morning. Everything you need to know about Finland can be found in its tourist offices. Helsinki's office is at 19 Pohjoisesplanadi, and the vast national tourist office across the street displays more glossy brochures in English than you can haul away.
The long nights of a Nordic winter should not keep travelers at bay because Helsinki was built with cold, dark days in mind.
When the light fades shortly after lunch, spend a few hours at one of the city's 83 museums. After the museums close, the shopping-starved can take comfort in the plethora of department stores and malls downtown open late on weekdays.
A world away from Smolensky Passazh in Moscow is the mammoth Stockmann on 52 Aleksanterinkatu, a middle-class department store with little elbowroom on weekends. The narrow Aleksanterinkatu street is lined with stores, with pedestrian traffic disturbed only by passing trams. Across the street at 1 Keskuskatu is Stockmann's three-floor bookstore with at least a third of its wares in English.
Though Finland's turbulent history is not immediately evident from its neat streets, the relatively young country has been batted about between the Swedes, who ruled it for over 600 years, and the Russians, who made the country an autonomous grand duchy after taking it over in 1809. The Finns took advantage of Russia's revolutionary turmoil to declare independence in 1917.
Russian-Finn relations remained prickly after Finland's independence and worsened when the Red Army invaded the country in the winter of 1939-40. The feisty Finns outmaneuvered the vastly superior Soviet forces by camouflaging themselves with white uniforms and skis, and eventually - though at a price - checked the Soviet Union's expansionist ambitions. For a better look at the country's history, visit the National Museum of Finland at 34 Mannerheimintie and the Helsinki City Museum at 4 Sofiankatu.
Founded in 1550, Helsinki was a muddy, plague-ridden backwater for its first 200 years.
All that changed in 1748, when Sweden built the Soumenlinna maritime fortress, one of the world's largest, to fend off the Russians. Spread over six islands, the fortress is just a 15-minute ferry ride from Helsinki. But beware of the wind, which threatens to blow over unwary visitors and makes taking photos hard unless you brace yourself against a tree or canon.
Most of the fortress is open to visitors, and you can spend at least an hour winding your way through the remains, climbing over and into walls, poking into all the nooks, and imagining how the mighty fortress eventually fell to the persistent Russians.
The closest island to the ferry landing, on the other side of a little white bridge, houses a naval academy where you can spot teenage boys in navy coats and Russian-style fur hats. There are several museums on the island, but only the Suomelinna museum is open in the winter.
Another place to warm your nose is the Panino restaurant in an old barracks building near the ferry landing, which brews its own beer. Ferries leave about every hour from Helsinki's Market Square.
After designating Helsinki the capital of its new territory in 1812, Russia made sure to leave its mark. Completed in 1868, the Uspensky Cathedral is the largest Orthodox church in western Europe. From the cathedral, walk to the obelisk topped by a double-headed eagle in the middle of Market Square. Dedicated to Nicholas I's wife, Alexandra, the eagle was toppled during Finland's break from Russia and returned to its place only in 1972. During daylight hours, the square is livened up by tents selling fresh fish, souvenirs and furry mittens.
Warm up in the red-and-white brick Old Market Hall, the city's oldest indoor market. Its two aisles are lined with cheese, raw and cured meat, chocolates and sweets, fish in every shape and size, and tourist tidbits like reindeer sausage and cloudberry jam. Since you can rest assured that the fish doesn't get much fresher, stop by the market's cozy sushi nook, the Norisushi Bar.
From the market, head up the cobblestone Sofiankatu, an open-air street museum. Just around the corner from the city tourist office, the 24-hour museum shows the history of Helsinki's streets, from carved gutters to covered wells and street lighting. The alley also leads to Senate Square and the imposing facade of the city's best-known landmark - the enormous Lutheran Cathedral.
In the middle of the square is an aging statue of Alexander II and his entourage of Law, Peace, Light and Labor. The square is a favorite gathering place to ring in the New Year.
Although rich in culture, Helsinki is missing that staple of old cities: a castle. For your old-castle fix, take a day trip to Finland's largest, in Turku. Built a hop and a skip away from Stockholm across the Baltic Sea, the castle was begun in 1280 to fortify Swedish influence in the region.
Today's immaculately restored structure has survived more than 700 years of fires, wars, building additions and a restoration campaign that stretched from 1946 to 1961. Black arrows and costumed museum attendants point out the proper way to view the castle's labyrinth of rooms, but it's best to buy an information booklet for 1 euro because all the museum's labels are in Finnish.
Like all well-tended castles, the most tantalizing staircases and rooms are roped off, but the remaining rooms offer a glimpse of life in medieval Finland.
There are drafty latrines, 16th-century wall paintings and a system of holes in the floor to carry heat from the stove below. Deep down in the castle's maze is the ladies' parlor: a small, dim room where the royal dames spent most of their time.
Until 1585, it was reachable only by a door in the courtyard. This served the dual purpose of controlling the ladies' movements and providing a last stand if all other parts of the castle had fallen to an enemy.
But there's no need to worry about enemy attacks. These days, Finland is as peaceful as a night under the aurora borealis, and enchanting enough to charm the wool socks off your feet.
TRAVELER'S TIPS
WHERE TO STAY
Scandic Hotel Continental Helsinki (940-551) at Mannerheimintie 46 offers doubles in the city center for 180 to 300 euros. With doubles starting at $150, Hotel Cumulus Seurahuone at Kiavokatu 12 (969-141) is a good train station option.
WHERE TO EAT
For unpretentious Finnish food that's easy on your euros, try Zetor (666-966) at Mannerheimintie 3-5, popular with locals who enjoy eating at rough wooden tables amid old tractors. Head to Lappi (645-550) on Annankatu 22 for a taste of Lapland, offering traditional northern dishes with reindeer and cloudberries.
HOW TO GET THERE
Trains from Ladozhsky Station leave daily at 7:30 a.m. and 4:31 p.m. Pulkovo Airlines flies to Helsinki daily except Sunday and Finnair flies daily except Saturday. Trains from Helsinki to Turku leave about 10 times a day.
TITLE: Restaurant Chain Expands
AUTHOR: By Andrei Musatov and Gleb Krampets
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: As part of its regional expansion, the Moscow restaurant chain Yolki-Palki opened its first restaurant in St. Petersburg at the end of December.
Yolki-Palki, founded by Moscow entrepreneur Arkady Novikov, owns 28 restaurants, 26 of which are located in Moscow. The trademark is owned by the Lanch Co.
Lanch development manager Roman Chursin said that at the end of December his company opened its first restaurant on Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg. This is the second restaurant outside of Moscow; the first is in Rostov-on-Don. The company spends "hundreds of thousands of dollars" on building restaurants in the regions, Chursin said.
Boris Krupkin, general director and co-owner of the rival Chainaya Lozhka chain of eateries put the cost of opening his first restaurant in St. Petersburg at between $400,000 and $500,000. This includes renovation, equipment, advertising and a few months of lease payments during renovation.
Rashid Magdeyev, vice president of the St. Petersburg Association of Restauranteurs predicted a promising future for Yolki-Palki in St. Petersburg. In just a few years the St. Petersburg market will be saturated, meaning now is the time to act, he said.
Vladislav Ivanov, general director of Pizza Nord, the company that operates Pizza Hut and Kentucky Fried Chicken in St. Petersburg, agrees. Ivanov estimates that only 30 percent of demand for restaurants is met in the city. "A city like St. Petersburg should have at least 1,000 fast food restaurants, and there are only about 40," he said.
Krupkin of Chainaya Lozhka said that Yolki-Palki could face a deficit of retail space in the center of town appropriate for the restaurant's niche. "The Moscow chain doesn't open more than one or two eateries a year precisely due to this problem," he said.
The Moscow restauranteurs are interested in other cities beyond St. Petersburg. Chursin of Lanch said the company would open franchises in Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Krasnoyarsk, Krasnodar and Tula. He declined to name the regional investment budget or the company's revenues.
The chain faces difficulty expanding in Moscow. "Our department that produces semi-prepared food for restaurants can serve no more than 30 outlets," Chursin said. "Moreover, the Moscow market is gradually becoming saturated and we can see two main vectors of development: changing format in Moscow and entering the regions."
Yevgeny Prigozhin, director of Concord Catering, which owns the Blin-Donalts chain of inexpensive eateries said it is easy to expand in the fast-food chain business. In 2004, Blin-Donalts plans to jump from three to eight outlets. Prigozhin doesn't rule out expansion. "We're examining regional legislation and figuring out how much money we would need to open in the regions," he said.
Ivanov noted that the Yolki-Palki brand name is well known among visitors to Moscow, which could explain the mushrooming number of restaurants in other cities bearing the same name. According to Lanch Co., there are restaurants not related to the Moscow chain operating in seven cities.
"Most likely people saw our restaurants when they were in Moscow, then copied the idea. Maybe it was by accident," said Oleg Parfyonov, the Moscow chain's lawyer. Last year the company sent letters to the owners of these restaurants to convince them to change the names of their restaurants. The company did not say how many of the restaurants had complied with the request.
TITLE: Small Business to Get Loans Worth $1Bln
AUTHOR: By Simon Ostrovsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Vneshtorgbank will lend small and medium-sized businesses $1 billion this year, bank head Andrey Kostin said after a meeting with President Vladimir Putin last week.
No Russian commercial bank currently has a small business lending program of its own, though there are a few banks that lend to small companies through funds provided by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development.
Putin has called the small business sector a top priority, but efforts to reform relevant legislation have done little to boost statistics.
Small and medium-sized enterprises account for less than 15 percent of gross domestic product, according to the State Statistics Committee. In the European Union that figure is close to 60 percent.
If Vneshtorgbank makes good on its promise to lend out $1 billion, it would constitute the largest investment by a single organization in the direction of small business reform.
One of the main reasons that the Russian small business sector has not flourished is because it lacks infrastructure readily available in the West, such as lending institutions, according to a recent study by the World Institute for Development Economic Research, a United Nations-sponsored think tank.
Russia's banks have traditionally catered to small groups of industrialists, living off a lending portfolio of two or three high-volume clients.
Lending programs for private individuals and small companies require the creation of an expensive retail network and more personnel to staff branch offices.
"Vneshtorgbank is a relatively new player on the small and medium business crediting market," said Vladimir Osmolovsky, head of the company's department of client marketing and economic analysis.
"For this reason the bank is actively pushing ahead with developing new credit programs [for small businesses]."
Vneshtorgbank said it would increase its presence in the Moscow area to 45 branch offices by the end of the year and to 120 by the end of 2005.
It currently has 95 offices outside Moscow.
"The small business credit risks of $1 billion that the bank is taking upon itself in 2004 is an unprecedented amount for Russian banks," Osmolovsky said. "We will decide whether to increase this sum after the program has been finished."
Last year the EBRD Small Business Fund gave two Omsk brothers, who produce ice cream, it's billionth dollar in credit after having operated on the Russian market since 1994.
The EBRD fund considers it important that small businesses are financed through banks instead of donor organizations, so that a normal banking culture develops in Russia.
Vneshtorgbank's move to finance small business looks like a step in this direction.
But credit in Russia doesn't come cheap. Interest rates will be similar to those offered to private individuals, Osmolovsky said. In Russia those rates hover between 12 to 15 percent for dollar loans, compared to U.S. interest rates in the lower single digits.
Vneshtorgbank's competitors don't doubt that the banks credit will be in demand, however.
"If you want to do it, you can hand out $1 billion pretty fast," Nadiya Cherkasova, deputy director of business development at KMB-Bank, which lends to small businesses through the EBRD's fund, told Izvestia.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: New Skyscrapers?
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Two 40-story high-rise buildings will be erected in St. Petersburg, the city's committee on urban planning and architecture announced Monday, Interfax reported.
The LEK Estate construction company will build the high-rises designed by Arkhstudiya.
The new buildings will stand on a 1.2-hectare plot behind the Russian National Library on Moskovsky Prospekt.
With a total of 472 apartments and 35,000 square meters of floor space, the two buildings will share a ground-floor complex with 4,680 square meters of office space.
Finnish Tech Prize
HELSINKI, Finland (SPT) - This year's Marcus Wallenberg Prize, a major international technology award, will be awarded to Paul Olof Meinander, president of the Finnish company POM Technology Oy.
The prize of 2 million Swedish Crowns (219,400 euros) will be presented by King Carl XVI Gustaf in an award ceremony in Stockholm next fall. The National Technology Agency of Finland, Tekes, has been financing the prize-winning innovation since 1994.
The prize-winning innovation cuts water circulation by 70 to 90 percent in paper machines, reduces emissions from paper manufacture and conserves energy. The POM system has been approved as an alternative to conventional solutions in the paper industry and adopted for production use in 25 locations in Europe, Asia and North America.
Avtotor Goes Opel?
MOSCOW (SPT) - The Avtotor automotive plant located in Kaliningrad announced on Monday that it may start assembling Opel Vectra sedans, Interfax reported.
"It's just an idea, but there's a possibility we could reach an agreement with General Motors. If the Opel Vectra turns out to be the most profitable car for the market, then that's the one we'll discuss," Avtotor Holding general director Valery Sokolov told Vedomosti in response to a rumor the plant was in talks with GM.
So far Avtotor has concentrated on assembling Hummer vehicles, also by agreement with GM. The Kaliningrad plant also assembles South Korean KIA and German BMW vehicles. Norilsk ADRs
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - Norilsk Nickel asked Russia's stock market regulator to allow it to convert more shares into American depositary receipts amid growing demand from investors.
The company asked the Federal Securities Commission for permission to convert as much as 35 million shares, or 16 percent of charter capital, into ADRs, Norilsk spokesman Sergei Polikarpov said. About 37 percent of the company is in free-float, of which 23 percent is being held by foreign investors in ADRs, he said.
"There's growing interest in the Norilsk stock,'' Polikarpov said. "Foreigners prefer ADRs. We have come very close to a limit of conversion to ADRs earlier set for us by the commission."
Record CB Reserves
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - Foreign currency and gold reserves rose to a record $78.9 billion, the Central Bank said Thursday.
The reserves rose $1.8 billion to $78.9 billion in the week to Jan. 9, after falling $700 million in the week to Jan. 2. The previous record was $77.8 billion on Dec. 26.
Foreign currency and gold reserves indicate the country's ability to pay its foreign debts, which is important for investors holding billions of dollars of the country's bonds.
2nd Severstal Car Plant
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - Third-largest carmaker Severstal-Avto plans a 1.5 billion ruble ($51 million) share offer to finance construction of second production plant, Vedomosti reported Thursday.
Severstal-Avto, controlled by third-largest steelmaker Severstal, plans to sell 7.7 million shares valued at 190.71 rubles apiece.
Ulyanovsk-based Severstal-Avto plans to sell the stock before next winter, Vedomosti quoted the company's finance director Nikolai Sobolev as saying. The plant, scheduled to cost between $70 million and $150 million, would produce 50,000 cars per year, Vedomosti reported.
Severstal-Avto, which controls sport utility vehicle maker UAZ and engine maker ZMZ, may seek a foreign partner for the project, Vedomosti quoted a Severstal-Avto executive as saying.
TITLE: Scot Holds Keys to City's Millions
AUTHOR: By Chris Condlin
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Dostoevsky brought Adrian Terris to Russia. As a psychology student in his native Scotland, Terris, now the general director of the St. Petersburg Yellow Pages, asked a professor for something more interesting than the typical textbook fare. "Try Dostoevsky," the professor responded, "he's the real psychologist. Try 'Crime and Punishment.'"
A decade later Terris was on a plane to Russia, with his entire savings in his pocket, leaving behind him a job as an auditor in a French bank and a promotion to captain in the British Territorial Army.
The confidence and idealism that spurred his move are characteristic of Terris' approach to life in general, and have guided him in the St. Petersburg business world. He conducts business on his own terms, dictated, he says, by a personal philosophy that people are more important than profits: "individual growth first, and then corporate success."
But although people may be his priority, Terris has had more than his share of corporate success as well. Under Terris' five-year leadership, the St. Petersburg Yellow Pages have become the premier phone directory in the city, with a database of over 72,000 entries. In 2003, the company distributed a record 175,000 copies of the directory, given free to all city businesses, making it one of the most widely available phone directories in Russia. The company's sleek web site - yell.ru - boasts as many hits as the top phone directory website in Moscow. And in 2003, the company posted 30 percent growth, three times the industry average
Not content to rest on his laurels, Terris has been pushing the company in new directions. Last year he negotiated a deal with cellular provider MTS that allows subscribers to access the Yellow Pages through their cell phones using the wireless application protocol, or WAP. The Yellow Pages already services 60,000 users a month using this technology.
Also in 2003, Terris opened a Moscow branch of the Yellow Pages with plans to release his company's first directory in April of this year. Not intimidated by the more competitive climate in the capital, Terris is confident that the "good business principles" which made the St. Petersburg Yellow Pages successful will prove equally resilient in Moscow. "Moscow is not as awesome as people suggest it might be," he says. "I have to do it. I feel that the directory business there is not developed as much as it is in St. Petersburg."
Eventually, he expects the Moscow venture to be three times as large as his St. Petersburg operation. But he has no plans to move permanently. With a wife and two children here, he is firmly entrenched in St. Petersburg. Besides, he says, "there are too many cars in Moscow."
A love of Russian literature may have brought Terris to Russia, but it was an accident that brought him to St. Petersburg. Knowing almost nothing about Russia, he was set to go to Moscow by default, when a "chance conversation" with a friend in London's Waterloo Station convinced Terris to try the northern capital. He pictured a "small fishing village near Finland," and realized only as his plane was landing that he had come to a city of millions.
When Terris first came to St. Petersburg in 1994, he planned to stay for no more than a couple of years. But he quickly fell in love with his new home. "The slow moving Neva River carried me away," he says wistfully.
Doing business in Russia is completely different from in Britain, he says. "Contracts aren't important here, what's important is a man's word." This style seems well suited to Terris' personal approach to business. And the Russians haven't disappointed. "I've never met so many honest businessmen," he says.
Terris began working for the Yellow Pages in 1996, first as commercial director, and then as general director. Taking over the company just before the 1998 financial crisis was an adventure, he says, but he describes that year in almost fond terms. The crisis, he says, "was a war without bullets," and he smiles like an old veteran recounting battle stories. He emphasizes that the results of the crisis were not all negative. "It was like a forest fire," he says, "it cleared out a lot of the dead wood." The Yellow Pages, of course, remained.
Terris's idealism about what he is doing is palpable. "It's not about money, it's about caring," he says without blinking an eye.
"The job of a manager," he explains, "is to be managed by his staff. The only reason I'm doing business is because I'm interested in people."
The company's high employee retention rate, which hovers around 95 percent, attests to the success of Terris's philosophy. Colleague and friend Ognyan Geroff, the general director of the development company Tangra, confirms that there is a close relationship between Terris and his staff. "The people who work for Adrian love him not only as a boss but as a person."
Although happy at the office, Terris finds time for other pursuits. He is the president of St. Petersburg Caledonia, the city's Scottish culture club, which helps him keep in touch with his roots. "Most of all, I miss the mountains," he says, "there aren't any mountains nearby."
TITLE: Relocation Firm Sees Growing City Demand
AUTHOR: By Simone Kozuharov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A leading relocation company has opened an office in St. Petersburg in response to a growing need in the business community, company officials said.
Crown Relocations, a company specializing in the relocation of executives and their families internationally, has expanded its Moscow office to open a small branch office in St. Petersburg.
"There is a load of activity in Moscow and this is why we've opened up in St. Petersburg, to service the demand that we have here," said David Muir, the company's chief executive for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. "Moscow was servicing it previously and now we decided we need to manage the quality of the services here on the ground."
According to company officials, the company is responding to a "booming" market and demand for their services which include international and national moving services, real estate services, visa registration and work permits, handyman services, tenancy and property management, language and assimilation training, orientation tours and document archives, among others.
"There are opportunities for us [in St. Petersburg] from an operational point of view, being based here, as well as helping the Finnish community, of course, who are not very far away. So from our point of view, there are unique features about being in St. Petersburg rather than being in other parts of Russia," Muir said
If the company has similar success in St. Petersburg, it will expand to serve the Baltics as well. "That's where we're heading with this," Muir said.
"The Russian market is booming and there's a lot of internationals who think that its important to be in this market right now," Alexis Saporta, Moscow branch manager and country manager for Russia, said. "We're completely overwhelmed by requests from this sector."
Saporta considers St. Petersburg "a developing market," and said other cities in Russia are also beginning to develop a need for the company's services.
"We really respond directly to the demands of our customer in the sense that there are more and more requests coming mostly for St. Petersburg and we have to service that," Saporta said. "We are receiving requests from places like Krasnodar, Yekaterinburg, Sakhalin, Irkutsk, Tyumen - all these places with potential arrivals and sometimes in big numbers - and we have to find solutions for those places."
One St. Petersburg businessman attributed this demand to an evolving expatriate community.
"The expatriate community is certainly changing here ... turning from single executives to more family [oriented]," said Aaron Bogott, sales manager at Jensen Group, a real estate development company. "The situation in terms of the business climate is more friendly ... the comfort level of people or executives coming to St. Petersburg is increasing."
According to Muir, the company draws from a large pool of customers including corporate executives, the diplomatic sector and private individuals.
"They've lived in Ohio all their life and now suddenly they're walking through Moscow airport," Muir said.
"And they come with their kids and their whole family," Saporta added.
Muir said clients are no longer just expatriates, but Russians as well.
"Now we're seeing movement between places like St. Petersburg and Moscow of Russians ... obviously the income levels are up and [they] can enjoy these services as well," Muir said. "Previously, [you] would not, maybe four years ago even when we were entering the market, there would have been a demand for our services from Russians within Russia, but there is now."
One of Crown's local competitors in document archiving has also seen an increase in activity.
"The number of people who are calling us is increasing," said Dmitry Marchenko, a client service specialist at OSG Records Management. "It has only [been] a year [since] our company has been here in St. Petersburg and nobody provides the same business in St. Petersburg."
Crown's expansion to St. Petersburg could change that, although Taavi Suorsa of the company's St. Petersburg office said Crown does not yet have a client for the archive service in St. Petersburg.
Crown opened its Moscow office four years ago and has 40 employees.
"In one year we had an increase of nearly 55 percent of staff," Saporta said. "There's a high demand for us right now in the market in Moscow and St. Petersburg and generally speaking, in Russia."
TITLE: Rosneft Wants Quarter Of $1.5 Bln Oil Project
AUTHOR: By Eduard Gismatullin
TEXT: MOSCOW - Rosneft, state-owned oil producer, said it wants to acquire as much as a quarter of a $1.5 billion project led by Lukoil and ConocoPhillips, the third-largest U.S. oil company, which is exploring for oil in the Arctic.
Rosneft asked LUKoil, No. 1 oil major by sales, for a stake of 20 to 25 percent in the Northern Territories fields in the Timan-Pechora oil province in the country's north, said Sergei Oganesyan, Rosneft vice president. The deposits hold about 990 million barrels of oil reserves, equal to a third of the country's annual output.
"Lukoil is cautious about our proposal," Oganesyan said in an interview in Arkhangelsk, in northern European Russia. "We will manage to agree as we see our future with Lukoil and ConocoPhillips in the Timan-Pechora province."
Russian oil companies are turning to isolated regions such as Arctic offshore and onshore fields and eastern Siberia to maintain output growth, which is slowing at older fields in central Russia and west Siberia. Timan-Pechora, an Arctic region about 1,500 kilometers northeast of Moscow, has estimated reserves of 32 billion barrels, according to Lukoil, enough to fuel the U.S. for 3 1/2 years.
Lukoil spokesman Dmitry Dolgov declined to comment. ConocoPhillips's Moscow-based spokeswoman Yelena Zemskova said only the company's headquarters in Houston could comment later.
Lukoil has said it would invest $5 billion this decade in Timan-Pechora to boost output in the region to one-third of its total production. Rosneft plans to produce about 40 percent of its output in the region and ship about a fifth of its export through northern ports as of 2005.
Rosneft plans to more than double its production in the Timan-Pechora province to 210,000 barrels a day next year, from 2003's extraction.
Rosneft already has a joint oil venture with ConocoPhillips, Polar Lights, in the region. At the same time, the U.S. company is in talks with Rosneft and Gazprom, the national natural gas monopolist, about developing the Shtokman oil and gas offshore field in the Arctic.
Rosneft also said Monday will drill two exploration wells at a Siberia field this year where Total SA, Europe's third-largest oil company, is seeking a stake.
Rosneft earmarked $60 million for drilling and seismic studies at the Vankor fields, said Rosneft CEO Sergei Bogdanchikov. The company needs to invest at least $500 million to start oil production in 2007.
"We would like to know the fields better and thus are not ready yet to invite Total in the project," Bogdanchikov said at a press conference in Arkhangelsk Friday. "At the same time we don't see investors queuing to take part" in this venture.
The two Vankor group fields hold at least 125.3 million tons of recoverable reserves, according to a Rosneft report. The deposits will be able to produce as much as 216,000 barrels of oil a day when they are fully developed, which may need a $2.5 billion investment.
Rosneft is building Arctic ports to boost exports as it increases output. The company plans to almost triple production by 2013, to as much as 1.1 million barrels a day. It is examining two options for port construction to get Vankor oil to market.
TITLE: Environmentalists Fear Spills as Local Ports Increase Capacity
AUTHOR: By Angelina Davydova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Ecologists are increasingly concerned about possible oil spills in the Baltic Sea and in the Gulf of Finland in particular with heavier traffic on oil transportation routes. While all countries sharing the Baltic Sea agree on the need to increase safety in the region, most focus their attention on Russia as oil exports through new ports around St. Petersburg are expected to soar.
New Ports
Shipping remains the most popular method of transporting oil from Russia, surpassing pipelines and railways, which both lack flexibility and wear down quickly. With two thirds of all oil extracted in Russia being exported, Europe continues to be the traditional destination of exports.
This leaves Russia to employ either facilities on the Barents Sea and other northern seas near Murmansk - the most developed port in the region - or to use Black Sea ports, which have already reached capacity and possess insufficient pipe facilities; or ports in the Leningrad Oblast around St. Petersburg, opening the way to the Baltic Sea.
There are a number of port terminals around St. Petersburg that have been launched recently or are under construction, with all of Russia's major oil companies contributing to investment in them. The first terminal to be opened was Primorsk, located 120 kilometers northwest of St. Petersburg and in operation since December 2001. The port is managed by state-owned Transneft, which invested $279 million in developing the facilities.
Primorsk is supplied and was built specially for the Baltic Pipeline System, or BPS, which originates in the Komi Republic. The initial capacity of the port was 12 million tons of oil per year, now stands at 30 million tons and has a projected capacity of 62 million tons.
In 2003 the port shipped 17.6 tons of oil, which is 42 percent more than in 2002.
The second port is Vysotsk, located on Vysotsky Island, 160 kilometers northwest of St. Petersburg. The port is linked to the mainland by rail, and was used to ship coal and gravel. In 2002 LUKoil began constructing an oil terminal for light-oil products with a projected capacity of 10 million tons.
The third major port in the Leningrad Oblast is Ust-Luga, 200 kilometers west of St. Petersburg. The Ust-Luga port handles coal, mineral fertilizers, timber and cargo containers. This port has a capacity of 35 million tons of goods per year.
Yet another port is Batareinaya Bay on the Gulf of Finland, 80 kilometers southwest of St. Petersburg, where Surgutneftegaz is developing a terminal for the transportation of light-oil products, such as gasoline and diesel fuel. The planned capacity of the port is 15 million tons.
Not far from Batareinaya is the Lomonosov port with a potential annual throughput of 2.1-4.5 million tons of oil.
And last but not least, an oil terminal in Vistino Bay in the Gulf of Finland is slated to be built by 2008 with construction to begin at the end of 2004. At a cost of $115 million, the project is intended to handle 4 million tons of oil and oil products.
Apart from Leningrad Oblast ports, there is the St. Petersburg Sea Port, which also increased the shipping of oil in 2003 to 11 million tons, while overall the port shipped 42 million tons of cargo; and the St. Petersburg Oil Terminal, which shipped 7.3 million tons of oil in 2003, a 7.5 percent increase over 2002. The terminal plans to expand capacity to 12 million tons of oil per year by 2005.
The Finnish Environment Institute says that such an increase in the number of ports and oil terminals will lead to an immense growth of activity in the Gulf of Finland and might have a negative impact on the ecological situation in the region unless certain safety measures are taken.
Higher Risks
Sirpa Pellinen, a spokeswoman for the Finnish Environment Institute, says that oil spills mostly occur near port areas and straits, especially at the entrance of the Baltic Sea and in the Gulf of Finland. This means that the part of the Gulf of Finland between Helsinki and Tallinn faces the highest risk of a spill.
At present Finland exports up to 75 million tons of goods by sea, while Russia's exports from the Baltic ports amount to 35 million tons of goods and could reach 100 million tons in the next couple of years, said Maire Kaartama, senior advisor of the Confederation of Finnish Industry and Employers, delivering a speech on Finnish industry and sea transport on Jan. 2, 2004, in Helsinki.
At present the waters of the Gulf of Finland are plied by an average of 100 vessels per 24 hours, with a minimum of 60 vessels.
There is also intense passenger and cargo traffic - six million people per year and 120 departures weekly respectively - between Helsinki and Tallinn, which means that the strait at the entrance to the Baltic Sea will become very dangerous with the growth of Russia's oil exports, Kaartama said.
Another dangerous part of the Baltic Sea is the Danish Strait, which is also very narrow, she said.
With sea traffic in the Baltic Sea already very dense, the annual growth of maritime traffic is expected to vary from 3 to 8 percent. According to a research project entitled Baltic-Pipeline-ERUS funded by the European Union's TACIS program, growth of maritime traffic from 1995 to 2017 will be 186 percent in break bulk, 84 percent in dry bulk, 186 percent in general cargo, 84 percent in liquid bulk and 39 percent in oil, so that total growth will amount to 92 percent.
The research project also pointed to the fact that nearly 40 percent of the vessels - or 50 percent of ships calling in ports - were more than 20 years old.
VTT also studies the most likely impact of the Baltic Oil Pipeline project. The probability of a sensitive area being affected by oil from the BPS is highest in Danish waters, the western Baltic south of Sweden and the Gulf of Finland west of Porvoo. The average amount of oil spilled into the Baltic will increase by about 10 percent (about 170 tons per year) in the long term, compared to the expected "background" spill by the year 2017. In the Gulf of Finland this increase will be about 20 percent (24 tons per year).
The risk of spills of less than 10,000 tons in the Baltic Sea will not change significantly, whereas the risk of spills between 10,000 and 100,000 tons will rise from one every 75 years to one every 50 years for the Baltic regions by the year 2017 due to the BPS project. The risk of such a large spill thus goes up by 35 percent for the entire Baltic Sea and by 100 percent for the Gulf of Finland.
Compared to other alternatives, the Baltic Sea route is the best prepared for coping with an increase in tanker traffic in terms of the existence of environmental organizations, legal framework and oil spill response capabilities, both nationally and the region. The most noticeable effect of the BPS is an increase by more than a factor of 7 in oil tanker traffic larger than 100,000 deadweight in the Gulf of Finland.
Another study by VTT Manufacturing Technology predicts enormous growth in maritime traffic by the year 2010 as a result of which the authorities can expect 6 significant spills per year.
The main concerns of the Finnish environmental authorities are that sub-standard ships will be allowed to collect oil from the terminal at Primorsk, that some ships will be unfamiliar with navigating the Baltic Sea, that single-hull tankers will become vulnerable in severe weather conditions, that there is already heavy shipping traffic in the Gulf of Finland, and that the existing escort service will not meet demand.
According to information provided by Bellona Environmental Foundation, during a recent meeting of the member states of the Helsinki Convention on the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea Area, Russia was the only country to speak out against a proposed ban on single-hulled oil tankers in the Baltic Sea.
According to Rashid Alimov of Bellona's St. Petersburg office, Russia specifically objected to wording in the declaration that said "the semi-enclosed Baltic Sea has a slow water exchange and is therefore particularly sensitive to eutrophication," meaning that the sea is abundant in accumulated nutrients that support a dense growth of algae and other organisms. Their decay depletes the shallow waters of oxygen in summer.
The Helcom-Bremmen Declaration went on to say that the countries "agree to enhance our cooperation in maritime safety in the framework of the International Maritime Organization, with the objective of preventing maritime accidents and consequent pollution, through concrete measures, especially concerning the phasing out of single-hulled vessels and the ban on transport of heavy (or black) oil in single-hulled vessels."
Another danger in the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea in general, especially in the winter, is ice. During the winter the ice cover in the eastern end of the Gulf of Finland can reach a thickness of between 70 centimeters and 95 centimeters.
However, a bigger problem is shifting pack ice, which can be as high as 10 meters, Mikko Niini, the vice president of Kvaerner Masa-Yards shipbuilders said.
Another possible threat is oil spills on ice, which are quite difficult to handle. There are very few oil collectors in the world equipped to collect oil from ice.
Last but not least, ecologists are extremely concerned by hidden or concealed oil spills, which are usually not reported to the public. In such cases, the oil is either dispersed and mixed with water or is made to sink or float away.
"We strongly prefer mechanical recovery to any dispersants," said Sirpa Pellinen of the Finnish Environment Institute.
Still, the recent oil spills near Russian ports in the Baltic and the reaction of the authorities to accidents remain controversial. For example, in July 2003 as a result of a heavy leak of black oil some 50 to 200 kilometers of shoreline near Kaliningrad were polluted, according to Bellona. Although the region officially announced later that the polluted beaches had already been "practically cleansed" and more than 4 tons of mixed black oil and sand had been removed, local ecologists, including Ecodefense! non-profit organization representatives seem to doubt this information.
Bellona's Alimov says that in the past 10 years environmental disasters resulting from oil pollution in the Kaliningrad exclave have become regular events. "But many argue that they have not been given due attention," he said.
Alexander Sutyagin, an environmentalist with the non-profit Baltic Pipeline System Monitoring Project, considers that "the authorities behave the same way everywhere. In the case of oil product spills, they try to underestimate the scale of the disaster and to conceal the real source of pollution."
"Black oil is collected, removed and usually buried close by," he said.
Ecologists warn that in Kaliningrad oil products tend to have seeped into the sand and are lying there, while the primitive emergency response system is not likely to change soon.
A more recent story is that of the dredge ship Balkhash, which carried 10 tons of diesel fuel and 400 kilograms of motor oil when it sank near Kaliningrad on Jan. 5, Interfax reported. Later it was announced that Natural Resources Ministry specialists had found a number of oil spills with some of them reaching 200 meters in length and 60 meters in width. However, the Emergency Ministry soon denied this information, denying the oil spills ever occurred. On Jan. 13 it was declared that the Hermes special oil collector began to collect the spilled oil from a polluted area of 600-800 square meters.
New Technologies
Facing the possible dangers of increasing transportation of oil and other potential polluters, researchers all over the world are trying to cope with the new demands for both building safer vessels and icebreakers and for constructing oil collectors.
There are three oil collection techniques used throughout the world. The first is the pumping technique, when a floating flexible weir is used to pump the spilled oil into a container. This technique is mainly used for light oil, since crude oil is too heavy for the weir.
The second technique involves the use of a drum skimmer, when a vessel is equipped with a big rotating drum the oil sticks to.
The third technique is the disc skimmer, when the oil sticks to a rotating disc.
However, in recent years another technique has come to the fore, that of the brush system, which employs millions of bristles attached to wheels. In this case, the oil sticks to the brushes. The recovery capacity of this method is the greatest and ranges between 20 and 500 cubic meters per hour, while the equipment can work up to three meters below the surface. The other characteristic of the new technique is that oil collected by brush skimmers can be reused
Christoffer Wallgren, the sales manager for Lamor Corporation AB, the world's leading producer of oil collectors, says that according to EU laws oil collected after a spill is considered waste and, thus, must be treated and not used again for commercial purposes.
However, this law does not affect Russia, where the oil can be used again, sold or given back to the owner after the mechanical cleaning of the brushes.
Brush skimmers can be used for other chemicals, such as paint and detergents, Wallgren said. Lamor already works with Russian oil companies and has supplied several sets of oil collecting equipment to Russia. "We see Russia as one of our potential markets," Wallgren says.
Oil collectors using the brush skimmers are produced mainly by three large manufacturers: the Finnish Lamor, Danish Roclean-Desmi and another the Danish Vicoma firm, which together occupy 50 percent of the world market, revenues of which amount to 300 million euros per year.
Protection as Policy
Sergei Grigoriyev, vice president of Transneft, the state-owned company that runs both BPS and Primorsk port, said that the company has invested more than $50 million in ecological programs to boost safety in the region. Moreover, single-hulled tankers are not allowed to enter the port.
The government of the Leningrad Oblast, where all the new terminals are located, has also confirmed that all precautions have been taken. "We have re-cultivated the soil and carried out a number of programs aimed at protecting the waters of the Gulf of Finland. Every new terminal should have its own ecological fleet made up of oil collectors and other cleanup and emergency equipment. Apart from that, we test soil and water quality and content on a weekly basis," said Valentin Sidorin, a spokesman for the Leningrad Oblast governor.
Sidorin also said that oil spills are unlikely to happen near the ports, first because the water is very deep, and second because there are certain regulations banning entry of single-hulled tankers to Primorsk and Vysotsk (where LUKoil will transport oil only using its own fleet of tankers). In addition to this, according to Sidorin, the part of the pipeline that goes under water (777 meters) also features mechanical safety installations.
Regional officials say that when the construction of the BPS was still in the planning stages, the project received a number of objections from the Finnish authorities, who claimed the project would harm the environment. As an alternative, the Finns suggested building an oil terminal 50 kilometers away in Porvoo, Finland. "The Transport Ministry even tended to favor this point of view, but when Vladimir Putin became prime minister it was decided that the pipeline would be built up to Primorsk so the oil terminal would be on Russian territory," Sidorin said.
Table 1. Forecast for maritime traffice in the Baltic Sea area in 2015
Total loaded Total loade
Country and unloaded and unloaded
(million ton) in the Baltic Sea Area
Sweden (2 percent) 200.5 108.0
Finland (2 percent) 125.0 80.0
Russia/Baltic (7 percent) 80.0 55.0
Estonia (4 percent) 48.5 19.5
Latvia (2 percent) 60.5 24.0
Lithuania (4 percent) 20.5 10.5
Poland (4 percent) 90.0 36.0
Germany/Baltic (2 percent) 76.5 95.5
Denmark (2 percent) 138.0 55.5
Norway (2 percent) 132.5 56.0
Total 972.0 540.0
Source: VTT Technical Research Center of Finland
TITLE: Betting on the Government for Gains in 2004
AUTHOR: By Christopher Weafer
TEXT: As we enter a new investment year, one thing has become very clear: This is a critical transition year for economic policy in Russia and if you want to make money in 2004 then you have to understand what the government wants to achieve and how it plans to achieve it.
President Vladimir Putin has always been a critical part of the investment case for Russia, and despite the strength of the economy and accumulated fiscal reserves he remains very much the decisive factor that will drive investment returns this year. This is because the government is planning to deliberately cap growth in the most efficient part of the economy (oil and other natural resources), by taking financial resources from these industries - in the form of taxes, including the probable imposition of a special "windfall tax" - and attempting to seed growth in industries that currently represent the least efficient part of the economy (such as manufacturing, services and consumer businesses).
That has potentially serious negative implications for the valuation drivers of the oil sector and for the market as a whole (as oil shares account for over half of the total value of all Russian equities), while allowing for a more optimistic view on stocks in domestically focused industries.
Whether this strategy for the economy makes sense or not is irrelevant. The fact is that this has always been part of Putin's long-term plan for the economy, a plan that he hopes will eventually lead to a doubling of GDP by increasing sustainable growth in industries aside from natural resources and through that to achieve a more even spread of wealth across the population (something he has reiterated in major policy speeches on a number of occasions over the past four years).
Apart from the economic uncertainties raised by this high-risk transition strategy, investors will enter 2004 nervous about the possible fallout from the YUKOS/Menatep case. Foreign investors view this as a potentially negative political risk issue (i.e. if the company is specifically targeted by the Tax or Natural Resources ministries) and will therefore remain largely passive observers of the equity market until these threats come to an end.
Because of the more general issue of the government's future attitude toward companies that emerged from the 1990s privatization process, we may not see a reversal of the perception of heightened investment risk until after a new government is formed with liberal reformers retaining the key economic roles and probably not until Putin's annual state of the nation address in May.
That uncertainty suggests that for the first half of 2004, at least, the market will be mainly driven by domestic traders and short-term investors. This further suggests that we will see a lot of volatility (as investors respond to unfolding events and the never-ending stream of rumors and conspiracy theories), but limited upward momentum in local stock indices because of the heavy weighting of the oil sector. Trading volatility has become exacerbated over the past year because the free float of shares available to minority investors has continued to shrink due to continued strategic buying in the oil and utilities sectors and the lack of any major new stock market listings. At the start of 2003, the free float equaled 30 percent of the total value of the stock market, while today it is just less than 26 percent, or approximately $50 billion. Because most of this free float is actually in oil stocks the practical effect is that as investors become more optimistic about stocks in other sectors, particularly in second tier domestic oriented sectors, prices in these often illiquid stocks will be pushed higher very quickly.
Even assuming that Putin is able and, more importantly, willing to preserve the balance of influence inside the presidential administration between the investment-friendly liberal economists and the more hawkish siloviki, the investment environment was always likely to be much more difficult in 2004. Russian equities have outperformed the global emerging-market average in each of the past five years based on the relatively simple investment case of cheap assets (after the 1998 crisis) getting less cheap as investment risk slowly decreased in response to high export earnings, improved domestic confidence and better management of the economy.
The hope is that in the future the investment case will be based on a combination of strong domestic and export earnings growth plus the stock market expansion that will come from a successfully restructured economy. In the meantime, the government has not only got to be successful in its high risk interventionist strategy, but also has to move quickly to reduce the high level of bureaucracy and corruption that acts as a barrier to business growth. To fund the ambitious growth plans, it also has to create the right sort of incentives to attract some of the $230 billion of Russian capital that is currently sitting in offshore bank accounts.
How this all works out has implications for growth prospects in all industries and it is a fair bet to say that we will see major changes in the valuation drivers of most stock-market sectors over the next six to 12 months.
Companies in which the state has a large equity interest are expected to perform well in 2004, particularly Gazprom where the evidence now strongly points to long awaited reform of the company being imminent, including the removal of foreign share ownership restrictions and a listing on MICEX. While these reforms will not of themselves increase Gazprom's profitability, taken in combination with expected domestic gas tariff reform and the long-term driver of increased export volumes, they should result in a dramatic increase in the company's stock market valuation (despite the politically inspired cautious comments from Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov last week). Sberbank may also see some progress in removing foreign share ownership restrictions, but even without this its central position in the economy and the strength of its balance provided by substantial holdings in sovereign eurobonds should help its stock-market valuation continue to grow.
Shares in industries such as services, manufacturing and the consumer sector are expected to see greatest investor interest but generally these are stocks with low liquidity and less developed financial disclosure than the larger companies on the stock market. Currently stocks in these sectors represent only about 3 percent of the value of the stock market, or $5.5 billion, while the major oil stocks are each valued at over $10 billion with YUKOS alone having a value of almost $30 billion.
Hence any move by investors to diversify out of oil would have a dramatic effect on valuations of these stocks. In a typical emerging stock market, these sectors would represent about 50 percent of the total market valuation. Companies expected to see good stock market growth this year include OMZ (formerly Uralmash) after its recent merger with Power Machines, and the pipe manufacturers, Chelyabinsk Pipe Works and Vyksa Metallurgical Plant.
The main message for 2004 is not to get carried away with market momentum, to realize that it is likely to be a volatile year, and not to trade simply on valuation but to understand what is driving that valuation and where the risks lie. By investing with the government, i.e. in state controlled enterprises and those stocks that should benefit from any success in the economic transition, investors can once again make selectively strong gains in Russia in 2004.
Christopher Weafer, chief strategist at Alfa Bank, contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: Budgets Stand To Gain Trillion by Homeland Estimate
AUTHOR: By Sergei Glazyev
TEXT: During the recent State Duma election campaign, our opponents repeatedly accused my colleagues and me of demagogy.
For some reason, few politicians seemed to believe it possible to achieve a real increase in our compatriots' standard of living, a doubling of pensions in short order, state stipends of 4,500 rubles to students, and an allowance for soldiers of 1,000 rubles per month. And that all this could be achieved without fueling inflation or running a budget deficit.
To substantiate these assertions, I will list the main sources of additional budget revenues.
The most important of these is natural resources rent. It is no secret that minerals, energy resources and timber reserves make Russia potentially the richest country in the world.
It is also no big secret that the exploitation of Russia's natural resources over the past decade has done little to increase the prosperity and welfare of our compatriots, instead enriching just a small number of people.
Looking at these two entirely obvious facts, one could of course laugh in one's sleeve and talk about the mysterious paradoxes of the Russian economy. We have lived for long enough listening to such laughter, which has accompanied many rigged auctions and tenders.
In my view, it has long been apparent that there is an extremely simple explanation for this "economic mystery." Those companies that exploit natural resources (resources that, it is worth noting, belong to the state) do not pay taxes on the super-profits they derive.
In the majority of countries around the world, it is common practice to hand over to the state (i.e. to society) a portion of the income received not as a result of the labor of entrepreneurs, managers and workers, but as a result of exploiting nature's unique properties.
A natural resources rent or tax on additional income (additional compared to normal income earned by putting labor and capital to work) exists in Britain, Norway and Saudi Arabia. In Russia, where mineral wealth forms a significant part of the country's economic potential, such a tax is more than justified - in fact, it is necessary.
According to the World Energy Council, approximately 60 percent of the world's reserves of nonrenewable energy resources are on Russian territory, including 20 percent of oil reserves, 35 percent of gas reserves and 12 percent of coal. There are also significant reserves of gold, diamonds, iron ore, nonferrous and other precious metals.
According to Russian Academy of Sciences estimates, annual natural resources rents should be valued at approximately $50 billion. The economists whose calculations we are drawing upon assert that it is entirely realistic to be able to double salaries and pensions within two years of introducing the new taxation system.
There is no need to fear that, as a result, no one will be willing to invest in extractive industries or the energy sector. Our oligarchs will simply have to make do not with a 50 percent profit margin, but a 10 percent to 15 percent profit margin - something perfectly acceptable to investors and businessmen all over the world. Meanwhile, budget revenues would grow by 1 1/2 times without any miracles.
There are also other sources of additional budget revenue: for example, increasing the profit tax take by reducing the illegal export of capital. Such a curtailment is almost inevitable if the state would encourage producers in the real economy, rather than handing out tasty slices of Christmas pie to those that got a place at the feeding trough first.
Other sources of additional budget revenues are:
. Increasing excise duties on alcoholic drinks, while tightening control over production to limit the flow of illegal production onto the market;
. Raising customs duties by reviewing the system of privileges on imported goods and cracking down on smuggling;
. Gradually putting the gray economy out of business, which will not only lead to an increased tax take at all levels, but will also result in more income from registration and licensing fees; and
. The more effective use of state property and increasing revenues from the state's foreign economic activities.
In total, according to our calculations, the federal, regional and local budgets could receive approximately 1 trillion rubles more than is currently written into the government's budget - if our proposals were to be implemented.
I understand that the balance of forces in the new Duma will make it impossible for us to implement all the measures listed above in full, but I hope that the common sense of my parliamentary colleagues will make it possible to at least partially supplement the country's meager budget.
Then it will be easier to address those issues that have been shelved due to the - imaginary - lack of budget funds.
Sergei Glazyev, co-leader of the Rodina bloc, contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: Attraction to Investors Rises
AUTHOR: By Angelina Davydova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The most important event last week was the Central Bank's lowering of the interest rate to 14 percent starting Jan. 15. Previously the interest rate had been changed on June 21, 2003, from 18 percent to 16 percent.
At the same time, the news broke that inflation in 2003 amounted to 12 percent, which met the target set by the government. Both pieces of news were foregone conclusions and did not have a significant effect on the market. Nevertheless, they are important reference marks.
As for the lower interest rates, Vyacheslav Luginin, director of Brokercreditservice Consulting, says they prove that Russia is becoming more attractive for investors. "For private individuals and companies it means credit resources will become cheaper, thus, on the one hand we predict more heated competition among credit institutions, and, on the other hand, an increase in investment supply both for projects and stocks and bonds from private investors," he said.
On the foreign currency front, last week also witnessed the continuing fall of the U.S. dollar against the ruble, although this fall was less drastic than during previous weeks. The euro rate against the ruble finally stopped growing. On Monday, the U.S. dollar was officially worth 28.79, while the euro rate dropped to 35.76.
Vladislav Oreshkin, an analyst from United Financial Group, said in a report released on Friday that "we continue to believe that the authorities will resist any significant increase in the ruble."
Last week Russia's benchmark RTS index was reluctant to break the 600 mark. In a market report published on Monday, Troika Dialog commented that "while this level remained unsurpassed at Friday's close, we are fairly confident that the market is unwilling to fall. The RTS index ended last week down 0.7 percent with the blue chips caught in a tug of war. Pulling upward were Aeroflot (up 4.8 percent) and UES (up 2.8 percent), while on the other end of the rope were Norilsk Nickel (down 6.0 percent), Tatneft (down 3.8 percent) and Yukos (down 2.8 percent)."
On the oil and gas front, Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov said that the government is currently considering taxing "excessive profits" being generated by oil companies on the back of the strong oil price, Troika Dialog reported. Kasyanov himself supports additional taxation while the price holds above $25 per barrel, although this should not have any major effect on company profits, he said. According to an Aton Capital report, Kasyanov also noted that Russian oil companies' tax burden was similar to their international peers': lower than in Norway, higher that in the UK and the same as in the U.S. However, he said the government may move to implement a tax system that differentiates on the basis of oil-field quality.
Kasyanov also said Russia remained stuck in an "export trap," as 50 percent of the economy was dependent on exports and external factors, including the international oil price, although he added that four years ago that figure was 60 percent, Aton Capital reported.
Prices consolidated on the external debt market. Troika Dialog research found that the week before last sovereign eurobonds saw major demand from overseas players, which pushed their spreads to a record low, while last week saw the same trend in not only Russia but also other emerging markets. According to Troika Dialog, this week could see sovereign bond prices drop slightly.
On the ruble bond market the pattern of trade last week saw profit taking first, which, according to Troika Dialog, was perfectly natural following the previous week's price rise, but on Wednesday the trend shifted. This week analysts expect prices to consolidate as investors prepare for major ruble bond placements at month's end and the start of February (with the two most important being 5 billion rubles in the Moscow 38 bond on Jan. 28 and 10 billion rubles in Gazprom bonds on Feb. 3). Such an increase in supply of bonds from the most creditworthy borrowers could even cause a technical correction in the first-tier, analysts predicted.
TITLE: 2004: The Year of Putinism's Wretched Victory
AUTHOR: By Andrei Piontkovsky
TEXT: In the golden year 2004, Russia's newest political ideology - Putinism - will flourish, reaching new heights of success.
Putinism is the final, highest stage of Russia's brand of criminal, bureaucratic capitalism - the natural, logical mutation of the Yeltsin model of the 1990s. It is capitalism run by police and pencil pushers with the father of the nation in charge. It's the replacement of Yeltsin-era oligarchs with new "patriotic" ex-security service operatives, and more broadly by that huge collective oligarch - the bureaucracy - with its armed detachments, the so-called power agencies. The ideology of Putinism and the model of governance it has produced are most striking for their aesthetic and intellectual poverty. But that's not a fatal flaw. The real problem is the utter ineffectiveness of Putinism. Rather than correct the defects of Russian capitalism - the merger and criminalization of money and power, institutionalized corruption - it only intensifies them.
This kind of model is incapable of ensuring stable growth. It will not allow Russia to overcome its terrible social stratification or to achieve the breakthrough needed before a postindustrial society can emerge here. This model of peripheral capitalism dooms Russia to economic degradation, marginalization and ultimately to collapse. It cannot drag on for decades like the Stalin or Brezhnev models.
But 2004, as I said, will see the wretched triumph of Putinism. Continued high oil prices will allow the regime to maintain the illusion of relative economic prosperity. And this spring Russia will have a new prime minister, current finance minister, Alexei Kudrin.
At the casting call for this role, Kudrin demonstrated his personal loyalty more zealously than the rest, as well as the greatest readiness to turn in his former patrons. On top of that, his image as a liberal technocrat fits perfectly with the myth that the regime is proceeding with the course of reform.
Under Prime Minister Kudrin, GDP will grow at a reasonable pace (6 to 7 percent). Gold and currency reserves will increase. Inflation will remain moderate and the strength of the ruble will continue to grow. The strength of the ruble, coupled with a fall in oil prices, will produce a serious economic crisis in 2005.
Vladimir Putin's resounding victory at the polls in March will wrap up the sweep operation of Russian politics launched by his administration, leaving Russia with a single politician. The current hypocritical system of "managed democracy" will give way naturally to an openly authoritarian regime.
In fact, this operation was substantially completed in 2003. The symbol of the new political era and the result of a decade of liberal reform in Russia was the historic standing ovation given to Putin at the13th congress of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, or RSPP - a gathering that looked like a remake of the 17th Communist Party Congress, known as the Congress of Victors. The RSPP brings together Russia's capitalist shock workers. These were supposed to be the emancipated titans of industry, the flower of 10 years of reform. Instead, we beheld a room full of slaves quaking in their boots. The post-Soviet liberal revolution produced not free people but a new generation of slaves. Unlike the slaves of communism, these new villeins are bound by the property they have acquired, and are therefore capable of far greater baseness and submission.
This year will see the further political and spiritual consolidation of Russian society. The leading lights of culture, the political spin doctors and the practitioners of many other of the oldest professions will hold congresses just like the RSPP, and at each one another Volsky will throw up his hands with mock surprise and say rapturously, "I can't stop them, Vladimir Vladimirovich."
And indeed, there will be no stopping them. The revival of the traditions of lofty spirituality and conciliarism in Russian society will demand that the people not merely love the anointed president but perform greater feats of genuine civic spirit. People will walk barefoot for miles and stand for hours in the freezing cold once more to appear on the president's annual question-and-answer session on national television, and they will once more ask about the health of his favorite dog who had the patriotic good sense to whelp on the eve of the State Duma elections. This must be what Kremlin spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky means by the "mystical link between Putin and the masses."
Putin's mystical link with the masses in the military will be expressed from time to time in televised speeches by the rank-and-file about the inevitable catastrophe awaiting the Americans in Iraq and their shameful flight from the country. As far as foreign policy is concerned, the year will pass in expectation of that catastrophe as television news shows report on coalition casualties with malicious delight.
This will be a tough year for the Americans in Iraq. They will incur further losses, but they will not leave. The Europeans will disagree with the Bush administration on many issues, but they will increasingly support U.S. policy in Iraq, because they realize what is at stake there. Slowly but surely, the situation in Iraq will improve. It will not be a decisive issue in the next U.S. presidential campaign. Bush will easily win a second term, buoyed by an improving economy this year.
As Russia's "strategic partnership" in the war on international terrorism collapses, the foreign policy establishment will turn its attention to strengthening Russia's position in the former Soviet republics. United by the fever of neoimperialism, Russian politicians from Dmitry Rogozin to Anatoly Chubais will make much of building their empires in the sand.
The administration of newly elected Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili will be labeled anti-Russian, and all the traditional measures will be taken to destabilize it. Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko will also be tarred as anti-Russian, and Moscow will pull out all the stops to keep him from winning the election. All of this loving attention will backfire, however, and Yushchenko will win.
Russian politicians will fail to understand that their neoimperial impulses can elicit nothing but rejection in the former Soviet republics. Yet all they would need to know is to study their experience of "unification" with Belarus, whose leader Alexander Lukashenko has led the entire Russian political elite around by the nose for the last 10 years by exploiting their collective complexes.
By the end of 2004 Russia's relations with the United States and the European Union will be chillier than at any time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Officially this will be described as defending Russia's national interests as the country rises from its knees.
The man of the year in 2004 will be footballer Vadim Yevseyev. As he leaves Portugal following an unsuccessful performance by the Russian national team at the European Championship this summer, Yevseyev will turn to the Western television cameras and from the depths of his mysterious Russian soul he will hurl his trademark howl - "Fuck you!" - just as he did in Wales.
Yevseyev will be invited to the Kremlin, where he will be awarded the Order for Services to the Fatherland, Fourth Degree, as the person who most completely expressed the existential essence of the Orthodox Russian character and the fundamental principle of Russian domestic and foreign policy.
Andrei Piontkovsky, an independent political analyst, contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: America's Almanac Alert
AUTHOR: By Matt Bivens
TEXT: On Christmas Eve, the FBI issued a terrorism bulletin to some 18,000 police organizations across the United States. The message: Be on the lookout for anyone carrying - an almanac.
An almanac, for those not familiar with the word, is a quaint book from a simpler time. Once, farmers and sailors found almanacs crucial tools - they were chock-full of guesswork about the coming year, from long-range weather forecasts to guide planting and reaping, to exact predictions for each day's sunrise and sunset, each shore's high and low tides.
"Blum's Almanac," one of many titles, reports, "When the first printing press came to America in 1638, the second book off that press was an almanac." (The first was, obviously, a Bible.) Benjamin Franklin - the founding father honored on the U.S. $100 bill - drove the popularity of the books even higher by authoring the immensely popular "Poor Richard's Almanack," which included advice about how to live richly and die wealthy.
Almanac publishers have since added all sorts of official trivia - the state flag of California, the capital of Montana, the area in square miles of Kansas - making almanacs favorites of Nazi saboteurs.
Seriously. In 1942, German spies were landed on Long Island, New York, by a U-boat and soon after caught by the FBI. One of the spies was carrying "The Old Farmer's Almanac" in his coat pocket, and the government decided the book was providing aid and comfort to the enemy with its weather forecasts. The publisher of "The Old Farmer's Almanac," according to its official history, had to do some fast talking to avoid the wrath of a war-hysterical nation, explaining that it published not weather forecasts - Heavens no, not in wartime! - but weather indications.
Those German spies were declared by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to be "enemy combatants," and were tried as such by a U.S. military court. It is this very 61-year-old case that President George W. Bush now cites when he asserts the power to declare people "enemy combatants" - including American citizens picked up, unarmed, on American soil - and "disappear" them into places such as Navy brigs, or odd prison camps he's ordered established in the no man's land of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
So with our top government men poring over the old 1942 enemy combatants case, is it any wonder we'd rediscover the dangers lurking in almanacs?
Terrorists, the FBI warned in its Christmas Eve bulletin - a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press - use almanacs "to assist with target selection and pre-operational planning." (I bet they also take inspiration from Poor Richard's motivational sayings like, "Haste makes waste," and "Have you something to do tomorrow? Do it today.")
The editor of the "World Almanac" countered sourly that al-Qaida "certainly didn't need the almanac to locate the twin towers." But the FBI, unmoved, insisted all police officers keep an eye out any time they search or stop someone. Suspect almanacs should be reported to the local U.S. Joint Terrorism Task Force. "Especially," reported the AP, "if the books are annotated in suspicious ways."
Like if, in the margins of the page about how the state flower of Minnesota is the Pink and White Lady's Slipper, there's scribble reading: "Osama bin Laden hates the Pink and White Lady's Slipper! Die, Minnesotans! Die!!" - that should be reported.
Matt Bivens, a former editor of The St. Petersburg Times, writes the Daily Outrage for The Nation magazine. [www.thenation.com]
TITLE: Chris Floyd's Global Eye
AUTHOR: By Chris Floyd
TEXT: "Murder, though it hath no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ." - Shakespeare, Hamlet.
It's all out in the open now. The fact that the president of the United States and his top advisers deliberately concocted a false case for an illegal and unnecessary war - in plain terms, that they committed cold-blooded, premeditated mass murder - was confirmed this month by the most impeccable mainstream sources: George W. Bush's own Cabinet officials, speaking for the record in America's major media.
Remarkably, the "extremist views" and "paranoia" of the "lunatic fringe" - those "Bush-bashers" who for months proclaimed that the Regime's lust to conquer Iraq was part of a long-planned scheme of looting and dominance that had nothing to do with Sept. 11, 2001 or defending America from terror - are now issuing from the mouths of the Regime's inner circle.
Secretary of State Colin Powell led the way. Powell, a pathetic bagman who began his career with a botched job of whitewashing war crimes in Vietnam (the My Lai massacre) and is ending it with a botched job of whitewashing war crimes in Iraq, admitted that there was no evidence of any past collusion between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, The New York Times reports. Although the "very real" threat of Saddam passing on his vast arsenal of technodeath to Osama bin Laden was the most effective tool in the regime's "sales program" for war, resonating viscerally with an American public still reeling from Sept. 11, the genial general - who loudly trumpeted this "threat" at the UN - now says it was never anything more than a worrisome "possibility" without any basis in fact.
As well he might. For even had the mythical alliance of Bush bogeymen actually existed, that "vast arsenal of technodeath" did not. There were no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to pass on; there were not even any active programs to develop WMD. This has long been obvious from reading between the lines of the reports of Bush's own weapon-hunters, but it was finally made manifest in an extraordinary report last week in The Washington Post.
There, leaders of Bush's CIA-directed weapons search team admitted publicly that Iraq's WMD program was shattered in the first Gulf War - 13 years ago - and its remnants completely dismantled in 1995. This was of course long known (and oft reported by "Bush-bashers") before the latest war - indeed, it was even reported in the mainstream media years ago, which is where the paranoiacs on the lunatic fringe found it, in easily-accessible archives and Congressional reports. But it was conveniently forgotten in the profitable, corporate-driven war fever before the invasion. Now, after the murder of thousands of innocent people, including almost 500 American soldiers, the truth re-emerges - again from the mouths of Bush's own hirelings.
Then came the revelations of Paul O'Neill, Bush's treasury secretary until December 2002. In a nationally televised interview, O'Neill confirmed that Bush and his minions were planning the invasion of Iraq from the moment they took office - months before 9-11. "[It was] the president saying, 'Go find me a way to do this,'" said O'Neill, whose eye-openers are featured in a new book by Ron Suskind of the archconservative Wall Street Journal.
Although the regime's hatchet men are now desperately downplaying O'Neill's importance, questioning his sanity, even threatening to prosecute him, he was very much in the leadership loop: a member of the powerful National Security Council, privy to top-secret intelligence. He says he never saw "anything in the intelligence that I would characterize as real evidence" of an Iraqi threat - just a muddy stream of "assertions and illusions." Suskind also unearthed early Bushist memos detailing the predators' post-war designs for Iraq, including extensive military occupation and - in March 2001 - plans for parceling out Iraq's oil wealth to favored corporations and foreign allies, CBSNews.com reports.
Again, this is old news for lunatic fringers. As often reported here, the Cheney-Rumsfeld pressure group, Project for the New American Century, long ago outlined its program for America's "full spectrum dominance" over the globe, with the planting of a "military footprint" throughout oil-rich Central Asia and the Middle East. Indeed, conquering Iraq was an imperative that "transcended the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein," said PNAC; whether he was there or not, whether the Iraqi people needed "liberating" or not, the invasion would go forward. PNAC, whose members now fill the regime's upper ranks, also yearned openly for a "new Pearl Harbor," a devastating sneak attack that would "catalyze" public support for the group's "revolutionary transformation" of American society into a militarized aggressor state.
This is no "conspiracy theory." PNAC's maniacal manifesto was published in broad daylight in September 2000 - but was ignored by that same corporatized American media that later proved so helpfully amnesiac after the "new Pearl Harbor" was launched by the CIA's old allies from the Afghan jihad, led by a scion of the Bush family's business partners, the bin Ladens. (This long-documented family connection was detailed by Republican strategist and former Nixon aide Kevin Phillips in the Los Angeles Times this month - yet another belated mainstreaming of the "lunatic fringe.")
Thus the regime's shifting rationales for war - terror threats, WMD, concern for the Iraqi people - have now been publicly exposed, by the Bushists themselves, as nothing more than lies, flimsy excuses to commit murder for power and gain. Where, then, is the "fringe," that blighted place beyond the pale of reason and human decency?
Who, then, are the lunatics?
For annotational references, see the Opinion section at www.sptimesrussia.com
TITLE: Koizumi Commits To Iraq
TEXT: TOKYO - Japan must face its share of the dangers of rebuilding Iraq, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said Monday while asking his nation to back his plans to send troops on an aid mission.
As Koizumi spoke, an advance team of Japanese soldiers prepared to leave a U.S. base in Kuwait and set up camp in southern Iraq, beginning this country's most dangerous overseas military operation since World War II.
With recent polls showing most voters opposing the dispatch, the prime minister made it a centerpiece of his policy speech marking the beginning of the five-month Parliamentary session.
"We won't have fulfilled our responsibility as a member of the international community if we contribute materially and leave the manpower contribution up to other countries because of the possible dangers involved," Koizumi said.
"Japan's development and prosperity depends on world peace and stability. We will aggressively contribute to the rebuilding of Iraq."
Koizumi's determination to deploy some 1,000 navy, air and ground troops to help rebuild Iraq despite deep public reservations reflects a shift in the government's attitude since the 1991 Gulf War, when Tokyo shouldered a big portion of the financial burden but sent no soldiers.
Criticized at home and abroad for relying on "checkbook diplomacy" during that war, Koizumi and his allies in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party have been eager to contribute Japanese troops to back the United States, its most important ally.
Since late 2001, Japan's navy has provided support to the U.S. campaign against terror in Afghanistan.
Koizumi also is building momentum for a historic rethinking of the constraints placed on Japan's military by the 1947 constitution, written by the United States. His party is drafting a revision of the document, which has never been amended.
TITLE: Iraqi Shiites Call For Elected Government
AUTHOR: By Hamza Hendawi
TEXT: BAGHDAD, Iraq - Tens of thousands of Shiite Muslims marched peacefully in Baghdad on Monday to demand an elected government, as U.S. and Iraqi officials prepared to seek U.N. endorsement of American plans for transferring power in Iraq.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan has been reluctant to let the United Nations play a greater role in Iraq until he is convinced the country is safe.
Underscoring those dangers, 24 people were killed and about 120 were wounded Sunday when a suicide bomber blew up his pickup truck at a gate to the headquarters compound of the occupation authority in Baghdad, Iraq's Health Minister Khudayer Abbas said Monday.
Huge crowds of Iraqi Shiites, estimated by reporters at up to 100,000, marched about 5 kilometers to the University of al-Mustansariyah, where a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani delivered a speech he said was directed at Annan, the U.S.-led occupation authority and its Iraqi allies.
Al-Sistani, the country's most influential Shiite leader, has rejected a U.S. formula for transferring power through a provisional legislature selected by 18 regional caucuses, insisting on direct elections instead.
The legislature is supposed to appoint a transitional government, which will take over from the U.S.-led coalition administration July 1 before holding full elections in 2005.
"The sons of the Iraqi people demand a political system based on direct elections and a constitution that realizes justice and equality for everyone," al-Sistani's representative, Hashem al-Awad, said. "Anything other than that will prompt people to have their own say."
The crowd responded by chanting: "Yes, yes to elections! No, no to occupation!"
"What our religious leadership is doing today is at the heart of its mandate," cleric Faras al-Tatrasani, 36, said. "We are demanding democracy. And that's what America came to give us."
Two U.S. military helicopters hovered low over the demonstrators but otherwise there was no sign of American soldiers. Scores of armed Iraqi police stood by.
"This demonstration is a message to America that we want elections," said Naim Al-Saadi, a 60-year-old tribal chief.
Many marchers linked hands. Others carried portraits of al-Sistani and other Shiite leaders and waved computer printout banners saying, "Real democracy means real elections."
On Thursday, about 30,000 Shiites held a similar demonstration for elections in the southern city of Basra, a Shiite-dominated region.
Shiites are believed to comprise 60 percent of Iraq's 25 million people but were suppressed by Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated government. They fear the provisional legislature will cut them out of power again.
The growing clamor for political rights by the majority Shiites is ratcheting up pressure on the Bush administration and its Iraqi allies trying to control the guerrilla violence, blamed on Sunni minority insurgents loyal to Saddam.
An U.S. soldier died Sunday of wounds suffered last week in a roadside bombing north of Samarra, according to the U.S. command. The American death was the 501st since the Iraq conflict began March 20.
U.S. and Iraqi Governing Council officials say it is not possible to hold free and fair elections before the July 1 deadline given the precarious security situation. U.S. officials hope Annan will support that view following his meeting Monday with chief U.S. administrator for Iraq, Paul Bremer, and members of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.
Annan withdrew all international U.N. staff from Iraq after two bombings last year at U.N. headquarters and a spate of attacks on humanitarian targets.
Sunday's bombing may have been a signal to the world organization to stay out of Iraq and a warning to Iraqis against cooperating with occupation forces.
A separate bomb blast Sunday in the southern city of Karbala killed one person and wounded 17, including 10 Iraqis and seven Iranians, police and hospital officials said.
The coalition headquarters is one of the most heavily protected areas in Baghdad. U.S. soldiers guarding the gate usually stand about 20 meters from the road behind coils of barbed wire and concrete barriers.
Witnesses said that the driver of what the U.S. military described as a white Toyota pickup truck tried to bypass a line of Iraqi workers and a crowd of U.S. military vehicles at about 8 a.m., coming as close as possible to the entrance American troops call "Assassins' Gate."
The force of the blast, from a bomb containing 450 kilograms of explosive, rattled windows more than a mile away. Most victims were Iraqis, but the wounded included three U.S. civilians and three American soldiers, the U.S. military said.
TITLE: Khmer Rouge No. 2 Admits "Mistakes"
AUTHOR: By Miranda Leitsinger
TEXT: PAILIN, Cambodia - The top surviving leader of the Khmer Rouge admitted he made "mistakes" during the feared regime's rule but denied being guilty of genocide and rejected the idea that millions of people died.
Nuon Chea, second in command under Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, told The Associated Press in an interview he would gladly appear before a U.N.-backed war crimes tribunal pursuing top Khmer Rouge leaders. His comments appeared to be the latest in regime leaders' efforts to get their versions on the record before being called to trial.
"I admit that there was a mistake. But I had my ideology. I wanted to free my country. I wanted people to have well-being," Nuon Chea, 77, said from his modest bungalow in Pailin, the movement's former stronghold.
"I didn't use wisdom to find the truth of what was going on, to check who was doing wrong and who was doing right. I accept that error," he said in the interview Saturday.
The Khmer Rouge, which ruled from 1975-79, is implicated in the deaths of at least 1.7 million Cambodians, nearly a quarter of the population, according to the Documentation Center of the Cambodia Genocide Program, administered by Yale University. They died from disease, overwork, starvation and execution.
Researchers and historians believe Nuon Chea was responsible for Khmer Rouge policies that led to the atrocities. He said the fallen regime had caused only part of the suffering and said, "I wasn't a war criminal."
Nuon Chea didn't go nearly as far as his comrade, Khieu Samphan, who admitted in December that genocide took place but denied ordering killings or knowing the extent of the regime's brutality. The comments by Khieu Samphan, the nominal leader of the Khmer Rouge and its best known public face, were the first such admission by a senior regime leader.
During its rule, when Nuon Chea served as the movement's ideologue and Pol Pot's close comrade, the Khmer Rouge emptied cities, abolished money, and closed schools and hospitals in an attempt to create an agrarian utopia.
During the interview, Nuon Chea wore sunglasses with a "Gucci" label, a black T-shirt and shorts with a blue-and-white scarf around his waist. His modestly furnished bungalow sits on the outskirts of Pailin, a gem mining town where many ex-Khmer Rouge live.
Nuon Chea said the number of people who died was not in the millions. He acknowledged that many did die but said it was impossible to say how.
"People died but there were so many causes of their deaths. We have to know the situation, what the situation was like."
Nuon Chea said he is willing to face a court to set the record straight. The Cambodian government and United Nations agreed last June to establish a tribunal to try former Khmer Rouge leaders like Nuon Chea, and he may be compelled to face charges.
No senior Khmer Rouge member has ever been convicted for the regime's atrocities. Only two top officials - Ta Mok and Kaing Khek Iev - are in jail after being seized by the government in the waning days of the Khmer Rouge guerrilla war, but have not been convicted. Pol Pot died in 1998, an ill and hunted man, while other leaders like Nuon Chea were granted government amnesty.
Pol Pot and Nuon Chea became brothers-in-revolution in the 1950s. Known as Brother No. 2, Nuon Chea spent most of his life shrouded in self-imposed secrecy and keeps a low profile.
"We have to take this chance to benefit our country and our people," Nuon Chea said. "We will have to explain to people around the world and my people so they can understand who created the conflict back then, who was the enemy."
"The only thing I want to beg is for the court not to be biased. But please judge according to the rule of law and religion," said Nuon Chea, who describes himself as a practicing Buddhist.
Nuon Chea, born of a wealthy Chinese-Cambodian family and educated in Thailand, said that the overthrow of King Norodom Sihanouk by the U.S.-backed Lon Nol led to the Khmer Rouge storming into Phnom Penh in 1975. The Khmer Rouge drove 2 million people from the city at gunpoint and forced them to work in the countryside.
Nuon Chea said foreigners were Cambodia's enemies during the regime's rule but would not say who. The Khmer Rouge long accused both the United States and the former Soviet Union of trying to subvert their regime.
TITLE: British WWII Recon Goes On Internet
TEXT: LONDON - A huge British archive of World War II aerial reconnaissance photos, including pictures of the D-Day landings in Normandy, is to go on the Internet on Monday.
Under the digitalization project announced Saturday, some 5 million Royal Air Force photos of Western Europe will be available to the public on the Web site www.evidenceincamera.co.uk., archivists said.
"These images allow us to see the real war at first hand - as if we are RAF pilots," said Allan Williams, head of the Aerial Reconnaissance Archives project at Keele University in north-central England.
The photos, a key source of intelligence for Allied commanders during the war, include American troops landing in Normandy on D-day, the effects of the bombing of Cologne, Germany, and the German battleship Bismarck being hunted by the Royal Navy.
The pictures were transferred to Keele University in 1962 from the Allied Central Interpretation Unit, where wartime analysts studied the material collected by reconnaissance crews. The collection is the property of the national Public Records Office on permanent loan to the university.
Before the digitalization, using the photo archive had meant a manual search through thousands of boxes.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Presidential PR
GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala (AP) - President Oscar Berger invited thousands of Guatemalans to spend a few hours inside the presidential palace on Sunday - part of a massive public relations campaign that has been the centerpiece of his first week in office.
Berger, who was inaugurated Wednesday, has tried to cultivate an image as "the people's president," making a point to be more accessible than his predecessor, the often-reclusive Alfonso Portillo.
Berger won presidential elections that were held in two stages in November and December, but opponents warned he would be be a puppet of the rich.
Patriarch Awards Castro
HAVANA, Cuba (AP) - The spiritual leader of the world's 300 million Orthodox Christians will honor Fidel Castro with a church order in recognition of Cuba's construction of a new cathedral, regional church leaders said Friday.
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew will bestow the church's Order of St. Andrew on Castro for his government's construction of the new St. Nicholas Cathedral, to be consecrated by the patriarch on Jan. 25, regional church leaders said.
Bartholomew is considered "first among equals" of 14 patriarchs representing Orthodox Christian in eastern Europe and Middle East. There are less than 2,000 practicing Orthodox Christians in Cuba.
Gun Battle in Kabul
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - Three U.S. soldiers were wounded in an attack on a southern Afghanistan base, a military spokesman said Monday.
One attacker was killed in the gunfight that erupted when about 15 insurgents assailed the base at Deh Rawood in Uruzgan province early Sunday, Lieutenant Colonel Bryan Hilferty said.
It was unclear whether the assailants were affiliated with the ousted Taliban regime or other groups who have mounted a wave of attacks on soldiers, government targets and aid workers across Afghanistan's south and east.
Tutu Ordains Tutu
ALEXANDRIA, United States (AP) - Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work against the racial apartheid in his native South Africa, ordained his daughter Saturday as an Anglican priest.
Mpho Tutu, along with three other new priests, was ordained at Christ Church, an Alexandria Episcopal church where she will minister for the next two years.
The 72-year-old cleric was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his apartheid campaign and, after the white government fell, led South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which aired the misdeeds of the apartheid era.
Passenger Privacy
WASHINGTON (NYT) - Northwest Airlines has acknowledged releasing information on its passengers for an experiment to determine if the government could "mine" the data to spot terrorists.
The airline's action came to light through Freedom of Information Act requests made to the Transportation Security Administration and NASA by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington-based privacy-rights group.
The information Northwest turned over to the government appears to involve more than 10 million passengers, said David Sobel, the general counsel for the privacy group. In September 2003 a smaller carrier, JetBlue, said it had given information on passengers to a company that works under contract for the Defense Department.
TITLE: Els' Repeat Sony Open Win Is First Since Pavin in 1987
AUTHOR: By Doug Ferguson
TEXT: HONOLULU, Hawaii - Ernie Els watched a 4-foot par putt slide by the hole and knew it was going to haunt him. This being the Sony Open, he should have known how it was going to end.
Despite wasting a two-shot lead with four holes to play, Els wound up in a familiar position Sunday.
He wore the same green shirt, had a lei around his neck and the trophy at his side.
"A playoff at the Sony ... it's working out for me," Els said.
The Big Easy, as Els is known, had to work extra hard for this one, holing a 30-foot birdie putt on the third playoff hole to defeat Harrison Frazar and become the first repeat winner of the Sony Open since Corey Pavin in 1987.
He also became the first player since Nick Faldo in the Masters (1989-90) to win the same tournament back-to-back in a playoff.
A year ago, he beat Aaron Baddeley on the second extra hole with a 55-foot putt from the fringe at No. 10. Els figured destiny was on his side when he reached the same green.
Frazar was in trouble to the left, took three shots to reach the green and had 15 feet for par. Els played it safe and hit a sand wedge into 10 feet for birdie.
"I really didn't think he was going to make that, and he just bombed it right in the middle," Els said. "I guess I was taken aback. I was hoping for two putts [for the win]. But nothing comes easy. I told myself on the next tee to win the tournament, instead of waiting for someone to give it to you."
Els did just that, making the long birdie and thrusting his arms in the air - more out of relief than celebration.
"I felt the tournament was slipping away," he said.
It was a difficult loss for Frazar, a 32-year-old Texan who is 0-for-161 on the PGA Tour.
This was his best chance at winning, and he gave it his best shot.
"I had a one-shot lead and shot 4 under on a pretty tough golf course," Frazar said. "Most of the time, that's going to be good enough. I just got beat."
Frazar closed with two straight birdies for a 66. Both players finished at 18-under 262.
Els, who has shot every round in the 60s at Waialae since he started playing the Sony Open four years ago, holed a 10-foot birdie putt on the final hole for a 65 that forced the playoff.
Both made pars on No. 18 in the playoff.
Frazar scrambled for an unlikely par on No. 10 to keep the playoff going.
Els made sure it didn't go any longer.
The last time Els was in a playoff was November in the Presidents Cup, head-to-head with Tiger Woods over three dramatic holes until darkness led to a tie.
Els got to finish this one off - plus, he got paid.
He earned $864,000 for his 13th career PGA Tour victory, and heads overseas to play in Thailand and Australia, not returning to the United States until late February or the middle of March.
He didn't win both Hawaii events like he did a year ago, but he feels his game is in the same position.
Els finally shook off the rust from spending a month on the beach in South Africa during the holidays. Getting rid of Frazar was tougher.
"Harrison, what a day," Els said. "He really hung in there."
TITLE: Roddick Aces Australian Open First Round
AUTHOR: By John Pye
TEXT: MELBOURNE, Australia - Top-ranked Andy Roddick had 20 aces on the way to beating Fernando Gonzalez 6-2, 7-5, 7-6 (4) Monday in the opening round of the Australian Open, his first major as men's No. 1.
The U.S. Open champion got a lucky line call to reach set point in the second and fell behind 3-5 in the third before Gonzalez's erratic forehand let the Chilean down.
Roddick broke Gonzalez in the third set's 10th game and then held in the 11th, taking a 6-5 lead with a second serve that forced an error from Gonzalez on game point.
Gonzalez held to force a tiebreaker but conceded three match points with a forehand that sailed over the baseline. Roddick won when Gonzalez sent a forehand wide.
"I don't think it was a good draw for either of us," the 21-year-old Roddick said of his match with the 34th-ranked Gonzalez. "Fortunately I got a little lucky there."
A semifinalist at Melbourne Park last year, Roddick knows things have changed now that he's No. 1.
"I got more guys gunning for me," Roddick said.
One of those players is defending champion Andre Agassi, who was facing Australian wild-card entry Todd Larkham later Monday.
Top-ranked Justine Henin-Hardenne had an easy opening match in the women's draw, overpowering 15-year-old Olivia Lukaszewicz 6-0, 6-0.
Henin-Hardenne, the French and U.S. Open winner last year, needed only 45 minutes to beat the Australian wild-card entry in the second match of the first day at Rod Laver Arena.
"I'm happy with the way I'm playing, I'm in good form," the Belgian star said. "It can be a long two weeks, so ... it's good not stay out there in the sun."
Among Russians advancing in the women's draw were Vera Zvonareva, seeded 11th, Elena Bovina (21st), Svetlana Kuznetsova (30th).
Earlier, Swedish teenager Robin Soderling upset 2003 runner-up Rainer Schuettler 4-6, 4-6, 7-5, 6-3, 6-4.
Schuettler, seeded sixth, won the first two sets and had a break point at 5-5 in the third, but the 19-year-old Soderling - playing just his fourth Grand Slam event - rallied to win. Soderling closed the match with two aces.
Schuettler hasn't won a match in three tournaments this month
"I've had a pretty tough three weeks now," said Schuettler. "I had great memories from last year. Of course there was a bit of pressure, but that's not the reason I didn't win."
Seventh-seeded Carlos Moya of Spain withdrew about two hours before his match against American James Blake. The 1998 French Open champion sprained his right ankle in the final of a tuneup event Saturday in Sydney. Peru's Ivan Miranda replaced Moya in the draw.
"I would have loved to play. Unfortunately, I'm not able [to]," said Moya, who only needed a 20-minute hitting session to realize he wouldn't last the first set.
Morocco's Younes El Aynaoui - who lost 21-19 in the fifth set of a quarterfinal last year against Roddick, the longest fifth set in an Open-era Grand Slam - lasted five games against Spain's Galo Blanco before withdrawing because of tendinitis in his right foot.
"The pain is terrible, it's like a knife going into my heal whenever I push," El Aynaoui said.
Henin-Hardenne, who beat France's Amelie Mauresmo in Sydney on Saturday for her first title of the year, saved four break points in the fourth game and two in the sixth game of the second set. She double-faulted on her first match point, but won on her next when Lukaszewicz's backhand went long.
Henin-Hardenne won all six points when she went to the net and converted six of nine break-point chances, producing 13 winners against two for Lukaszewicz.
Mauresmo, seeded fourth, also easily advanced, routing Taiwan's Chuang Chia-Jung 6-0, 6-1 and fifth-seeded Lindsay Davenport beat Ruxandra Dragomir Ilie 6-2, 6-3.
Earlier, Jelena Jankovic beat seventh-seeded Elena Dementieva, and two other seeded women also were eliminated.
Jankovic, of Serbia and Montenegro, beat Dementieva 6-1, 6-4, with the Russian committing eight double-faults and 32 unforced errors in the match that featured nine service breaks.
Tenth-seeded Nadia Petrova of Russia lost 6-3, 6-3 to Hungary's Aniko Kapros and 31st-seeded Tamarine Tanasugarn lost 6-1, 6-3 to big-serving American Laura Granville.
In early play, Americans Taylor Dent and Robbie Ginepri advanced, while Frenchman Arnaud Clement was the first of the men's seeded players to lose.
Clement, the 2001 runner-up, fell 6-7 (6), 4-6, 6-4, 6-1, 6-2 to Russia's Nikolay Davydenko.
Nicholas Lapentti, a semifinalist in 1999, beat Spain's Oscar Hernandez 6-1, 6-3, 6-1, and Enqvist edged 29th-seeded Vincent Spadea of the United States 4-6, 6-4, 6-4, 7-6 (6).
Other seeded players advancing were: Frenchman Sebastien Grosjean (9), Thailand's Paradorn Srichaphan (13), Dutchman Sjeng Schalken (16), and former No. 1 Gustavo Kuerten (19) of Brazil.
Mardy Fish (21) and Tommy Robredo (20) were among the six seeded men to lose in the first round.
TITLE: Experience, Attitude Aid Moscow Bid
AUTHOR: By Anneli Nerman
TEXT: MOSCOW - The Russian capital's rich experience of hosting international sporting events coupled with the overwhelmingly positive attitude of it's population are Moscow's greatest assets in its bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games, city and sporting officials said while unveiling their plans last week.
Moscow, vying to host only its second ever Olympic Games, is one of nine applicant cities, though it is considered an underdog in comparison with favorites such as Paris, London, Madrid and New York.
Compared to the fanfare accompanying the submission of bid documents in some cities, the Moscow event was a low key presentation of the documents sent to the International Olympic Committee.
The overall concept of the city's bid is "the Olympic River," referring to the Moscow River, which historically is the main artery of this 12th century city. The sporting and housing facilities proposed for the Games would be located along this waterway.
Moscow plans to revamp several stadiums to Olympic standards as well as build an Olympic Village of cottages to host the athletes. To accommodate all the tourists, between 200-300 mid-price hotels would be built, a monorail and light railway system added to the existing public transport and the passenger capacity of three airports doubled. City officials expect the private sector to pick up much of the costs.
According to a poll carried out by the Romir Monitoring agency, 90 percent of Muscovites and 89 percent of Russians support the idea of hosting the games in Moscow, many citing the increase in national prestige.
Security concerns, linked to the possibility of more terrorist attacks like those that already plague Moscow, were played down.
"We have measures worked out. If we stage a massive event we guarantee the security of all those who come to here," said Deputy Mayor Valery Shantsev.
Moscow has been the target of suicide bomb attacks linked to the ongoing war in Chechnya, now in its fifth year. Last summer, two women blew themselves up at a large outdoor concert in the capital, killing 15 people. In October 2002, Chechen rebels seized hostages at a Moscow theater, a raid that ended with the deaths of 129 hostages.
Hosting the 2012 Games would be particularly symbolic for Russia, which made its first official appearance in the Olympics a century earlier in Stockholm. Moscow hosted its first and only Olympic Games in July 1980, the first time the prestigious games were held in a Communist country. The games were marred, however, by a U.S.-led boycott to protest the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Moscow has hosted 100 major sporting events since 1980.
Other cities seeking to host the 2012 Games are Leipzig, Germany; Havana; Istanbul, Turkey; and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
In May, the IOC executive board will decide whether to accept all nine nations as official bid cities or trim the field to around half a dozen. The full IOC will select the host city in July 2005.
TITLE: Super Bowl Showdown Pits Panthers Against Patriots
AUTHOR: By Richard Rosenblatt
TEXT: PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania - Two men named Manning decided which teams will face each other in the Super Bowl in Houston on Feb. 1.
Ricky Manning Jr. picked off three passes by Donovan McNabb and helped put the Carolina Panthers in their first Super Bowl with a 14-3 win over the Philadelphia Eagles in the National Football Conference championship game Sunday night.
"They were coming at me, trying me, testing me. All I can say is, bring it!" Manning Jr. said.
Earlier in the day, National Football League co-Most Valuable Player Peyton Manning was intercepted four times in Indianapolis' loss to New England in the American Football Conference title game.
Manning Jr. became an unlikely hero by reading McNabb's passes just a little better than the Eagles' receivers. His three interceptions came in a span of 9:39 in the second and third quarters - the first two in Panthers' territory, and the third at the Philadelphia 37 to set up the clinching touchdown.
"I was hoping to get at least one," Manning Jr. said. "I came out there expecting to win. We attacked all day. Left side, right side. We just kept attacking their receivers."
In matching an NFC title game record for interceptions, Manning Jr. outdid his effort in last week's double overtime win at St. Louis. In that game, his interception set the stage for Jake Delhomme's game-winning 69-yard touchdown pass to Steve Smith.
After gaining a starting spot only late in the regular season, the 5-foot-8, 185-pound rookie from UCLA said earlier this week he wasn't impressed with the Eagles' receivers. He proved his point by being in the right place at the right time.
With the Panthers clinging to a 7-3 lead and the Eagles driving, a bruised McNabb hit James Thrash with a pass, but the ball was jarred loose and Manning grabbed it and raced 17 yards to the Philadelphia 37.
Five plays later, DeShaun Foster broke four tackles for a 1-yard touchdown run with 4:11 left in the third quarter. The Panthers led 14-3 and were headed to the Super Bowl just two seasons after going 1-15.
Manning Jr., a third-round draft pick, couldn't earn a starting spot at first in what was considered a weak secondary. But he finally moved in at left cornerback for Terry Cousin.
"He is a little bit undersized," Carolina coach John Fox said. "But you know, he's got a lot of magic and he's played very well for us. He's extremely tough mentally. To go this deep into a season in your rookie year is remarkable, says a lot about him."
A former high school quarterback and defensive back, Manning had three interceptions during the regular season. He has four in the last two playoff games.
"Guys just stepped up," running back Stephen Davis said after fighting off a strained left quadriceps and running for 76 yards on 19 carries. "And that Manning, making all those big plays. It's hard to believe he made all those interceptions."
Manning Jr.'s first interception came with 47 seconds left in the first half. His second pick came early in the third quarter as the Eagles drove to the Panthers 18 and threatened to wipe out Carolina's 7-3 halftime lead.
On a slant pattern by Todd Pinkston, Manning Jr. blocked the receiver's route as McNabb released the ball and easily picked off the pass at the Carolina 16.
Manning Jr.'s final interception came on the next series, and the Eagles couldn't recover.
"Pinkston is not that strong and I thought their wide receivers didn't have too many moves off the line," Manning Jr. said, adding that he couldn't recall ever making three interceptions in a game before. "All week long I thought I could get these guys."
Eagles coach Andy Reid defended his receivers.
"They didn't run wrong routes," Reid said after his team dropped its third straight NFC title game. "It was a combination of things. A couple of them were just good defensive plays."
TITLE: Nash Goal Helps Blue Jackets Tie Oilers
AUTHOR: By Rusty Miller
TEXT: COLUMBUS, Ohio - Columbus' second-year star Rick Nash scored his NHL-leading 28th goal - and came close to at least another one or two - to help the Blue Jackets tie the Edmonton Oilers 4-4 on Sunday night.
"I thought we should have won the game 7-3 or 7-4," Blue Jackets interim coach Gerard Gallant said. "They had some luck tonight and we didn't."
Nash, featured in the current issue of Sports Illustrated magazine as one of the NHL's budding stars, had chances to score a few more times.
"I don't enjoy the 0-0 games," he said with a grin. "I find it exciting and it's exciting for the fans. A lot of people are saying the game doesn't have enough offense, and when you see games like this, it's fun to watch and I'm sure that the fans love it. And, obviously, the players love playing those types of game."
The puck was behind Nash after he took a pass from David Vyborny a minute into the third period. Nash regained control by tapping the puck back between his skates with a defenseman draped on his back before jamming it past goaltender Ty Conklin to give Columbus a 4-3 lead.
"It was a nice play by Vyborny and I just had to try to bring it up on my forehand," Nash said. "Everybody can do it in the NHL. It's just a quick move up to your forehand. It's really not that hard."
The Oilers' Eric Brewer scored his second goal of the season 5:45 into the third to tie it.
Even Brewer came away impressed with Nash.
"He's a heck of a player," Brewer said. "He's obviously found where he can play well. He's in front of the net all the time, which makes a huge difference. He's a big body that skates well."
There were plenty of prime scoring chances the rest of the way - the best coming when Nash fed fellow 19-year-old Nikolai Zherdev and his shot was just wide with 41 seconds left in overtime.
Mike York, Ethan Moreau and Brad Isbister also had goals for Edmonton, while Steve Staios matched his career high with three points and Radek Dvorak added two assists.
Vyborny also tied a career high with three points on a goal and two assists. Zherdev added his sixth goal and Tyler Wright had his third of the season for the Blue Jackets.
Goals came in bunches throughout the game, with the teams trading goals in a little more than a minute during the opening period.
Vyborny got his 13th off a centering pass from behind the goal line from Nash. York then circled around the net and slipped a backhander past Columbus goaltender Marc Denis for his 15th of the season.
The Blue Jackets built a 3-1 lead on goals by Wright and Zherdev's sixth - the latter coming on a five-on-three advantage.
The Oilers pulled even with two goals within 15 seconds later in the period. Moreau redirected a shot in the slot for his ninth goal before Isbister scored a quick goal on Dvorak's pretty no-look, behind-the-back feed from behind the net.
"I'll take the point," Edmonton coach Craig MacTavish said. "We fought back and it's a big point after being down 3-1."
The Blue Jackets had 1:38 with a two-man advantage in the second period, then started the third with another five-on-three on which Nash scored.
Brewer's one-timer from the right dot after a cross-ice pass from Ales Hemsky evened it for the final time.
Nash's drive from just inside the blue line evaded Conklin but hit the far post with 10:08 left in regulation.
"It's been a long time for a 19-year-old kid to play like that," Wright said. "It's exciting to watch these guys and what they do, what they try, the confidence that they have to be able to try these things. Being an older player, it's just a treat."
TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: Batsman Hookes Dies
MELBOURNE (Reuters) - Former Australia batsman David Hookes died in hospital on Monday after suffering serious head injuries in an assault outside a Melbourne hotel, Hookes' family said.
"We, the family of cricketer David Hookes, wish to inform David's many friends, family members and fans that he passed away today at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne," Hookes' brother Terry Cranagh said.
"We trust that the police will conduct a full investigation into the cause of the incident," he read from a statement at The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne.
The 48-year-old Hookes played 23 tests for Australia from 1976-77 to 1985-86.
Wie Misses Open Cut
HONOLULU (AP) - Fourteen-year-old Michelle Wie missed the cut in the Sony Open by one shot Friday - despite making two birdies on her final three holes.
"I cannot believe it," Wie said, exasperated that her even-par 140 was not enough to play on the weekend. She finished the day for a 2-under 68.
The youngest player in the PGA Tour record books, Wie posted the lowest score ever by a female competing against the men.
Wie did not realize the cut was at 1-under 139 until she finished her round.
"I thought I just had to make birdie," she said. "They said it was 139, and I added 70 and 70 together and was like, 'Oh, no. This is not happening."'
Beckham's Is Longer
LONDON (Reuters) - David Beckham has one leg longer than the other, the England captain told the News of the World on Sunday.
Beckham said he was unaware of the problem until he underwent a medical before his transfer from Manchester United to Real Madrid last July.
"One of my legs is shorter than the other," he told the newspaper. "I think it's a common problem, but the difference in mine is a bit more unusual.
"I didn't know about it until I signed for Real, and it showed up in the medical.
"Thankfully, it's not a big problem," Beckham said.
Struggling Lazio Draws
ROME, Italy (Reuters) - Lazio's disappointing Serie A form continued Saturday when it drew 1-1 with lowly Modena.
Modena failed to capitalize on better first-half possession and fell behind in the 24th minute, when a Lazio counterattack ended with striker Roberto Muzzi rolling the ball into the path of team mate Claudio Lopez, who fired low into the net.
Lazio was pegged back on the hour when uncertainty in defense allowed home midfielder Nicola Campedelli to sweep a loose ball past keeper Angelo Peruzzi.
Woodbridge In Record
SYDNEY, Australia (AP) - Australia's Todd Woodbridge won his ATP Tour-record 79th doubles title Saturday, teaming with Jonas Bjorkman for a 7-6 (7-3), 7-5 victory over Bob and Mike Bryan in the Adidas International.
In the men's final, third-seeded Carlos Moya injured his right ankle and was forced to quit in the first set against Lleyton Hewitt.
The injury put Moya in doubt for the Australian Open, which started Monday.
Top-seeded Justine Henin-Hardenne of Belgium won the women's title, beating third-seeded Amelie Mauresmo of France 6-4, 6-4. Earlier Saturday, Mauresmo beat Italy's Francesca Schiavone 6-3, 7-6 (7-2) in a rain-delayed semifinal.