SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #938 (6), Tuesday, January 27, 2004
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TITLE: City Marks Breaking of Brutal Siege
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Sixty years ago on Jan. 27, 1944 the city of Leningrad marked one of the happiest days in its history - the end of the horrible siege of the city by fascist Germany.
Hitler's troops attacked the Soviet Union with no warning in the early morning of June 22, 1941, throwing the country into a tragic and bloody war, that killed about 30 million Soviet citizens.
The Third Reich killed people in battles, in concentration camps, civilians were shot down or burned in their villages and under bombardment in cities. However, for Leningrad they reinvented one of the simplest and most brutal methods of murder - famine.
Soviet histories of the siege have traditionally described Germany's initial plan as to invade and destroy Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was known from 1924 until 1991.
However, the defensive line around the city held and by September 1941 Hitler's commanders gave up on capturing the city and decided to lay siege to it, killing its inhabitants with hunger and bombs.
Historian Joerg Ganzenmueller, who is writing a book about the siege, wrote in German newspaper Die Zeit that in April of 1941, two months before the invasion of the Soviet Union, when the Reich Food Ministry reported "that the problem of supplying Leningrad with an appropriate amount of food cannot be solved, should it fall into our hands."
He also cited Hitler saying on Sept. 29, 1941 that "requests from the city to surrender will be rejected because the problem of the remaining presence and nourishment of the population cannot and should not be solved by us. We have no interest in caring for even part of the population in this struggle for existence."
On Sept. 8, 1941 the Germans closed their ring around Leningrad and committed one of their biggest crimes - bombing and destroying the city's Badayevsky food warehouse - the loss of which meant slow, but inevitable death for many residents.
Leningrad had been the second-largest city in Russia, with a pre-war population of 3.2 million people. By the end of the siege in 1944, only about 500,000 people remained, though many had been evacuated.
Official figures say about 700,000 citizens died from hunger and under bombs.
Rations consisted of "bread," a black mixture of flour and sawdust with blue-collar workers receiving as little as 250 grams a day, white-collar workers 200 grams, and dependents and children just 125 grams.
People used their imagination to make anything they could edible. They boiled "soup" from joiner's glue, leather belts, potato peelings; making tea from pine twigs to get vitamins, or digging the sweet soil near the burned Badayevsky warehouse where sugar had melted into the soil.
But this ration could not help a lot, and in the worst months of the extraordinarily cold winter of 1941-1942 people were dying in their thousands.
In his recent book "Unknown Siege" Russian historian Nikita Lomagin wrote that in winter 1942 the number of Leningraders dying from hunger sometimes reached 10,000 per day.
"Whenever we walked somewhere we just stepped over corpses on our way and by this time we were numb to this," said Nina Volodina, who was 10 years old in 1941.
Nadezhda Samsonenko, who was 18 in 1941, said one of her family's neighbors gave birth to a baby in January 1942. Her husband was in the army and there was nobody to help her. She didn't have milk and was sick. Soon, both the mother and son died.
For a long time, Soviet propaganda tended to keep the gloomiest facts about the siege a secret.
Thus, it prohibited publication of photographs or film of Leningrad streets showing more than three corpses on them. It also preferred not to mention the numerous cases of cannibalism that took place in the city.
The letters of Leningraders to the parts of Russia behind the front lines - known then as the Big Land - were strictly censored to eliminate all such negative information.
However, the evidence of the survivors and recently publicized NKVD files show that cannibalism occurred on a large scale.
Referring to NKVD files, Lomagin wrote that in February of 1942 alone, city police arrested 2,000 cannibals. People selling gelatin made from human bones and cutlets made from corpses went to sell their wares on Nevsky Prospekt every evening.
However, despite all the hardships and horrors many people survived because of the altruism of others.
Volodina said a woman neighbor who had two sons herself also brought up two orphaned children of another neighbor, who died during the siege.
Svetlana Pronberg, now 75, who was 13 when the siege began, remembers the extraordinary sacrifice of two spinster neighbors.
Having no children of their own, they dedicated all their care and kindness to a dog, whom they treated like a child.
"At the peak of the hungriest siege winter in 1941-1942 my sister and myself were almost dying from hunger," Pronberg said. "Then those two ladies brought us their dog. They said they could not eat the dog themselves, but gave it to us so that we would survive."
"That dog saved us," she said
Although most people had little leisure time outside work and finding sustenance, they still found the space for culture and emotions.
Samsonenko who taught at a school during the siege said she tried to make hungry children forget about food as they endlessly read them poems by national poet Alexander Pushkin.
"They asked us for food and we read and read Pushkin instead," she said.
Alexandra Pukhova said that in 1942 she and a friend went to a performance at Bolshoi Drama Theater.
"We looked like two malnourished old grannies, but we were so happy," she said.
It was during the depths of the hardest siege winter that she met her husband-to-be.
An acquaintance told Pukhova that she wanted to introduce her to a young submariner. At first she refused, saying that nobody would be interested in the wrinkled creature she had become. But the young man started to visit her anyway.
Once after Dmitry left had gone she found a piece of bread left on the shelf. "It moved me so much that he didn't give to me directly to save me from the embarrassment," Pukhova said.
They married on Jan. 30, 1944, three days after the siege ended.
In December 1941, when the ice on Lake Ladoga became strong enough to bear vehicles on the so-called Road of Life, food supplies began flowing into the city and evacuation by land resumed. The Germans often bombed the road, sinking the trucks and the food or people they carried.
Spring of 1942 brought some relief as people went out to plant vegetables in local parks and cooked dishes made of grass.
Survivors ventured out to clean the city after the long winter. Corpses were collected from throughout the city and buried at Piskaryovskoye cemetery.
"We never allowed any epidemics to break out in the devastated city," Pukhova said.
Survivors say it was a great joy for the city residents when the siege was broken.
However, even many years later the psychological and physical consequences of the siege experience caused many health problems among survivors.
According to the research by Lidia Khoroshilova, a doctor at the St. Petersburg Medical Academy of Post-Graduate Education, the long and severe famine seriously damaged their health and shortened their life span by between 1.3 to 1.8 years less than the country's average.
Survivors are prone to earlier and more frequent heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, and other illnesses, she said.
Her research also showed that though children born afterward to siege survivors enjoy average health, the next generation had a bigger percentage of chronic diseases than children from other families.
A series of events will commemorate the end of the siege.
At 9 a.m Tuesday at 14 Nevsky Prospekt there will be a traditional gathering and laying of flowers at a memorial sign like those during the siege that advised which side of the street was safest from shelling.
At 10:30 a.m. ceremonies will take place at the Piskaryovskoye cemetery, and at 11 a.m. at Serafimovskoyoye and Smolenskoye cemeteries.
New exhibitions on the siege will open in several city museums.
At 7 p.m. an orchestra conducted Shostakovich's Seventh ("Leningrad") Symphony in the Great Hall of the Shostakovich Philharmonic. The symphony was played in the besieged Leningrad to boost the spirits of Leningraders.
At 8 p.m. a festive salute will be fired from the Peter and Paul Fortress.
TITLE: Anti-Fascist Card Deck Caricatured Nazi Bosses
AUTHOR: By Simone Kozuharov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: On the 60th anniversary of the breaking of the Siege of Leningrad and in the wake of the release of a series of political card packs, a St. Petersburg man who painted just such a deck of cards depicting the Nazi leadership during World War II is back in the public spotlight.
Last year the U.S. Army issued playing cards of top Iraqi officials during its invasion of Iraq. Next came two Russian versions, depicting the administration of George W. Bush and the Kremlin elite.
But Ivan Kharkevich, 91, who was a propagandist in the war, drew up a similar pack of the Nazi leadership in 1943.
"Cards are a very convenient form of agitation," he said Friday.
They were intended to demoralize the German army to assist the Soviets in their attempts to budge the enemy who were dug in around Leningrad.
"The fronts were stationary and at that time the idea of creating the cards was born."
The Politburo commissioned the deck of 36 cards - there are no cards carrying a lower value than a six, Kharkevich said.
The cards, which bore slogans mocking the Nazi leaders and their allies, were intended to incite German soldiers to surrender. They were never distributed before the Germans' "iron ring" around St. Petersburg was completely broken on Jan. 27, 1944.
The cards portray each leader in 1941 - the year Hitler launched his offensive against the Soviet Union - and in 1943, much the worse for wear after their struggle with the Red Army. By that time the Soviets had won the battles of Stalingrad and of Kursk and the Nazi war machine was breaking.
"It was possible to draw a great number of caricatures of Reich leaders," Kharkevich added.
The two halves were separated by the names and positions of each leader in Russian.
Kharkevich said a poet wrote the sarcastic phrases between the halves, in Russian and German. The reverse side of the cards were encrypted with anti-fascist slogans to be decoded by the Nazi soldiers.
The aces were the German industrial and financial holdings that backed Hitler. Hitler was the king of spades, with Goering, Goebbels and Himmler also kings. The Queens were caricatures of Axis powers Hungary, Finland and Romania with Italian dictator Mussolini as the queen of spades. The jacks featured the heads of the German navy and army, Foreign Minister Joachim Ribbentrop and Afrika Korps commander Erwin Rommel.
"The whole editorial department decided how to draw the cards," Kharkevich said.
However, it was he who created the original designs.
Although he can't remember exactly how long he worked on the cards, he said it was at least a month. He worked day and night, painting the deck by hand. No deadline was given, but his chief hounded him, constantly reminding him to complete the deck "the sooner the better."
"I was hurrying because it was wartime and everything had to be done very quickly," Kharkevich said. "But I was young and did everything quickly. I don't know how long it would take nowadays.
"When the cards were ready in 1943, our attacks started. The fronts began to move and the Germans started to retreat," Kharkevich said. "Then we didn't need the cards anymore. No one plays cards when front lines are shifting."
The original cards remained in his possession until the 1970s when a representative from the Museum of the Breaking of the Siege, in Kirovsk, a city in the Leningrad Oblast region, saw the them and other work by Kharkevich at an exhibition. Kharkevich's cards were bought for the museum, which sells packs of the cards he designed.
Kharkevich saw his originals for the first time in about 20 years last week when an NTV reporter brought them to him.
The cards "are interesting from the point of grotesque politics," said museum spokeswoman Vera Pozdnyakova. "They were made by anti-fascists who tried to look with irony at the countries, politicians and generals who started the war," she said.
"This approach is of great interest - looking at the war from the satirical and humorous point of view."
Kharkevich was in a traveling editorial team based on a train that was frequently bombed, and later in cars.
The team first produced an anti-fascist newspaper in German called "Soldaten Freund" or "Friend of the Soldier."
When it became too difficult to produce the paper, it was scaled down to a leaflet.
Some prisoners of war voluntarily helped with the production of the anti-fascist propaganda and wrote articles condemning Hitler's Fascist regime, he added.
The leaflets were distributed by artillery and aviation bombs to German soldiers.
Later only bombs were used after the practice resulted in the death of an artilleryman, Kharkevich said.
His memory is patchy, he is hard of hearing and slurs his speech from time to time. He lives with his wife of 52 years, Galina, 76, in their one-room apartment.
Kharkevich said he isn't nostalgic for the Soviet era.
"I am very happy that we have democracy, although it is only a vague resemblance of democracy. But we have hope," Kharkevich said.
"I wonder why people praise Stalin nowadays. I can't understand it after he killed so many of our innocent population."
TITLE: Kobzon Urges No Sex on TV
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Pop crooner Iosif Kobzon, the new head of the State Duma's culture committee, said Monday that he will push for bans on sex on television and lip synching and take steps to promote the art of whistling.
Kobzon, who is often referred to as Russia's Frank Sinatra due to his velvet voice and alleged mafia ties, was elected in the single-mandate Buryat-Aginsk district in eastern Siberia with the help of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party. He denies being affiliated with any party.
Kobzon told reporters Monday that his first priority as committee chief will be to get "useful" bills from the previous Duma passed, including long-debated legislation outlawing explicit sex scenes on television and musicians from lip syncing in concert.
"Over my 45 years in the business I have sung more than any other performer in this country. Unfortunately, on television for example, lip-syncing is unavoidable," Kobzon said.
However, "you cannot imagine the torture of lip-syncing to my own voice," he said, grimacing.
He said a ban would pave the way for young talented performers to take to the big stage.
The last Duma refused to put the bill banning lip lyncing on the agenda, saying it was unworthy of its attention. It passed in a first reading the ban on sex on television.
Kobzon said he recently held a variety contest for young performers and was impressed by a participant who specialized in whistling.
"I previously had a very vague idea about what it meant to whistle on stage, and I will now promote it for the sake of preserving the genre," he said.
Kobzon acknowledged that his task at committee head might prove difficult and suggested that not all members of his committee are as committed as he is.
"I was told that my deputy is a builder from Tver," Kobzon said.
But he said he was pleased that the only two other deputies with ties to show business were on his committee - bard singer Alexander Rozenbaum and Soviet-era actress Yelena Drapeko.
TITLE: Ilyasov: No Forced Return
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: VLADIKAVKAZ, North Ossetia - Stanislav Ilyasov, the Cabinet minister in charge of Chechnya, told a senior UN official on Monday that the government would not force refugees from Chechnya to return home. Ilyasov told UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland that 49,000 Chechen refugees are currently living in neighboring Ingushetia, about 5,000 of them in tent camps.
"No one will be forced to move to Chechnya," Ilyasov said during their meeting in Moscow, adding that about half of the Chechen refugees now staying in Ingushetia are expected to remain there.
At the same time, Ilyasov said that the government would encourage residents of the tent camps to return to Chechnya. He said those who agree to resettle will receive security guarantees and housing and be eligible for a government compensation for the housing and property lost during the two wars in the province. The compensation amounts to a total of 350,000 rubles ($12,300) per family.
Egeland, who arrived Sunday, is to visit refugee camps in Ingushetia later this week and meet with local authorities.
Meanwhile, at least 10 federal troops have been killed and 11 others wounded in rebel raids and landmine explosions across Chechnya in the past 24 hours, an official in the Kremlin-backed Chechen administration said Monday on condition of anonymity.
TITLE: VOX POPULI
TEXT: The St. Petersburg Times asked St. Petersburgers what their views are of the Siege of Leningrad, which was finally broken 60 years ago on Tuesday.
Natalya Kosichenko, 28, art critic:
The siege is history. The siege is our memory. It's our pain. My family lived through a part of the siege. I must say people who survived the siege do not talk about those hard times, but members of my family used to tell me about it.
Nikolai, 41, unemployed:
I think, the modern generation does not know enough about the siege, and they can hardly imagine what it was like to survive it.
Our generation, who graduated from school in the Soviet times, still know more about it than people do today, since there was more education about that part of our history before perestroika.
The way people survived the siege was an indication of how strong the spirit of the nation was at that time, and how all people were connected by certain ideas of patriotism.
People were striving for a bright common future. The youth of today is mainly driven by commercial interests.
If people today faced such a siege, the city would surrender because today the main force is dollars and euros and not the pure ideals that the war generation lived by.
Marina, 41, teacher:
For me the siege is the history of my family because my grandmother worked in a city hospital all through the siege.
Today there is not enough information and education about the siege. On the eve of such a big and important anniversary for the city there should be more TV programs and movies about it.
We should remember the siege because we should be proud of our families and our city, and our history. Secondly, this memory would help us to appreciate and respect the people of that generation as much as they deserve.
Dima, 19, student:
What I know about the the siege is that it lasted for 900 days and that people survived severe hunger. I think, those people were heroic, and that we should remember that.
Pavel Smirnov, 20, student:
I think, today people would not live through such a siege because we don't have such patriots any more. Well, maybe we have them, but there are only a few. Now we have many people who call wherever they feel most comfortable home. In a way, people have become more pragmatic.
Nina Konstantinovna, 74, pensioner:
I lost all my health during the siege. I was 12 when it started. We were so hungry that we ate all the grass. And we dragged dead people to morgues. I remember how my mother went to the destroyed Badayevsky food warehouses and collected soil saturated with sugar from there.
I cry every time I recall the siege.
I think, the city did not surrender because there was lots of enthusiasm in the people of that generation. We were still children, but we also did what we could. We watched for [German spies. and sympathizers] firing flares indicating to German aircraft where they should bomb. We reported the locations where the flares were fired.
Nobody wanted to surrender, because it was our city and we wanted to live here.
I think, they don't remember enough today about the people who survived the siege. It's only because of this anniversary that they remembered about us and sent us congratulation cards. I got one each from President Vladimir Putin and Governor Valentina Matviyenko.
Text by Irina Titova
Photos by Sergey Grachev
TITLE: Nemtsov Attests SPS Is Healthy, United
AUTHOR: By Caroline McGregor
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Union of Right Forces leader Boris Nemtsov emerged from a marathon closed-door session of his party's congress Saturday night to deliver this message: "We're alive, healthy and united."
"Despite some divergence of views, we're united on the main thing: that SPS must be preserved," he told a group of journalists at the Holiday Inn Vinogradovo, where members of the Union of Right Forces, or SPS, retreated Saturday and Sunday to thrash out answers to the party's - if not the country's - eternal questions: Who is to blame and what is to be done?
The declaration of a strong front from Nemtsov, flanked at the news conference by fellow SPS leader Anatoly Chubais, was presumably meant to dispel prevalent perceptions that the party is dead, dysfunctional or headed for a split.
There is a sense that SPS has wallowed too long in its crushing failure to win seats in the State Duma in the Dec. 7 elections.
But to exorcise those frustrations, first they needed to be fully vented.
The analysis at the congress of what went wrong "has been tough and substantial, but at the same time, respectful," Chubais said. "No one stooped to personal fingerpointing."
Nemtsov noted that none of the 30 party members who took the floor over the course of eight hours of debate "even went so far as to think about a schism."
More immediately pressing, but still undecided at 9 p.m. Saturday, was a question of whether to embrace the presidential bid of longtime party leader Irina Khakamada, who threw her hat into the race as an independent, without seeking SPS's blessing.
Delegates eventually voted 76-61 that night to allow SPS members to vote as they wish on March 14 - which falls short of outright support for Khakamada but averts the split that had been hovering on the horizon.
Ahead of the congress, SPS sources had hinted that pragmatist factions would push for the party to support President Vladimir Putin, while the more disenchanted would push for an "against all" vote.
Khakamada made it known beforehand that if SPS picked Putin over her, she would leave the party, likely taking her supporters with her.
But the free-vote decision, she said, was an acceptable compromise.
"I don't want to be a destroyer," she told reporters.
Khakamada also offered a rundown of her key platform points, most of which are sharp criticisms of Putin's Kremlin and the clampdown on freedoms and the growth of corruption it has allowed.
Pinpointing SPS's failure to speak out in opposition to Putin as its single greatest mistake, she said, "We must end the dialog with authorities and start a dialog with the people. ... People understand perfectly that representatives of the regime openly lie on television screens everyday."
Khakamada said she has gathered more than the 2 million signatures required to challenge Putin on March 14, but she said the laws governing the Central Elections Commission's verification process was "subjective."
"I don't know to what extent the regime will tolerate harsh opposition and to what extent the regime will give my registration the green light," she said.
Khakamada will remain a member of the party, but not one of its leaders.
She and co-leaders Nemtsov, Chubais and Yegor Gaidar tendered their resignations immediately after the stinging Dec. 7 defeat, and delegates voted Saturday night to accept them.
The congress decided Saturday to replace the four co-leadership positions with a single post. The candidate to lead SPS will be picked at a party congress scheduled for April.
The four former co-leaders weren't without party jobs for long. On Sunday, they were elected to sit on SPS's advisory council.
With no illusions about Khakamada's chances of winning even if she does get on the presidential ballot, SPS is focusing its attention on rebuilding the party from the ground up.
Until the 2007 Duma elections, "the party's life will be shifted to the regions," Nemtsov said.
TITLE: Berezovsky Uses New ID For His Travels Overseas
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
TEXT: Britain said it has issued documents allowing the wealthy businessman who is wanted in Russia on fraud charges to travel under the new identity.
"Boris Berezovsky ... submitted a statutory declaration formally changing his name to Platon Yelenin, and the Immigration and Nationality Directorate issued a travel document, in accordance with the provisions of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, in that name," Home Secretary David Blunkett said Thursday, according to The Associated Press.
Berezovsky has been living in self-imposed exile in Britain since 2000. Russian prosecutors tried to extradite him to face multimillion-dollar fraud charges, but a London court threw out the case in September when it learned that the British government had granted him asylum.
Berezovsky said Sunday that the new travel documents with Platon Yelenin's name were issued in October at his own request.
"So officially I am now Platon Yelenin, although for any public appearances or contacts with the press I am still Boris Berezovsky," Berezovsky said by telephone from London.
He said Platon Ilyich Yelenin is a combination of the first name of the hero of a novel and film based on his life; the patronymic of Vladimir Lenin, who lived in exile in Britain before the 1917 Revolution; and the name of his wife, Yelena.
Boris Berezovsky first became known as Platon Yelenin late last year when he flew into Georgia under the new identity for a quick visit. The trip prompted Moscow to issue a sharp protest to Tbilisi that it had failed to detain a wanted criminal suspect.
Berezovsky cannot enter Russia even under the new name without losing the political refugee status granted by Britain, which ruled he may face persecution at home. But he already has another name picked out.
"Then I'll change my name to Vladimir Putin," he said. "If they [Russian authorities] are going to have some fun, I'll also have some fun, so they will be looking for Vladimir Putin all over the world."
TITLE: Vavilov Free After Queries
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Andrei Vavilov, the one-time oil baron and former first deputy finance minister, said Friday that he left U.S. investigators satisfied after four hours of questioning in connection with a high-profile embezzlement case against former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavlo Lazarenko.
"I was interrogated as a witness," Vavilov said in an interview with Ekho Moskvy radio. "I gave a statement. There are no longer any claims against me. For me, the story is closed."
He denied media speculation that the questioning had anything to do with the ongoing legal attack against Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky or the controversial sale of his oil firm Severnaya Neft to state-owned Rosneft last year.
Vavilov learned that U.S. authorities wished to question him when his private jet touched down for customs clearance in Palm Beach, California, on Jan. 5.
After four hours of talks between the agents and Vavilov's lawyers, Vavilov was permitted to continue his trip with the understanding that an investigator would sit down with him in Aspen, Vavilov's spokeswoman Maya Ivanova said Friday.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Yushenkov Jury
MOSCOW (SPT) - The Moscow City Court selected 12 jurors and two alternates Monday for the trial of six men accused of participating in the killing of State Duma Deputy Sergei Yushenkov, Interfax reported.
Yushenkov, a vocal critic of President Vladimir Putin, was gunned down at the entrance to his apartment building in northwestern Moscow on April 17. He was a co-leader of the Liberal Russia party.
Prosecutors have accused Mikhail Kodanyov, who belonged to a rival pro-Boris Berezovsky wing of Liberal Russia, of organizing the killing along with five accomplices.
Kodanyov's lawyer, Genri Reznik, told Interfax on Monday that his client will plead not guilty.
Preliminary hearings in the case are scheduled to begin Friday.
Synagogue Blast
MAKHACHKALA, Dagestan (AP) - An explosion shattered several windows in a synagogue in Derbent, a city in Dagestan, police said. No one was hurt.
Major Anzhela Martirosova said unknown attackers threw a grenade at the building Sunday night, but Magomed Gafarov, the Derbent police chief, said it was not known what kind of explosive had been used.
He said hooliganism was suspected.
Riuven Margulin, of the Sokhnut Jewish agency in the North Caucasus region, said no one was in the synagogue at the time of the explosion.
UN in Chechnya
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A rebel attack on a military convoy killed four servicemen and injured four Monday as a UN envoy began new talks on conditions in and around Chechnya.
Local officials said the convoy was halted by a roadside explosion outside a village in the Sharoi district in western Chechnya. The soldiers died in a subsequent shootout.
UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland was to start talks in Moscow on Monday with Stanislav Ilyasov, the federal minister for Chechnya.
Ship Accident
HELSINKI (AP) - Two Russian sailors were killed and one was injured Sunday in southern Finland when they were trapped in the hull of a cargo vessel without oxygen, rescue and police officials said.
The men suffocated because the ship's load - damp wood chips - had depleted the air in a shaft of the hold in the Gibraltar-registered Bjoern, officials said.
The ship, owned by Danish company DanShip, was beginning to unload its cargo at a harbor near Kotka, 130 kilometers east of Helsinki, at the time of the accident.
Rescue teams managed to pull the men from the hold but were unable to resuscitate them. One man was saved, but was suffering from respiratory injuries. The ship had a crew of seven.
Police began an investigation into the incident, and a preliminary analysis indicated it was an accident, chief inspector Tuomo Kokkonen said. Otis Revenues Up
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Otis, the U.S. elevator manufacturer, saw revenues increase by 18.5 percent in 2003 to 3.2 billion rubles, Interfax reported Otis Lift general director Pavel Vishnyakov as saying at a briefing Friday.
Vishnyakov said Otis plans to see increased growth in 2004.
Governor Valentina Matviyenko, who was also present at the briefing, said the city plans to increase cooperation with Otis to improve housing in the city. These plans modifying elevators in the city's apartment buildings to prevent theft of parts.
Port Canal to Deepen
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The city's main maritime canal will be deepened to 13 meters, making it possible for the port to receive ships with up to 70,000 tons deadweight, Interfax reported Transport Minister Sergei Frank as saying after a meeting Friday.
The canal project will be implemented in 2004 and 2005. The cost of the project has yet to be determined. Frank said the recoupment period would not exceed seven years.
The port currently receives ships of no more than 40,000 deadweight.
Sky Link Deal
MOSCOW (SPT) - Sky Link purchased a 43.12 percent share of charter capital in St. Petersburg's Delta Telecom cellular operator, according to a supplement to the Federal Securities Ministry bulletin, Interfax reported Thursday.
The shares were bought on Dec. 22 from Northwest Telecom.
Sky Link was founded in June 2003 to upgrade 450 MHz analog networks of Russian cellular operators using the IMT-MS-450 digital standard.
Curonian Oil Ban
VILNIUS, Lithuania (SPT) - The Lithuanian environmental ministry's decision to shelve plans to extract oil in the Curonian Bay could put pressure on LUKoil to halt its plans to drill in Russian land nearby.
Vitalijus Auglys, chief of the ministry's environmental impact department told Interfax Monday that the decision took into account the will of local residents and specialists' conclusions that oil extraction could negatively affect the environment in the area. Reserves in the area have been estimated at about 2 million tons of oil.
Lithuania's plans to extract oil near Kintai provided Russia with the argument that the Baltic country should not oppose LUKoil's extraction of oil in the D-6 field in the Baltic Sea. D-6 is near the Curonian Spit, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Milk Production Up
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Petmol increased production by 12 percent in 2003 over 2002, to 140,000 tons, Interfax reported Monday.
Sergei Polyakov, Petmol first deputy general director, said the dairy plans to boost production by 9 percent in 2003 to 152,000 tons.
In 2002, Petmol produced 125,000 tons of dairy products, or 2.7 percent more than in 2001. RusAl, Alcoa Talks
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - Russian Aluminum is in talks with Alcoa Inc. on production and marketing of rolled aluminum, Vedomosti reported Friday, citing unidentified RusAl executives.
Rusal may sell stakes in its aluminum-rolling plants in Samara and Belaya Kalitva to Alcoa or create a venture to jointly market rolled aluminum outside the country, the executives said.
The talks, which started several months ago, are "at an initial stage,'' the executives said. Jake Siewert, an Alcoa spokesman in New York, declined to comment, Vedomosti said.
UFG Deal Complete
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - Deutsche Bank AG, Europe's second-largest bank by assets, completed its purchase of a 40 percent stake in the Russian broker United Financial Group, the companies said Friday.
Deutsche Bank and Moscow-based UFG will cooperate on research, sales and trading of equities and corporate finance, a press release said.
Incomes Jump 14.5%
MOSCOW (Prime-Tass) - Real disposable incomes rose 14.5 percent on the year in 2003, the State Statistics Committee said Friday.
In December 2003, real incomes rose 28.3 percent on the month and 20.2 percent on the year.
Real disposable income is income adjusted according to the consumer price index, with mandatory payments deducted.
Average monthly income per capita stood at 7,287 rubles ($255) in December 2003, up 31.8 percent on the month and 34.2 percent on the year.
Kyoto Delay
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said Friday that Russia was not alone in delaying approval of the Kyoto Protocol aimed at cutting greenhouse gases.
"I believe it would be unfair to say that Russia holds the key to the success of the Kyoto Protocol," Ivanov told reporters after talks with his French counterpart Dominique de Villepin.
TITLE: They Felt the Hunger Pangs, But Survived the Cruel Siege
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Vera Lyudyno, now 80, spent six years in Soviet camps for keeping a diary of the horrors of the 900-day Nazi siege of Leningrad.
"In that diary I wrote about what I saw: frightful hunger, the number of bombardments, about frozen corpses of people left leaning against city buildings and trucks loaded with corpses that drove through the city," Lyudyno said.
Lyudyno was arrested a few days after the end of the siege, the 60th anniversary of which will be celebrated on Tuesday.
"Where is the diary?" was the first question an investigator from the NKVD secret police asked her.
Lyudyno was 17 when the Nazi troops surrounded the city in September 1941 and laid siege to it in order to deliberately starve its citizens.
In the middle of all that horror Lyudyno, who had been physically handicapped since childhood, found herself in a plaster cast and unable to move around much after surgery on her legs.
She could do nothing but look out the window at what was happening on the streets and describe it in her diary.
However, in contrast to many siege survivors, who prefer to tell stories about deeds of altruism and heroism in the starving city, Lyudyno describes the awful situations she witnessed.
"These times brought out the worst and the best qualities of people, most of whom were driven by a single instinct - to eat," Lyudyno said.
"One of our neighbors, who worked as a singer in a theater, used to eat his entire 200-gram monthly ration of raw meat at once so that nobody would steal it from him," she said.
Another neighbor wore a little bag on her chest, where she kept her bread ration, fearing that her daughter or grandchildren would eat it, Lyudyno said.
"That woman later died with the bag still on her chest," she said.
Lyudyno witnessed many things that indicated looting and cannibalism were occurring.
A Tatar family with many children lived in their building. Slowly the children started to disappear. Later their clothes were found in the apartment of a woman violinist. Their bones were found in her heater. The woman's five-year-old son also disappeared, Lyudyno said.
During the toughest times, her family cooked a kind of jelly made from leather belts or from joiner's glue.
"The 'recipe' required us to soak the belts for quite a while, then cut them into thin strips like macaroni, boil the strips for a long time, and cool them to form a jelly. A bay leaf was added. When you ate it all your stomach felt as if it was on fire and you got very thirsty. The trick was not to drink anything to preserve the sensation that you had eaten well," she said.
Lyudyno said the authorities violated human rights in Leningrad. Lyudyno's mother went with many other people to work on the city's fortification line. But as soon as the workers crossed the city's limits their food cards were taken away from them. They couldn't go back without the cards, but they were barely fed where they were working.
"My Mom told me that many people were dying of hunger because they had almost no food. But someone really wanted to hide that fact, so the corpses were placed on carts in a way that made it look as if they were seated and being driven away somewhere," Lyudyno said.
When the Germans bombed Leningrad she couldn't go to an air-raid shelter because of her plaster cast. Her father stayed with her in the apartment and they played chess as a distraction from reality.
"I was really stressed because of all the noise and destruction around us," she said. "But my father was calm. And when he saw that I was paying too much attention to the sounds of fires and explosions, he instantly said 'tvoi khod' (your move)," she said. Lyudyno's father died of hunger in 1942.
The plaster cast did not come off until spring of 1943. In the fall, she enrolled at the conservatory, where she had always dreamed of studying. She played her piano right through the siege.
Once she was out of the cast and mobile, Lyudyno started reading her siege diary to her friends.
When the NKVD arrested her in February 1944, they gave no explanation why they had come for her. The diary, however, had gone missing several days before her arrest. The investigator's question suggested to her that her diary was the reason for her imprisonment.
Lyudyno, by then aged 20, who could barely walk even with a cane, was accused of spreading anti-Soviet propaganda, picking up German propaganda leaflets, reading Hitler's "Mein Kampf," and once saying that she "would not work on a collective farm."
"It was all wrong except that I once really did say to my friends that I would not work on a collective farm because I was handicapped," Lyudyno said.
She was offered a chance to avoid being sent into exile if she agreed to work as an informer in a Leningrad prison. She refused and was sent to Karlag labor camp in Kazakhstan for six years.
Lyudyno said her prison and camp experience was much harder psychologically than even the siege had been.
"When you see how NKVD people kick a person to death, it's completely different from seeing people dying from hunger," she said.
Today Lyudyno rarely leaves her tiny one-room apartment on the outskirts of St. Petersburg because of her age and illness, and she says that sometimes it seems to her "as if all those horrors just could not have happened to me."
In 1941, Viktor Kirshin was 14 and studied at an industrial school in Leningrad. Immediately after the siege began, the school's students were sent to the city's Max Heltz plant, which produced tanks and machine guns.
"The hardest thing for us to cope with was the hunger," Kirshin said. "It took us a little while to get used to the bombing and shelling. But nobody could get used to hunger."
Teenagers aged 14 to 16 had one of the highest death rates in the besieged city, especially those who studied at industrial schools. This was because most of them were from other parts of the Soviet Union and didn't have their parents with them.
"Teenagers died more because they were at the age when people grow fastest and their bodies require much more food than usual," Kirshin said.
Girls endured the hardships better than boys, he added.
"As workers we received 250 grams of bread in our cafeteria, a bit of water that was called soup, and sometimes a lump of sugar," Kirshin said.
Despite this low level of sustenance, the students worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week, just like adults at the plants.
"We became so weak that many of us just fell down next to the machines we were operating," he said. "Some teenagers even tethered themselves to their machines with their belts so that they wouldn't fall over."
"We looked like 70-year-old men," Kirshin said.
Many of his classmates sometimes slept at the plant. He usually went home, where he lived with his grandmother.
"She used to boil up some tea and we drank it with my bread ration that I used to bring from work," he said.
One of the biggest joys for the young laborers was to go to the front lines and fire the machine guns that they themselves had made in the direction of the Germans.
When soldiers at the front learned that the excellent machine guns they were being supplied with from the city were made by teenagers, they were eager to meet the skillful workers, he said.
The soldiers asked the factory bosses to bring several industrious teenagers along for a visit when the next batch of machine guns was delivered.
"We drew pieces of paper with our names on them from a hat to select who would be the lucky ones to go to the front line," he said. "It was such happiness for us boys to shoot at fascists."
Having a large number of communal apartments was a lifesaver for many in the besieged city, Kirshin said.
"The shared hardship made people very close to each other," he said. "If in the morning a neighbor didn't come to the shared kitchen, his neighbors would go to his room, make him get up, give him tea and share bread. And by evening that person would have been revived."
By spring of 1942 most of the industrial schools' students were dead. The rest were evacuated through the narrow communication lines out of the city that were within the range of German artillery.
"Ironically, the journey out of the besieged city was fatal for many of those that had managed to survive that far," he said.
This was because the departing students were given a large amount of food to sustain them on their journey.
"They gave us a full plate of porridge, fat, sugar, and a loaf of bread ... and it was criminal to give us so much," Kirshin said.
Quite naturally, most of undernourished young people couldn't help but eat all that food at once.
"I heard the champing in the train's compartments all night," he said. "They died almost instantly because the thin walls of their stomachs could not cope with such an enormous amount of food and simply burst."
Kirshin said 45 students were in his train car headed for the Caucasian resort town of Mineralniye Vody. Every morning the corpses of one or two students were taken away.
The teacher accompanying them tried to stop the children from overeating. He took their supplies to his compartment for the night, but when he fell asleep desperate teenagers reclaimed the food and gorged themselves again.
When they arrived in Mineralniye Vody local kind-hearted women stood in line to take the hungry children to their homes.
"The kindest Ukrainian woman literally dragged my friend and myself to her house," he said. "There we saw lard, pies and sour cream on the table."
Kirshin and his friend ate and ate. But the next morning they were almost dead and in a hospital.
"That woman kneeled down in front of us and fed us with a spoon," he said.
After the siege Kirshin's sight started to fail to the point that he almost couldn't see at all. Later he recovered, and started working as a journalist.
He spent 30 years working as a journalist after the war, eventually rising to become the first editor in chief at the city's television news program, Inform-TV.
"The siege is one of the main subjects of my journalistic activities," said Kirshin, who now runs a siege museum at St. Petersburg's School No. 210.
Vera Nikitina was 17 when the war started. She said nobody had expected that Leningrad would be surrounded.
"Just before the war my sister gave birth to a son," she said. "When they were leaving to go deep into the hinterland behind the front lines we gave them all our stored food. So, when the city was besieged we had no extra food left."
Nikitina served in the city's air-defense brigades.
"We went to the places where bombs fell, picked up the people who were wounded, brought them to hospitals and extinguished incendiary bombs," Nikitina said.
During the siege the family burned half of her wardrobe in their hand-made heating stove and made jelly out of joiner's glue.
Besides the horror of starving, the most difficult memory for her from those days was when in 1941 the Germans bombed a hospital, which caught fire.
"The doctors who survived were bringing the injured out, but the fire moved so quickly that there were only a few people who managed to escape it," Nikitina said.
Whole families died during the siege.
"My friend Katya lost all her family. Her father was killed at the front, and her mother and brother died of hunger," Nikitina said.
During the siege, most Leningraders did not lock their apartments from the inside because people had trust in each other.
They were afraid that at some point they would be so weak from hunger that they would not be able to open the door, she said.
"But for us young people, it seemed we were not afraid of anything," she said.
Even in the hardest days people still found the energy to go to theater performances, watching in their warm coats because the heating system was not working.
"We went to the Alexandrinsky and Comedy theaters and it gave us such a boost," she said, adding that Leningrad radio was another powerful means for lifting people's spirits.
Siege survivors still feel a special affection for radio, which is less popular among modern generations who have grown up with television.
A few years ago when St. Petersburg radio was transferred from the first channel to the third, it was a big blow for her generation, she said.
The first channel is the only one that old radios can play and it is that type of radio that most siege survivors have in their homes.
"If something alarming happens how will we get to know about it now?" she said.
TITLE: Oblast Sees Growth, Oil Terminals
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Leningrad Oblast economy grew steadily last year with the total amount of investments and average salaries up on 2002, Grigory Dvas, an Oblast vice governor said at an Interfax briefing Monday.
"If in 1996, when I just started working as a vice governor, we made an effort to attract investments to liquidate unemployment, now we have a different problem. Not only do we not have enough skilled workers, but there is a lack of [unskilled] workers," Dvas said.
About 9,000 people - 1.2 percent of the active working age population - are registered with the regional labor exchange, while there are 20,000 vacancies, he said.
"Now we are forced to develop special measures to attract workers from other regions of Russia and from abroad," Dvas said.
The region has also run out of areas equipped with sewage and other utility systems necessary to start new investment projects, such as plants for storage, production or assembly, Dvas said. For this reason, the Oblast government is looking into organizing 19 industrial zones in the Leningrad Oblast. Three of them will be located near Svetogorsk, Gatchina and Tosno, according to plans.
"Mainly [such] areas will be located along highways in the directions of Vyborg, Moscow, Murmansk and Tallinn, as well as along the Ring Road and in districts close to the administrative border with St. Petersburg," Dvas said.
Among new projects Dvas mentioned Oiltanking Deutschland GmbH, which together with TNK-VR company plans to build an oil terminal in at the Ust-Luga port to export Russian oil.
At the same time, the amount of oil exported through the Baltic Pipeline is expected to increase this year from 18 million to 30 million tons, he said. The Oblast government is also considering a new Rosneft project to build another oil terminal at the Primorsk port, which would be able to supply 10 million tons of oil annually.
Rostar, a Moscow-based packaging producer, will launch the first phase of its $75 million pant to make aluminum cans with a total capacity of 1.7 billion cans per year, Dvas said.
Industrial growth in the Leningrad Oblast was estimated at 20.9 percent in 2003, while in St. Petersburg this figure reached just 6 percent, according to statistics presented by the Oblast economics and investment committee Monday.
Total investment is estimated at 26.3 billion rubles ($922 million). The biggest foreign investments, which total about $204.5 million, came to the region from abroad, including $86.9 million from France and $50.5 million from the U.S.
"Development in agriculture slowed, although it looked fine before autumn. The weather, you know, changed. It started raining and then snowing, so there wasn't enough time to gather [all the] harvest," he said.
In the key dairy sector "five percent more milk was obtained [on average] from each cow milked," the economics and investment committee said.
The average salary in the Oblast grew by 10.8 percent in real terms influenced by inflation and is estimated at $214.50 per capita, while the real income of the population grew by 6.5 percent, the statistics say.
TITLE: Governor to Free Up Prime City Territory
AUTHOR: By Andrei Musatov, Ilya Khrennikov and Anatoly Tyomkin
PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: St. Petersburg developers are about to gain access to a prime piece of land in the city center if Governor Valentina Matviyenko gets her way.
Last week Matviyenko presided over a meeting of the government at which the issue of transferring the freight and customs functions of Moskovsky Station to the city's outskirts was discussed. As a result, a 270-hectare plot of land would be vacated. Part would be sold and part would be leased to investors, a source inside the city administration said.
The land in question is bordered by Ligovsky and Staronevsky prospekts, Obvodny Canal and Ploshchad Vosstaniya. It is currently home to Moskovsky Station, warehouses, residential buildings and industrial space. Some of the buildings are registered as architectural monuments.
City Hall has decided that Moskovsky Station will retain its passenger train functions. The warehouses and customs terminal that process about 2 million tons of goods per year will be moved outside of town, possibly to the Shushary station. Construction on the vacated land could start by the end of 2005, according to City Hall.
The source in the city administration, who requested that his name not be used, said part of the land belongs to the Russian Railways Co., or RZD. Part belongs to the city, and a thin strip - allocated 10 years ago for construction of a high-speed railway - belongs to the Property Ministry.
RZD officials are skeptical about Matviyenko's plan.
RZD spokesman Konstantin Pashkov put the cost of moving the freight handling facilities at "billions of rubles."
"But who will provide the funding?" he said. "It's good in theory. Freight shouldn't be handled in town," he said.
Pashkov noted that, four years ago, Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov proposed moving the capital's train stations to the ring road. Luzhkov's project never got off the ground.
The City Hall source said the project would be financed by the city and private investors but declined to discuss the issue of how much the move would cost.
Real estate experts say the land under the freight handling terminal is very attractive.
Alexei Grigoryev, general director of RMS-Otsenka, a real estate valuation company, said land around Moskovsky Station should fetch at least $500 per square meter.
Grigoryev said that, according to existing technical and ecological constraints, it would be possible to build hotels and business centers along the remaining tracks, and housing in the heart of the territory. But Grigoryev thinks investors could be scared away by limits on building height in the city center.
"The territory should be developed as a complex," said Igor Vodopyanov, manager of Struktura Peterburg development company. Vodopyanov said about $2 billion would be needed to develop the area while observing existing standards for density of construction. This amount does not include the cost of moving the customs terminal and warehouses, or of demolishing buildings and putting in new utilities, Vodopyanov said.
TITLE: IKEA Fights Threat of Closure
AUTHOR: By Denis Maternovsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The St. Petersburg IKEA outlet is to undergo an environmental audit to stave off closure by the Natural Resources Ministry, the Swedish furniture giant said Monday.
The store, which opened in December, failed to comply with ecological standards and could be closed as early as Tuesday, the Environmental Audit Chamber said last week.
"The problem has been resolved," said Peter Partma, IKEA's expansion manger for Russia.
The ministry could not be reached for comment Monday.
In mid-November, authorities tried to prevent the opening of the store because of a lack of documentation. They finally gave IKEA an extension until Jan. 15, which the retailer failed to meet.
"We were a little bit late with submitting the documents, but this will have no effect on our activities in Russia and our expansion plans," Partma said.
IKEA has hired a firm to conduct an environmental audit to comply with state regulations, Partma added.
IKEA's expansion plans include a total of five to six stores in Moscow, one or two more in St. Petersburg, as well as one in each of country's 11 remaining cities with a population of over one million.
Partma stressed that the problem in St. Petersburg was not "environmental," but "administrative."
"IKEA has really high environmental standards," he said. "They are probably even more strict than the state ones."
"Every developer in Russia is facing this sort of problem," Boris Yushenkov, general director of Colliers International's St. Petersburg office, said.
"These Soviet-era regulations are not flexible enough and they don't meet international standards," Yushenkov added.
TITLE: Yukos Leadership Looks At Shakhnovsky Case
AUTHOR: By Valeria Korchagina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The verdict in the criminal case against Vasily Shakhnovsky, a key Yukos shareholder charged with tax evasion and fraud, is to be delivered on Feb. 5, the judge ruled after hearing closing arguments Friday.
The verdict is likely to signal how the legal assault on the oil major and its main shareholders will develop.
Although Shakhnovsky voluntarily paid $1.8 million in funds that tax authorities claimed he failed to pay, he could not avoid the criminal charges of tax evasion and fraud.
A guilty verdict could mean a suspended sentence, imprisonment or exile to a remote province.
"The state cannot be too forgiving to persons that violate criminal law," prosecutor Dmitry Shokhin told the court Friday, according to Interfax.
"As for Shakhnovsky, he evaded paying the truly astronomical sum of $1 million in taxes," he said.
The $1.8 million the former head of Yukos-Moskva eventually paid included $1 million in unpaid taxes and $800,000 in penalties.
After the hearing Friday, Shakhnovsky broke his silence, held since the trial started in mid-January.
"I am charged with not paying $1 million in taxes. But recently I paid another $10 million in taxes and spent just as much on charitable causes," Shakhnovsky said, according to Kommersant.
"The consequences of this case are very important for the country in which we live.... I have not committed a single crime in my life.... And I expect a just trial," he said.
All other key Yukos shareholders - Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Platon Lebedev, Leonid Nevzlin, Vladimir Dubov and Mikhail Brudno - are facing charges related to tax evasion and fraud.
Former Yukos CEO Khodorkovsky and Lebedev have been kept in pretrial detention since their arrests last year, while the three others have been placed on wanted lists and are believed to be abroad.
Shakhnovsky has stayed in Moscow for the duration of the investigation on a pledge not to leave the city.
The legal assault on Yukos shareholders and managers has also been aimed at the oil major itself. The company has yet to fight off a Tax Ministry claim that the company failed to pay $3.4 billion in taxes in 2000.
As Shakhnovsky awaits the judge's verdict, Yukos suffered another blow on Friday, when a local court froze 50 percent of shares in its subsidiary Lenaneftegaz in the Sakha republic.
Lenaneftegaz has been the only remaining Yukos enterprise working in the potentially high-yield Talakan fields. Last year Yukos lost licenses to explore Talakan in favor of state-friendly oil major Surgutneftegaz.
Lenaneftegaz, however, still has millions of dollars worth of equipment there.
The arrest of the shares came just two days after Rafail Zainullin, chairman of the board of the Yukos subsidiary Kuibyshev refinery, was arrested on charges that the refinery evaded taxes.
TITLE: Companies Sending Spam Straight to Mobile Phones
AUTHOR: By Simon Ostrovsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Need a penis extension? Reach into your pants and pull out your mobile phone, as companies in Russia are offering to send spam straight to your cellphone.
E-mail offers for breast enlargements or mortgages don't surprise anyone anymore.
But few people are prepared for the flood of advertising that companies promise to send to cellphones via the Short Message System, or SMS.
A quick Internet search turns up dozens of web sites offering telephone spamming services. One such firm, Vzlyot Rakety, offers to send unsolicited messages to 1,000 cellphone subscribers for 3,000 to 6,000 rubles ($100 to $200), depending on which of the three major phone companies is targeted.
The price seems inordinately expensive when compared to the cost of spamming by e-mail, which costs 15,000 rubles for 1 million messages.
The price is justified because of the service's effectiveness, said Natalya, a Vzlyot Rakety sales manager who did not give her last name.
"You will see sales go up by 40 percent to 50 percent," she said. Higher sales are the only proof a customer has that the company provided the service.
Mobile companies are playing down the threat of spam filling up cellphone mailboxes. They say that the companies are probably conning businesses into believing they have provided a service of which there can be no proof of delivery.
"We haven't had any problems yet," said Marina Belysheva, a Megafon spokeswoman. "I think these people who have come out and said they can do this are tricksters."
Belysheva also said cellphone users have text recognition technology which allows them to filter out unwanted messages.
Over four years of mobile phone use, this reporter has received only one unwanted solicitation via SMS - last month.
It is difficult to measure how spammers may be bombarding unsuspecting cellphone users with text messages. But in principle the technology required to do so is easily obtainable.
All an SMS spammer needs is a computer, a cellphone, a $20 cable, free shareware from the Internet, and a database of mobile numbers available at the city's pirate CD markets.
The telephone is attached to the computer by cable, and the program instructs the phone to send a message to as many numbers as desired. For spammers, the cheapest option would be Megafon's O'Lite plan, under which sending one text message costs 1 cent.
TITLE: Russia Restores Gas Supplies To Belarus Pending Contract
AUTHOR: By Judith Ingram
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia restored full natural gas supplies to Belarus on Saturday, swiftly ending a cut-off that reflected growing tensions between the two countries, which have been sending mixed signals about their willingness to follow through with a planned merger.
Two Russian gas companies, Itera Holding and Trans Nafta, reduced gas shipments to Belarus starting midnight Friday because it had failed to pay for new deliveries.
The Belarussian government, which has paid the same, low price as Russian consumers, refused to pay more for the gas and resisted Russia's push for a control stake in its natural gas pipeline that carries Russian gas to Western markets.
A Belarussian delegation traveled to Moscow on Friday, and the two countries' presidents, Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko, spoke on the telephone late Friday to resolve the dispute.
A spokesman for Itera, Viktor Cheryomukhin, said Saturday that the gas companies had fully restored supplies to Belarus and that they would be continued until Thursday. To receive gas shipments after that, Belarus will have to sign a contract for gas at a higher price Russia charges on the world market, he said.
He denied that the companies had come under political pressure to resume supplies.
The gas dispute reflects simmering tensions between Russia and Belarus, which have signed a 1996 union treaty but failed to reach significant progress on its goal of creating a single state.
Lukashenko, an authoritarian leader and admirer of the Soviet Union, who signed the union treaty in 1996 with then-President Boris Yeltsin, has rejected Putin's scenario of integration under which Belarus would essentially be absorbed by Russia. Moscow, for its part, no longer wants to continue subsidizing the Belarussian economy.
Putin and Lukashenko have vowed to push ahead with plans to establish the Russian ruble as their single currency by Jan. 1, 2005.
TITLE: Haiku Gives Birth to Fashion Brand
AUTHOR: By Alina Ledovaya
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Hidden in the backyards of Ulitsa Bolshaya Morskaya, just a block away from Nevsky Prospekt, is a fashion design studio called Ulita. An atmosphere of mystery and warmth draws the odd passerby. Inside, a stylish, attractive and very friendly woman greets visitors and ushers them into a mysterious showroom decorated with hieroglyphic signs. The hostess is Olga Ostanina, general director and ideological leader of Ulita Fashion House, a company that designs and produces women's clothing and accessories.
The 40-year-old Ostanina is a successful businesswoman who took on - and mastered - the difficulties of opening a business in Russia without worrying about the risks ahead.
As one of two sisters raised by a single parent, Ostanina always felt the need to work and help her family. When she was 13 years old she started to sew dresses, but at that time she never thought that dress designing would become her profession. It was in the hairdresser's on Staronevsky Prospekt at which Olga worked as a cleaner that she was first exposed to the world of fashion. In the 1980s, hairdresser's shops were fashion centers where people brought different style magazines and discussed the latest fashion trends. "It was there I first saw the importance of good service," Ostanina said. "And I learned to work with clients, without thinking that I would one day need these skills."
Ostanina went on to start her career, earning several degrees. She graduated from St. Petersburg State University with a degree in philology, then studied at the Patent Institute. In 1999, she participated in a program for entrepreneurs at the Stockholm School of Economics.
When she first started her own business in 1990, Ostanina was very optimistic, full of ideas and energy. With the help of artist Galina Zmanovskaya she decided to organize a small dressmaker's and to work with individual clients. Ostanina ignored her friends' advice and started designing unique, artistic collections, instead of making mainstream clothes and earning money by sticking famous labels on them.
Ulita organized fashion shows, which were financially unsuccessful. Ostanina looked for dressmakers and worked with individual clients. "Now I understand that it was absolutely wrong, that we needed startup capital to buy equipment and hire dressmakers, but on the other hand, by designing artistic collections we attracted some of our most faithful clients," she says.
The first Ulita office was situated outside the city center, in the neighborhood of Avtovo. Yet the clients came, undaunted by the distance.
The name Ulita appeared in the very beginning. Chosen by chance, it now symbolizes feminine mystique. Ulita is an old Russian women's name, but it also recalls the word ulitka, the word for a snail, the slowest moving insect. Ostanina recalls the words of a Japanese poet "Slowly a snail is crawling up the slope of mount Fuji toward its top." This resembles the company's motto: slowly and gradually it is growing and spreading around the city, developing new projects and attracting new clients.
But what is more important than the name is the trademark. After graduating from the Patent University, Ostanina worked in the library of the Patent Department, where she realized the importance of brands. In the early 1990s, few people recognized the power of the trademark, but Ostanina understood its significance in the world and, together with an artist, designed the logotype that would illustrate the Ulita brand.
"The first money that allowed us to develop our business came not from designing clothes, but from making Russian flags for the whole city," Ostanina said. "It was the beginning of the 1990s when the new Russian flag was introduced. We took the order, researched flag material and earned money for new equipment and rent for a new office," she said.
One of the high points in Ostanina's career was her internship in the United States in 1994, when she got her first glimpse of the huge clothing market, fashionable showrooms, boutiques and vast amount of clothing that sooner or later would make its way to Russia.
"This trip was very useful for me. I wasn't scared of the competition ahead. Everything I saw stimulated me and I had a desire to do everything better," Ostanina said.
At the end of her internship Ostanina drafted a business plan that helped her get her first loan from a European Bank in 1995.
Ulita works mostly with individual clients: women of different ages and occupations. Some of them are involved in business, while others have fulfilled themselves as housewives. "They are all interesting personalities who lead active and full lives," Ostanina added.
Foreign women - mostly from Great Britain, the United States and Finland - are also among the clientele. Ulita is well known among members of the International Women's Club. They also have corporate clients, such as the Radisson SAS hotel, the Neptun hotel and others.
Ostanina feels it is very important to introduce new projects to keep clients interested. This was how the idea of the combination salon-studio was born to host regular fashion "shows." The month-long exhibits feature the work of young and creative artists, who thus receive the opportunity to express themselves and attract the attention of Ulita clients. Another project is the Labyrinth of Style dressmaker's club initiated three years ago by clients.
Apart from her professional activity, Ostanina spends time with her husband and daughter. She also has different hobbies. Recently she took an interest in Argentinian tango and is a member of the Tango-Argentino Club.
"Now most of the difficulties are in the past," Ostanina said. "Big plans are ahead, such as opening a shop in the spring and franchising the business in big Russian cities (except Moscow)," she said.
Natalya Mozheiko, director of Flowers on the Fontanka, became a client of Ulita when the fashion house was just beginning. "What I like about the work of Ulita is their individual approach to clients. I also like the quality and style of their clothing," she said. Having known Olga Ostanina for a long time, Mozheiko says that "she is a very sociable, active and outgoing person, she is our motorchik."
TITLE: Investment Growth Awaited
AUTHOR: By Angelina Davydova
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Investment demand was the main internal economic driver in 2003, key economic indicators published Monday by the State Statistics Committee showed. Fixed investment expanded by 14.5 percent in December. This represents a 12.5 percent gain for the full year.
A United Financial Group market report released Monday stated that company analysts view "the speeding up of investment growth in December as further confirmation of our robust outlook for 2004. Investment growth is being additionally boosted by falling local interest rates, the appreciation of the ruble and visible net private capital inflows into the country given the reduced tax burden."
UFG also stated that the significant increase in personal income during the four quarters of 2003 will stimulate consumer demand in the first quarter of 2004.
The unemployment rate has increased and reached 8.9 percent, which is the highest rate since February 2003. Although analysts still believe that workers released from industry can find employment in the service sector, December was the fifth consecutive month that unemployment rose. This is a cause for concern, UFG experts say.
On the foreign currency front, the ruble continued growing last week, rising against the dollar to its highest level in three years as oil export revenue and foreign investment increase. According to Bloomberg, foreign investment almost doubled to $20.9 billion in the first nine months of last year.
"The Central Bank may change its policy of trying to slow the ruble's rise and let it extend last year's 8.5 percent gain against the dollar in an effort to slow annual inflation to 10 percent from 12 percent by the end of 2004," the agency's analysts say.
The ruble rose to 28.50 against the dollar on Friday, up from 28.65 on Thursday. The currency is at its highest since February 2001. Still on Monday, the ruble fell slightly to 28.55 against the dollar.
Aton analysts predict the nominal ruble rate will strengthen by 6.3 percent this year, reaching 27.70 rubles per dollar by the end of the year on the back of a healthy external balance, a budget surplus and high transaction demands for rubles. "That would compare with a strengthening of 7.9 percent in 2003," an Aton report said. "The expected appreciation of the ruble is negative for exporters' profit margins but positive for ruble bonds," the report concluded.
On the stocks front, last week witnessed an agreement between the London Stock Exchange and the RTS Stock Exchange on Friday to work more closely and make it easier to swap information on firms listed on the two bourses, Reuters reported.
The two exchanges signed a memorandum of understanding to swap information in areas such as advising each other about cross-listed securities' suspension from trading, the reasons behind any suspension, and of significant price movements.
By Monday the benchmark RTS has risen for four days in a row, after finally breaking the 600 barrier. Troika Dialog analysts in a market report said that they do not see it as the limit and they expect it to rise further, albeit at a somewhat slower pace. "The marker is desperately looking round for new ideas and investors simply switching from out-performers to laggards. This was clearly the game plan on Friday, to the benefit above all of Tatneft, up 9.5 percent during the day on MICEX and even higher going into the overnight session in New York."
Gazprom should also benefit, Troika Dialog analysts say. "It has been struggling upward for the past 14 trading days on far above average turnover. As a consequence, it is now one of the market's most distinct underperformers. Again, the big seller holding it back seems now to be through, suggesting a faster rise ahead. Meanwhile, UES is a good relative play and a name that could outperform the market this week."
By and large, the market has now set its sights on 650 and should not see any major correction before then. VimpelCom and MTS were quite strong overnight in New York, up 2.7 and 2.8 percent - a reflection of the general mood towards the Russian market on the part of U.S. investors, a Troika Dialog report said.
TITLE: Secure Property Rights Nurture Democracy
AUTHOR: By Anders Aslund
TEXT: In a seminal 1995 paper, Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner demonstrated that the more a country is dependent on the export of natural resources, the lower its economic growth - by examining the performance of a large number of countries between 1970 and 1990. The obvious conclusion was that a large resource endowment leads to poor economic policies and the so-called Dutch disease, when abundant resource exports boost the exchange rate excessively, rendering other industries uncompetitive.
The thesis that natural resources are a curse has become an axiom in the current Russian economic debate, but is it really true? The statistical evidence supporting it is overwhelming. OPEC members dominated world oil exports between 1970 and 1990, and their domestic economic policies were miserable, leading to low economic growth. Another common view is that rents from natural resources promote authoritarian rule. Correlation, however, is not the same as causality.
Barry Eichengreen, the Berkeley economic historian, has argued that America's economic history teaches the opposite. The abundance of natural resources in the United States is seen as a factor promoting both free-market economic policies and democracy. The American frontier mentality, predicated on free resources, generated a society of free individuals (even holding social democracy at bay).
Some of the foremost industrialized countries of our time such as Australia, Canada, Sweden, Finland and the United States based their economic development on the export of resources. There is no fundamental difference between resources such as gold, other metals, lumber and oil. The real question is why some resource-rich countries have pursued good policies and become rich, while others have stayed poor.
The U.S. example is the most illustrative history of economic success in a resource-rich country. First, immediately after their discovery, natural resources became private property. Second, private property rights, once established, were treated as sacrosanct. Third, no monopolies were tolerated (in the famous standoff between John D. Rockefeller and President Theodore Roosevelt, the tycoon was forced to sell off parts of Standard Oil, but he was fully compensated). Fourth, prices and wages were kept free and could fall just as easily as they rose.
The contrast with OPEC countries could not be greater. Between the early 1950s and 1970, the OPEC members nationalized their oil companies, and virtually all of them have state-owned monopolies running their oil sectors. It is well known that state monopolies with their bureaucratic culture kill entrepreneurship. Not surprisingly, most OPEC countries have developed heavily regulated economic systems with little ability to adjust by reducing wages or social transfers when oil prices fall.
It does not have to be so. The Anglo-American countries (the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia) stick to their free and private enterprise model, and they seem to thrive where others fail.
In recent years, one country followed in their footsteps: Russia. Two major oil companies, namely Surgut and LUKoil, were privatized by their management. Later, three major state oil companies that had been utter disasters - Yukos, Sibneft and Sidanco - were sold to outsiders. Yukos and Sibneft became the greatest success stories of Russian oil, while Sidanco was taken over by TNK, which was privatized in a decently honest auction. Only Rosneft is left as a relatively large - and characteristically mismanaged - state-owned oil company.
By 1999, Russia had acquired an almost ideal industrial structure with a handful of big private oil companies, which naturally became competitive. Oil production has risen by about 10 percent per year as the companies have improved in all conceivable ways, ranging from transparency and auditing to management and production. The revival of Russian oil has been the most positive news in the global oil industry since North Sea oil came on stream.
But what is happening to these achievements now? Yukos is being slaughtered by the authorities for purely political reasons, while Sibneft appears to be up for sale.
Many argue that private ownership has a much more solid foundation in Europe and America than in Russia, but property rights in the West were not formed in a more ethical fashion, only slightly earlier. The essence of successful capitalism is to accept existing property rights and declare them sacrosanct - no matter how they arose in the first place. There is nothing moral about historical property rights, but a society that accepts them tends to generate more economic growth and nurture democracy better than societies that persistently question their inheritance.
Few would contend that a new round of confiscations in Russia will lead to a more equitable distribution of property. If President Vladimir Putin is to attain his goal of doubling Russia's GDP in 10 years, he needs sound economic policy, which can only be built on secure property rights.
Anders Aslund is director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Russian and Eurasian program, and author of "Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc." He contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: Taxing Resources Should Be First Step in Social Strategy
AUTHOR: By Jacques Sapir
TEXT: The issue of taxing natural resources has been raised more and more often since world oil and gas prices rocketed, and Sergei Glazyev's contribution to this debate in The St. Petersburg Times last week is very much to the point - even though his article also addresses other important issues, such as trade tariffs and excise tax on alcohol.
Glazyev is correct when he writes that most Western countries have some kind of tax on natural resources. He is also right when he writes that raw material "rents" are not to be confused with profit - a point rammed home by David Ricardo, one of the founders of political economy, nearly two centuries ago. Glazyev's position is not that of a populist or demagogue and certainly should stimulate serious debate rather than the kind of insults we heard during the State Duma election campaign in December.
However, I think that certain problems have been left untouched in his article and would like to focus on some of them here.
First of all, what is the main objective of this tax: to raise more budget revenues, to foster a more efficient use of natural resources, or a combination of the two?
If we are talking about natural resources like oil, gas or metals, then it would be natural enough to focus on the budget revenue issue. However, if we are talking about water, fisheries or the timber industry, then sustainable use of these resources should be the primary focus.
Even when it comes to oil, taxation could also be used as an incentive to encourage private companies to use oil fields more efficiently, and to discourage them from relying on tricks like injecting water into a field to boost production.
I think that Glazyev would have considerably strengthened his position if he had made clear that efficiency and sustainability are also an objective of taxation - even if sustainable use of natural resources cannot be achieved through the tax regime alone.
The second point concerns how one goes about implementing such taxes. Quite clearly, you cannot tax water, fisheries and oil in exactly the same way. Even if we focus solely on oil, should tax be levied at the production level or the export level?
Actually, I would personally favor a two-tier system with an export tax "eating" the difference between normal production costs (plus profit, of course) and world prices; and a production tax focusing on the better use of existing equipment and oil fields.
How can the government set these taxes without having a good understanding of how the oil industry works?
This is a classic asymmetrical information issue, like the principal-agent problem. Benchmarking is frequently not effective enough. My personal opinion is that the state should retain at least one oil company in its ownership - if only to be sure of getting the relevant information for setting taxes correctly.
However, control of capital and financial flows will have to be pretty tight to ensure effective implementation of the export tax. Private companies will try to evade part of the tax burden by overvaluing their financial commitments abroad or playing games with contract prices. Monitoring the real financial position of these companies and how financial flows relate to actual transactions is thus of the utmost importance. This raises the issue of what would be most efficient: external control of private companies through taxes and regulations, or internal controls through direct state ownership.
This is an issue that should not be left to ideologues. All things being equal, I would prefer external control, implemented through a combination of taxes and regulations. However, external control will be efficient if, and only if, there are tools and means for such control. If not, state ownership could be a solution - at least a temporary one.
The third point is how to deal with overvaluation of the exchange rate if one succeeds in taxing exports. If successfully implemented, such a system would mean a massive influx of foreign currency into the Russian economy. In the context of an unregulated exchange market, this would lead to the ruble becoming overvalued quite quickly. Again, my personal view is that effective taxation of raw materials exports is not compatible with the current exchange market system.
Fourth, what should be done with the new tax bonanza? Glazyev is right to highlight pensions, stipends for students and allowances for the military. I would also add raising civil servants' salaries, if only to fight corruption by giving them the opportunity to make a decent wage.
However, when one looks at the state of Russia's public infrastructure, it is clear that the transportation, health and education sectors are urgently in need of funds. A trade-off must be engineered, and it will not be an easy task. For decision-makers, it will require clear heads and stout hearts. However, it should be understood that this trade-off could well become the starting point of a new social pact giving the Russian social and economic system the very legitimacy that is currently sorely lacking. How raw material "rents" are captured and reinvested in the economy and society will determine Russia's development for the foreseeable future.
We all have to thank Glazyev for making his contribution to the debate clear and to the point. I agree with his arguments to a considerable extent, but I would still have liked to read more about the implications of taxing natural resources.
Glazyev's Rodina bloc got nearly 10 percent of the vote in the Duma elections. This obviously gives him certain rights to push and promote his long-advocated ideas, but the very electoral success Rodina enjoyed also means that it takes on new responsibilities.
Just advocating taxation of natural resources is not enough. It is a first step, but needs to be followed by a comprehensive economic and social strategy for Russia.
Jacques Sapir, professor of economics at the Post-Graduate School of Social Sciences in Paris, contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: Can Russia Be a Great Power?
AUTHOR: By Mark N. Katz
TEXT: Despite all of Russia's current problems, many Russian officials and commentators express enormous confidence that their country will once again be a great power. Bolstering this confidence is the observation that since the country has previously been able to survive periods of extreme weakness and (like the proverbial phoenix) risen from the ashes to become stronger than before, it can - and will - do so again now. But there is strong reason to doubt the country's ability to pull this feat off.
Three of the most striking occasions when the country appeared to be on the verge of collapse, but then went on to reassert itself as a great power, occurred during the Napoleonic Wars, World War I and World War II. In each of these cases, Russia benefited from the facts that the principal opponent (France in the first case, Germany in the second two) had overextended itself, and that there were many other nations working to defeat it.
Many Russians who see the United States as Moscow's principal opponent now draw an analogy between these previous events and the present. While Russia was greatly weakened by the collapse both of communism and the Soviet Union, the United States is now overextending itself in Afghanistan and Iraq. Further, Russians see that many other countries are working to end "American hegemony."
This analogy, however, is a false one. To begin with, it is not at all clear that the United States is overextending itself. The Bush administration's military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq are hardly the equivalent to Napoleon's, Kaiser Wilhelm's and Hitler's attempts to conquer all of Europe and more.
But even if the United States is overextending itself and ends up withdrawing from Afghanistan and Iraq as well as retreating from the role of sole superpower, it is not at all clear that this will benefit Russia. Russia's previous transformations from near-collapse to resurrection as a great power were greatly facilitated by its neighbors in Europe, the Muslim world and China all simultaneously being weak as a result of war or some other factor.
This is certainly not the case now. Europe is strong and united. China is also strong, and getting stronger. And while the Muslim world may not be strong, it is certainly reasserting itself. Even if U.S. power does decline, opportunities for Russia to assert its influence in Europe, China or even the Muslim world simply will not be present, as they were in the past.
Many Russians, though, are focused on reasserting Moscow's influence in the non-Russian republics of the former U.S.S.R. They bitterly resent the unprecedented U.S. military presence in the Caucasus and Central Asia. An American withdrawal from these regions, however, would not benefit Russia. Moscow's failure to defeat the Chechen rebels after many years of trying suggests that it would also be unable to contain resurgent Islamic fundamentalism in the Caucasus and Central Asia by itself. Indeed, it is not clear that this could be done even with a U.S. presence there.
Similarly, Russia by itself could hardly hope to contain growing Chinese power in the Far East. And given the likely continuation of European distaste for intervention or confrontation, it is doubtful that Russia can count on its new allies there for much support vis-a-vis a resurgent China, the Muslim threat from the south or both.
Instead of resulting in Russia once again becoming a great power, a decline in American willingness or ability to act as a superpower will only result in Russia becoming even weaker.
For if the United States can't or won't help Russia against the most likely threats Moscow faces, it is doubtful that Europe or anybody else will be willing or able to do so, either. The choice Russia now faces is either to be a junior partner of the United States, or a weak, isolated power facing threats it cannot deal with on its own. The Russian phoenix won't rise again this time.
Mark N. Katz, a professor of government and politics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times.
TITLE: Siege Victims Deserve Open, Caring Society
TEXT: "One death is a tragedy," said Josef Stalin, one of last century's greatest tyrants. "A million deaths is a statistic."
Recognizing the suffering of the about 1 million civilians who died in the Siege of Leningrad is about much more than statistics.
They were victims of the criminal policy of Stalin's arch-rival in tyranny, Hitler.
The Nazis are often condemned for their use of modern, "industrial" methods of mass murder, specifically for the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
But surrounding Leningrad and cutting off its lines of communication for nearly 900 days and starving its population was medieval.
One of the worst crimes in the bloody 20th century, the 880 days it lasted made it the longest siege endured by a modern city.
Hitler's blitzkrieg tactics that had already brought him most of continental Europe failed in the vast expanses of Russia and his troops dug in for a long and gruelling struggle. They occupied and vandalized the city's outer suburbs and placed an "iron ring" around the city.
The only thing modern about the torment of the trapped and freezing civilians that the Germans added was the high explosive and incendiary materials they dropped or shot into the city.
Other large cities were also devastated by the Nazi war machine. Warsaw received particularly bad treatment and many large Soviet cities were captured by the Germans. Word of their maltreatment of civilians, captured soldiers and their executions of Jews and political officers spread quickly.
The response in Leningrad was not capitulation and resignation but a firm resolve to resist the invaders. Desperate to save face after allowing the Germans to get this far, the brutal secret police and Communist party - that had already purged the city several times in the 1930s and would again after the war - succeeded in rousing the public's spirit.
But in the face of all this horror, the city's cultural and scientific elite either spirited their treasures away or remained to guard them, often at the cost of their own lives.
There is human triumph in the siege, but there are other sides to it that barely get a mention in commemorations - the crimes of desperate and starving people and cannibalism that are little discussed, although they are well documented in studies on the siege published outside Russia. They do not appear in school textbooks.
If Russia wants to move into the future, it must open its eyes to the full truth about the past. Transparency and openness can contribute to a society that is just the opposite of the totalitarian German state that imposed the siege.
Creating such a society might be one of the best ways of honoring those who died in the siege.
TITLE: The Folly of Fingerprinting
TEXT: A 5-year-old child, a Chinese babushka, a Welsh insurance agent, a prominent scientist and two average Joes. Six cases of mistaken identity - six grounded flights between Paris and Los Angeles.
Most of us are in favor of the authorities erring on the side of caution when it comes to keeping airlines from being hijacked. So there was little complaint raised about the Bush administration grounding flights during the Christmas holidays.
But most of us are also in favor of competence. And it's starting to seem in ever-shorter supply when it comes to preventing terror attacks.
For example, The Toronto Sun, citing Canadian-U.S. documentation, reports the U.S. federal government has "a master list of five million people worldwide thought to be potential terrorists or criminals." Five million people! Exactly how is this list being assembled? No wonder they're calling in the SWAT teams over 5-year-olds and Welsh insurance agents.
That's the depressing background to the new U.S. policy of fingerprinting every Russian, Ukrainian, Estonian, etc., upon arrival: It won't work. So if you find it insulting, but have been consoling yourself that at least it might save lives and stop murders, you and the White House have one thing in common: You're both kidding yourselves.
If we had been collecting millions of fingerprints and photos before Sept. 11, 2001, would that attack have been foiled? Of course not. We already had all sorts of specific and relevant information about the Sept. 11 hijackers; we had the raw data at our fingertips; we just didn't analyze it well.
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, in making this very point, recently listed everything we knew yet ignored about the Sept. 11 hijackers:
n In late August 2001, Nawaq Alhamzi and Khalid Al-Midhar bought tickets to fly on American Airlines flight 77, which was flown into the Pentagon. They bought the tickets under their real names - names that were also on a State Department/INS watch list (spelled correctly, and not at all Welsh-sounding).
n The CIA and FBI were looking for Alhamzi and Al-Midhar as suspected terrorists, in part because they had been observed at a "terrorist meeting" in Malaysia. The whole time, they were in San Diego - where they'd rented an apartment under their own names and were listed in the phone book.
n Using the Internet to search for common addresses, analysts would have discovered that other hijackers shared an address with Alhamzi and Al-Midhar - including Mohamed Atta (who was on American Airlines flight 11, which flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center) and Marwan Al-Shehhi (on United flight 175, which crashed into the South Tower).
n Similar searches of common addresses, phone numbers and even, believe it or not, frequent flier numbers - coupled with an INS watch list of expired visas - would have led to all of the other hijackers, including those who boarded United flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania.
"Not to put too fine a point on it, but what is needed is better and more timely analysis," Gore observed. "Simply piling up more raw data that is almost entirely irrelevant is not only not going to help. It may actually hurt the cause. As one FBI agent said privately of [Attorney General John] Ashcroft: 'We're looking for a needle in a haystack here, and he is just piling on more hay.'"
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: Royal Flush
TEXT: Out of the blood and murk of Iraq, yet another sinister connection is emerging, a skein of corruption tying Dick Cheney's Halliburton, the Bush Family fortunes - and a mysterious Kuwaiti company that peddles material for building weapons of mass destruction.
This month, Pentagon auditors called for a formal investigation of "overcharges" by Cheney's Halliburton hirelings. The well-connected corporation - which has been the chief beneficiary of the Bush Regime's looting of the American treasury to pay for its ravaging of Iraq - is accused of skimming $61 million in excess cream from a shady deal to import Kuwaiti gasoline into the conquered land.
To carry out this choice bit of war profiteering, Halliburton hooked up with Altanmia Marketing of Kuwait. Altanmia was given exclusive rights to ship Kuwaiti gasoline to Iraq - "even though it had no prior experience transporting fuel," U.S. Congressional investigators report. So what is the firm's actual expertise? Investments, real estate - and acting as "representative agents for companies trading in military and nuclear, biological and chemical equipment," the Wall Street Journal reports.
In other words, Halliburton's new partner traffics in the essential elements of WMD - the very stuff whose spread and sale the United States is ostensibly dedicated to stopping around the world. Ostensibly. But as always with the Bushists, the rhetoric of "security" is a thin rag to cover their unquenchable thirst for state-supported brigandage.
After grabbing the gasoline subcontract - before the bidding process was closed, naturally - Altanmia proceeded to charge Halliburton more than twice the price that other exporters were getting for moving gasoline into Iraq. Luckily, the White House has given Halliburton a "cost-plus" contract to lord it over Iraq's energy sector. Thus, the higher Altanmia's costs, the more "plus" Halliburton gets for its coffers - and all of it paid for by those eternal suckers, the American people. It's crony capitalism at its finest: the suckers shoulder the financial risk, the American military serves as company muscle; all Halliburton has to do is sit back and rake in the dough - minus a few campaign contributions and "retirement packages" for their political operatives, of course.
Strangely enough, Kuwaiti energy officials had never heard of Altanmia before the Halliburton deal. They had recommended several experienced distributors - with far cheaper rates - to the Americans, but were told that Altanmia was the only choice, the Wall Street Journal reports. Stout yeomen down in the military contracting ranks, under the mistaken impression that they were supposed to broker an honest deal, complained of heavy pressure from American and Kuwaiti government officials to keep Altanmia on the gravy train, Congress reports. One stalwart, contracting officer Mary Robertson, tried to stem the tide, declaring in a letter to Halliburton, "I will not succumb to the political pressures ... to go against my integrity and pay a higher price for fuel than necessary."
But integrity to a Bushist is like garlic to a vampire. Robertson was ignored. Indeed, even as the overcharging scandal was breaking last month, Richard Jones, Bush's ambassador to Kuwait (and deputy to Baghdad viceroy Paul Bremer) implored Halliburton and its military overseers to make a deal with Altanmia for even more gasoline imports - even if the company refuses to lower its extortionate rates, the WSJ reports.
So who are these guys at Altanmia, meriting such special favor? That's the $61 million question. The official owners are members of powerful Kuwaiti business clans, but Congressional investigators are now probing "multiple allegations" that Kuwait's royal family - the Al-Sabahs - has "off-the-books" connections to the firm.
It would be unusual indeed if they didn't. Like the House of Saud, the Kuwaiti royals are normally cut in for a taste of any heavy action going down in their domains. The House of Bush has similar aspirations, of course - they too have long regarded their own country as a private fiefdom to milk for their personal enrichment. Thus it was a marriage of true minds when George Bush I first hooked up with the Al-Sabahs in the 1960s, in a business venture to exploit Kuwait's offshore oil reserves.
That long and profitable association paid off handsomely in 1991, when Bush, like any good feudal lord, sent his private army - the U.S. military - to fight for his royal Kuwaiti brethren in their dispute with Iraq over war debts and oil rights. Tens of thousands of people perished in that intramural squabble between Bush's Kuwaiti business partners and Bush's wayward protege, Saddam (whom Bush had favored with weapons, money, trade concessions and - shades of Altanmia! - "dual-use" nuclear, biological and chemical equipment, including anthrax, as the U.S. Senate reported in 1994). Perhaps a million more people died in the squabble's bloody aftermath: first in Saddam's murderous crackdown on Kurdish and Shiite rebels - abetted by Bush, who ordered his vast army in the region not to interfere with the slaughter - then from the vicious UN sanctions regime - likened to genocide by not one but two of its top administrators.
But so what? The important thing is that Bush investments were protected and the groundwork laid for more lucrative adventures in the years to come - like the sweet skim job with Altanmia, and the hundreds of other hugger-mugger deals now pouring through the sleazepipe from Crawford to Baghdad.
Oh, and that Pentagon "investigation" of Halliburton overcharges? Forget it. Two days after the probe request, Bush gave Cheney's boys a new $1.2 billion contract for yet more Iraqi oil "reconstruction."
Remember, always, when dealing with the Bushes: Follow the money, not the mouthing.
For annotational references, see the Opinion section at www.sptimes.com
TITLE: High Expectations as Saakashvili Inaugurated
AUTHOR: By Steve Gutterman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: TBILISI, Georgia - Mikheil Saakashvili, a fiery 36-year-old U.S.-educated lawyer and anti-corruption crusader, was inaugurated Sunday as Georgia's new president, taking the helm amid high hopes that he can bring prosperity to the country.
Saakashvili, his hand on Georgia's constitution, took the presidential oath in front of the parliament building where two months ago he led protesters who evicted longtime former President Eduard Shevardnadze.
The parliament on Sunday was hung with four huge white and red medieval banners used by Saakashvili's opposition movement. After being sworn in, Saakashvili signed an act making the red-on-white, five-cross banner Georgia's new flag.
"We must create the Georgia that our ancestors dreamed of, the Georgia that we dream of," Saakashvili told a crowd of thousands, some waving tiny versions of the new flag, some holding flowers symbolizing the November "rose revolution" against Shevardnadze.
Saakashvili raised the European Union flag opposite the new Georgian flag on the parliament steps, signaling his desire for integration with the West.
"Our place is in European civilization," he said. "This, too, is the Georgian flag."
Saakashvili also said Georgia needs a strong army, and after his inaugural speech he saluted as camouflage-clad servicemen paraded past, chins jutting. A handful of helicopters buzzed over Tbilisi's main avenue, followed by two pairs of fighter jets that screamed overhead as police rode through on horseback.
Saakashvili plunged into the crowd after the ceremony, shaking hands and walking up the avenue to intermittent cheers.
"We have very high hopes for the future, he will get things done very fast," said Mzia Bekauri, 40, who said she had quit her teaching job under Shevardnadze because she was earning 16 lari ($8) a month.
Saakashvili said that one of the new leadership's key tasks is to "uproot corruption" that has kept the economy mired in its post-Soviet morass.
He said the most important challenge is to bring unity to Georgia, where two provinces, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, have won de facto independence in bloody wars in the early 1990s. Pushing his unification efforts, Saakashvili began the day by flying to the autonomous Black Sea region of Adzharia in a bid to ease tensions between its leaders and the central government.
Adzharia hosts one of two Russian military bases that remain in Georgia, a major irritant in their relations. Moscow has dragged its feet on their promised pullout, saying it will take at least 10 years.
Russia and the United States are wary of each other's activities in Georgia, where U.S. military instructors have been deployed. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov attended the inauguration. Saakashvili repeated his vow to improve relations with Russia, which dominated Georgia for more than 200 years and still holds powerful levers of control, including most of its energy supplies.
"Today I am offering a hand of friendship to Russia," he said.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Genocide Conference
STOCKHOLM (AFP) - Security was tight in the Swedish capital Stockholm as UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and 10 heads of state or government joined other delegates from some 60 countries for a conference on ways to prevent genocide, ethnic cleansing and mass killings.
Among the delegates at the three-day "Preventing Genocide" conference, opening Monday, were representatives from nations with experience of mass killings, including Armenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda.
"After World War II, everybody said: 'never again', and yet genocide happened," Annan said after a meeting with the conference's host, Swedish Prime Minister Goeran Persson. "We will try to find ways to nip the problem in the bud," he added.
Persson is the only western European leader attending the genocide conference, the fourth and final one in a "Stockholm International Forum" series initiated by Persson in 2000.
U.S. Search for 2 Pilots
TIKRIT, Iraq (AP) - A U.S. helicopter crashed in the Tigris river while searching for a missing soldier on Sunday, and the aircraft's two crew members were missing, the military said.
It did not say what caused the crash of the OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopter, attached to the 101st Airborne Division.
The helicopter was searching for a soldier missing when the boat he was in capsized earlier Sunday while on patrol.
Newton Remembered
BERLIN (Reuters) - A Berlin museum to showcase the work of Helmut Newton will open in June despite the photographer's death in a car crash on Friday, the foundation in charge of the project said Saturday.
"The planned opening, which Helmut Newton had looked forward to with great joy, will be a day of remembrance for one of the most important photographers of our time," the Prussian Culture Foundation, which oversees Berlin museums, said in a statement.
Newton, whose stark, often sadomasochistic portraits of nude women in chains and bonds won him acclaim and revulsion, was killed in a car accident in Hollywood on Friday, police said.
Newton donated 1,000 works to his native city last October despite being forced to flee Nazi Germany because of his Jewish ancestry. "When I left in 1938, I never missed Germany, but I missed Berlin a lot," he said at the time.
Aged Robber Jailed
LUBBOCK, Texas (Reuters) - The oldest bank robber in the United States, 92-year-old J.L. Hunter Rountree, was sentenced to over 12 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to robbing $1,999 from a Texas bank last August.
Rountree, who goes by the nickname "Red," said he robbed his first bank when he was about 80 because he wanted revenge against banks for sending him into a financial crisis.
Rountree was sentenced on Friday to 151 months in a federal prison, which he will serve at the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas.
He appeared in court in a loose-fitting prison outfit and shackles on his ankles. He had a cane to help him walk. Rountree listened to the proceedings through headphones because he is hard of hearing.
Rountree left a prison in Florida, where he was the oldest prisoner in the state, about a year and a half ago after serving a three-year sentence imposed on him for a 1999 bank robbery in Pensacola.
TITLE: U.S. Inspector Says Intelligence Misled
AUTHOR: By Scott Lindlaw
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - The outgoing chief U.S. weapons inspector says his inability to find illicit arms in Iraq raises serious questions about American intelligence-gathering.
Last year, David Kay had confidently predicted weapons would be found. But after nine months of searching, he said Sunday: "I don't think they exist."
"It's an issue of the capabilities of one's intelligence service to collect valid, truthful information," Kay said on National Public Radio.
Asked whether President Bush owed the nation an explanation for the discrepancies between his warnings and Kay's findings, Kay said: "I actually think the intelligence community owes the president, rather than the president owing the American people."
The CIA would not comment on Kay's remarks, though one official, speaking on condition of anonymity, noted that Kay himself was vocal in predicting he would find weapons.
Kay said his predictions were not "coming back to haunt me in the sense that I am embarrassed. They are coming back to haunt me in the sense of `Why could we all be so wrong?'"
The White House stuck by its assertions that illicit weapons will be found in Iraq.
But Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, a Democratic presidential candidate, said Kay's comments reinforced his belief that the Bush administration had exaggerated the threat Iraq posed.
"It confirms what I have said for a long period of time, that we were misled - misled not only in the intelligence, but misled in the way that the president took us to war," Kerry said on "Fox News Sunday." "I think there's been an enormous amount of exaggeration, stretching, deception."
Kay's comments also drew an I-told-you-so response from Hans Blix, the former chief U.N. inspector whose work was heavily criticized by Kay and came to an end when the United States went to war with Iraq.
The United States should have known the intelligence was flawed last year when leads followed up by U.N. inspectors didn't produce any results.
"I was beginning to wonder what was going on. Weren't they wondering too?" he said by telephone. "If you find yourself on a train that's going in the wrong direction, its best to get off at the next stop."
Kay told The New York Times in a later interview for Monday's editions that U.S. intelligence agencies did not realize Iraqi scientists presented Saddam with fanciful plans for weapons programs and then used the money he authorized for other purposes.
"The whole thing shifted from directed programs to a corrupted process," Kay told the Times. "The regime was no longer in control; it was like a death spiral. Saddam was self-directing projects that were not vetted by anyone else. The scientists were able to fake programs.
Kay said he resigned Friday because the Pentagon began peeling away his staff of weapons searchers as the military struggled to put down the Iraqi insurgency last fall.
Kay hopes to draw on his experiences to write a book on weapons intelligence.
TITLE: 'Rings' Collects Best Movie, Director
AUTHOR: By Anthony Breznican
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEVERLY HILLS, California - After seven years, it was time for a Hobbit victory dance. "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," the final installment of the epic fantasy trilogy that hadn't yet won most major movie awards, finally snared best dramatic film and three other trophies at Sunday's Golden Globes.
But some of the night's thunder also went to the intimate story "Lost in Translation," about two lonely Americans who find friendship in a Tokyo hotel. That movie collected three top awards, including best comedy film, best comedy actor for Bill Murray - his first major acting prize - and best screenplay for Sofia Coppola, who wrote, produced and directed the film.
"Rings" master Peter Jackson was recognized as best director, and the film - based on the J.R.R. Tolkien novels - won best original score and best song for "Into the West."
"Really, I just want to accept this award and pay tribute to professor Tolkien for his incredible book," said Jackson, who began preparing to film the trilogy in 1997.
"I never realized that seven years on this movie would end up turning me into a Hobbit," Jackson said when collecting the director award, referring to the shortish, big-footed magical characters in the Tolkien stories. "To all of the actors, our magical cast, you just gave so much to the movies and equally importantly you made it so much fun to work on."
Among TV nominees, HBO's six-hour adaptation of playwright Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" won five trophies, including best miniseries or TV movie.
The Golden Globes, voted by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, is regarded by many in Hollywood as one of the year's biggest parties, but it's also a way to generate front-runner buzz for the Academy Awards.
The Globes event came just two days before Tuesday morning's announcement of the Oscar nominations. The Oscar ceremony is set for Feb. 29, about three weeks earlier than usual.
TITLE: Thai Boy Dies of Bird Flu As It Spreads to Pakistan
AUTHOR: By Daniel Lovering
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BANGKOK, Thailand - A 6-year-old Thai boy became Asia's seventh confirmed bird flu fatality and Pakistan on Monday joined the list of countries affected by the disease that has sparked mass chicken culls across the region.
The World Health Organization pleaded Monday with the global scientific community to accelerate the search for a cure. Attempts to tackle the virus are being frustrated by its fast rate of mutation as well as its spread across at least eight countries.
Pakistan said it had detected a form of bird flu in its chicken population. The commissioner for livestock husbandry said it was not a strain of bird flu that can spread to humans - something that has happened in other parts of Asia.
"We have confirmed this. The strain that jumps to humans is not in them," commissioner Rafaqat Hussain Raja said.
Faizullah Kakar, an official at the WHO office in Pakistan, said it had no confirmation of an outbreak of bird flu in the South Asian nation.
Laos, meanwhile, fears it might also be hit by the bird flu and is awaiting test results on the nature of an illness killing its fowl, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said.
Other Asian governments frantically slaughtered chicken flocks in a desperate bid to contain the disease, as well as the growing political fallout from accusations that officials in two countries - Thailand and Indonesia - initially covered up outbreaks.
Officials in Bangkok said they were investigating whether the virus might be being carried by migratory birds.
The Thai boy became infected after he played with chickens in his village. He died Sunday night in a Bangkok hospital, Thailand's first confirmed death from the virus.
Six people have died in neighboring Vietnam and Thai officials are trying to determine whether the bird flu was also the cause of last week's death of a 56-year-old man who had bred fighting cocks.
The WHO said a search for a cure had been set back because the virus had mutated. A previous strain detected in Hong Kong in 1997 can no longer be used as the key to producing a vaccine. It said an international effort was needed.
Scientists believe people get the disease through contact with sick birds. Although there has been no evidence yet of human-to-human transmission, health officials are concerned it might mutate further and link with regular influenza to create a form that could be transmitted from person to person, triggering the next human flu pandemic.
"This is now spreading too quickly for anybody to ignore it," said WHO spokesman Peter Cordingley in Manila.
So far eight countries have reported bird flu - Thailand, Cambodia, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan are also affected and Indonesia admitted it had a problem on Sunday.
The outbreak has devastated Thailand's chicken export industry - the world's fourth largest. Thailand shipped about 500,000 tons of chicken worth $1.3 billion in 2003.
Vietnam has slaughtered more than 3 million chickens.
TITLE: New Hampshire Rivals Spar Over Policy
AUTHOR: By Nedra Pickler
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: PLYMOUTH, New Hampshire - New Hampshire primary leaders John Kerry and Howard Dean swapped criticism of each other's foreign policy credentials as the Democratic presidential candidates entered the final day of campaigning before votes are cast.
Dean said his opposition to the Iraq war was a significant difference between himself and Kerry, who voted for the resolution authorizing the U.S. invasion. He also criticized the Massachusetts senator for voting against the 1991 Gulf War.
"A lot of folks in the campaign, including Senator Kerry, complain about my lack of foreign policy experience," Dean, a former Vermont governor, said at a rally Sunday night. "But he voted not to go to war when the oil wells were on fire and the troops were in Kuwait."
Senator John Edwards , who finished second to Kerry in last week's Iowa caucuses and promised to wage a positive campaign, said Kerry has not been clear on the war.
"I think he's said some different things at different points in time," the North Carolina senator said as the candidates made the rounds of Sunday's television news shows. "So I think there's been some inconsistency."
Kerry asked Dean to "stop running a negative campaign," even as he suggested that Dean can't get elected. During door-to-door campaigning Sunday, Kerry said his rival is weak on foreign policy issues, and favors higher taxes for middle-class voters.
"The Republicans will just kill us on this," Kerry said. "Between foreign policy and taxes, I think it is a serious problem."
Kerry didn't sway David and Diana Frothingham after a 10-minute chat in their driveway - they said they still have to think about whether they will vote for Kerry or Dean on Tuesday.
Kerry, winner of the Iowa caucuses, has the advantage in most polls taken over the weekend, but Dean appears to have stopped the hemorrhaging of support after his Iowa loss and a frenzied concession speech last week.
New Hampshire is known for promoting underdogs and surprises. Polls showed 8 percent to 15 percent of voters were still undecided, and many more willing to reconsider their early picks.
TITLE: Philippousis, Hewitt Out of Aussie Open
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MELBOURNE, Australia - Hicham Arazi of Morocco was nearly perfect, while Australia's Lleyton Hewitt came undone after a mistake.
Arazi, ranked 51st, upset 10th-seeded Mark Philippoussis 6-2, 6-2, 6-4 on Monday to advance to the quarterfinals of the Australian Open.
The stunning defeat of Philippoussis, the hero of Australia's Davis Cup victory over Spain last month, put a damper on the center court fans celebrating their country's national day.
It left Hewitt as the final Australian in the tournament, but he didn't last much longer.
Roger Federer of Switzerland beat Hewitt 4-6, 6-3, 6-0, 6-4 in a match that turned on a foot fault that left the former top-ranked player screaming and unsettled.
Hewitt, seeded 15th, took advantage of uncharacteristic errors from Federer to take the first set and was serving at 2-3 in the second. He double-faulted to make it 40-30, then was called for dragging his foot across the baseline on his first serve.
After glaring at the linesman, Hewitt hit a backhand into the net and a forehand long to give Federer a break point. He then yelled at the linesman and followed the outburst with a forehand into the net that gave the game to Federer.
Hewitt spiked his racket when he was broken in the first game of the third set, and didn't recover from his mistake until the fourth.
Federer finished off the night with an overhead winner on his third match point.
Hewitt said the foot-fault call, the only one of the match, affected him for just one game.
"It's obviously disappointing when you hit an ace and get a foot-fault called," he said. "I still wouldn't have won the match. I ran into a guy who was too good for me tonight."
Earlier, Philippoussis hit a big overhead early in the first set that bounced and hit the 30-year-old Arazi on the side of the head, knocking him down. Arazi smiled as he got up and made the crowd laugh when he briefly hid behind a linesman before the next point.
But Arazi, who beat 25th-seeded Albert Costa in his last match, blunted Philippoussis' vaunted power, breaking his serve five times. Philippoussis squandered all 10 of his break-point opportunities, including five while trying to get back into the match while Arazi was serving at 1-2 in the third set.
The left-handed Arazi then broke Philippoussis for the last time in the next game, running around his backhand to hit a forehand winner that the Australian didn't make a move on.
While both players had 34 winners, Arazi made just 10 unforced errors to 38 for Philippoussis.
"The guy was pretty much too good today," Philippoussis said. "He played a flawless match. I felt like every time he wanted to go for it, he went for it and made it. Nothing much I could do."
Arazi next faces third-seeded Juan Carlos Ferrero, the French Open champion, who needed treatment on his injured leg twice in a 6-4, 3-6, 6-3, 6-2 win over Andrei Pavel.
"I started to feel better and better during the match, I tried to fight a lot and win - I did it very well," Ferrero said. "I was very focused and concentrated on my game and not on my injury."
In earlier fourth round action Sunday, a freak volley propelled Marat Safin to a pulsating 7-6, 6-3, 6-7, 6-3 victory over the United States' James Blake at the Australian Open on Sunday, taking the former world No. 1 into the quarterfinals.
The Russian will play current No. 1 Andy Roddick in a potentially explosive Melbourne showdown on Tuesday, Safin's 24th birthday.
Safin, who has slipped to 86th in the rankings after an injury-plagued 2003, pulled off an astonishing backhand volley to open a 5-3 lead in the fourth set and end Blake's hopes of a comeback.
Leading by two sets to one, Safin lunged to his left after a crunching Blake forehand, losing his racket as his return volley dipped over his opponent's head and dropped just inside the baseline.
"It was just pure luck," shrugged Safin, runner-up in Melbourne two years ago. "I don't know how it happened. It was not like I planned to play it. At the right moment, just pure luck - 100 percent.
"I think I just threw it, you know. Normally, it doesn't work this way. Just once a year."
Meanwhile, Blake questioned whether the shot was legal as Safin's racket flew off the court the instant he played the volley. Under the rules a player's hand must be in contact with his racket when he plays a shot.
"I'd love to see a replay. I'm not sure if it was actually even a legal shot," said the American, whose 50 unforced errors undermined a gritty performance.
"Unfortunately it came on a huge point when I really thought I should have put that forehand away. I've never seen an umpire make that call. It's probably way too tough to make."
Safin took the first-set tiebreak 7-3 and rolled through the second set after taking a time out to treat his blistered left foot.
A determined Blake struck back to take the third-set tiebreak 8-6 with a scorching backhand down the line.
But Safin dug in to avoid a fifth set against a player who had beaten him at the Hopman Cup earlier this month, wrapping up victory after three hours, eight minutes.
"It was like I should have finished it in the third set," said the 2000 U.S. Open champion.
"Fourth set, I was struggling, and my legs were getting tired a little bit. The fifth set is a lottery, so it was really important for me to make the break in the fourth set, and I was lucky to come up with that shot. Thanks, God."
In Sunday's other action, defending champion Andre Agassi advanced to the quarterfinals, moving a step closer to a semifinal showdown with the winner of the Safin-Roddick clash.
In women's play, top-ranked Justine Henin-Hardenne had to save a set point before advancing 6-1, 7-6 (7-5) over Italian qualifier Mara Santangelo. She will play 2000 champion Lindsay Davenport in the quarterfinals, while fourth-seeded Amelie Mauresmo of France advanced to face 32nd-seeded Fabiola Zuluaga, the first Colombian woman to reach a Grand Slam quarterfinal.
Davenport won the last eight points in her 6-1, 6-3 victory over 11th-seeded Vera Zvonareva of Russia.
Mauresmo beat Australia's Alicia Molik 7-5, 7-5, and Zuluaga defeated Hungary's Aniko Kapros 6-4, 6-2.
Lisa Raymond followed her upset over Venus Williams with an easy victory, defeating wild-card entry Tatiana Golovin 6-2, 6-0 to reach the quarterfinals of a Grand Slam for only the second time in 45 attempts. She reached the quarters at Wimbledon in 2000.
"It would have been pretty easy for me to have the letdown after playing so well against Venus," Raymond said. "I've never really peaked at Slams. To be able to play as well as I have here, it feels great. And hopefully I've got a lot more great tennis left in me for a couple more rounds."
Her quarterfinal opponent will be Switzerland's Patty Schnyder, seeded 22nd, who beat Nathalie Dechy of France 6-2, 6-4.
The 354th-ranked Golovin, who celebrated her 16th birthday Sunday, had only one win on the WTA Tour before arriving at Melbourne Park. She said she was tired after going further than she expected.
Second-seeded Kim Clijsters beat Silvia Farina Elia of Italy 6-3, 6-3 and will play sixth-seeded Anastasia Myskina of Russia, who rallied for a 6-7 (3), 6-2, 6-2 win over ninth-seeded American Chanda Rubin.
In a case of deja vu for the Russian, Myskina also beat Rubin in the fourth round at the Australian Open last year - before going on to play Clijsters in the quarterfinal. On that occasion Myskina lost to the Belgian.
In booking her place in the quarterfinals, Clijsters showed no signs of her sprained ankle, at one point sprinting in from behind the baseline to flick a drop volley just over Farina Elia's head. While she was happy with her form, she said the ankle is still bothering her.
(Reuters, AP)
TITLE: Olympic Official Questioned
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SEOUL, South Korea - Prosecutors questioned IOC vice president Kim Un-yong on Monday for a second time amid allegations that he collected illicit money from former South Korean Olympic officials and embezzled funds from taekwondo organizations.
Prosecutors questioned Kim last month, and initially planned to summon him for more questioning last week, but delayed it after the 72-year-old official collapsed and was hospitalized.
Kim, wearing a white mask and a navy blue hat, entered the Seoul District Prosecutor's Office Monday morning. He entered the building without answering questions from reporters.
Investigators are focusing on allegations Kim received thousands of dollars from a sports equipment company while picking an official sponsor for the Korea Olympic Committee, which he headed at the time, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported. The news agency cited a prosecutor who questioned Kim on Monday.
The company won a four-year contract as an official sponsor, but the prosecutor said Kim denied taking any money from the company to influence its selection.
Korean Olympic Committee officials identified the firm as Fuerza Sports, which specializes in sportswear such as training suits. The Olympic committee said they were unaware of any irregularities in selecting Fuerza as a sponsor.
A company official in charge of the sponsorship was out of town and unavailable for comment Monday.
TITLE: Russian Officials Alarmed By Titov's Failed Drug Test
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: Russian soccer officials have said they are shocked after Yegor Titov, one of the country's most recognized and influential players, failed a drug test.
The 27-year-old Spartak Moscow captain was handed a 12-month ban Friday from all UEFA competition matches after he tested positive for the banned stimulant bromantan.
"This is a bombshell," Russian soccer chief Vyacheslav Koloskov told Sovietsky Sport newspaper Saturday.
"I got home late on Friday and was ready to go to sleep, and then I received this news. It's just a nightmare."
Titov, who has 36 caps, tested positive after Russia's Euro 2004 qualifying playoff first leg against Wales in Moscow on Nov. 15, when he was an unused substitute. He started the second leg in Cardiff on Nov. 19.
Wales is considering an appeal against the result, a 1-0 victory for Russia.
"My first reaction was shock initially, because it is not something you expect to hear about," Wales manager Mark Hughes said. "Obviously when it has an impact on the results of sides we have been involved with, it begs questions.
Football Association of Wales council member Alun Evans said an appeal should be lodged even if the chances of succeeding were slim.
"But my personal view is that Russia has clearly won this playoff under false pretenses. As such, we should appeal immediately," Evans told The Western Mail newspaper.
"Football is a team game, and Titov contributed quite heavily to Russia's victory over us."
The midfielder, who was also fined 6,400 euros ($8,122) while Spartak received a 12,800-euro ($16,240) fine, has declined to comment.
"I know about it, but I will not say anything right now," he was quoted as saying by Sovietsky Sport.
"I was as shocked as everyone," fellow international Alexander Mostovoi said. "I haven't spoken to Yegor or anyone else on the team just yet, because I only found out about it late last [Friday] night," he said by telephone from Vigo, Spain.
"I think it's too early to blame Titov for this. We have to find out how it happened first. We have all been told players are supposed to know what they eat and drink, but it's not always possible," the Celta Vigo captain added.
"I know there was a case here in Spain a couple of years ago when one player failed a test after eating contaminated meat."
Spartak said Titov had been tested many times last year. "The last time he gave a sample was on Nov. 11, and it proved negative, therefore it's very difficult to know how traces of bromantan were found in his system," the club said.
Club president Andrei Chervichenko said it would appeal.
The club said on the eve of the Nov. 15 match, Titov had been given a flu remedy that may have contained the stimulant. Bromantan first came to light at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. At that time the drug was new and five athletes from the former Soviet Union were not punished.
(Reuters, AP)
TITLE: Yao Smashes Orlando Defense
AUTHOR: By Mike Branom
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ORLANDO, Florida - Orlando's weak interior defense didn't stand a chance against Yao Ming.
Houston's center continued his recent stellar play by scoring 21 of his career-high 37 points in the third quarter, leading the Rockets to a 99-87 victory over the Magic on Sunday night.
"Our goal is to play effective basketball and not to break records," said Yao, whose previous high was 30. "Of course, if I can score more points I will try to score more points."
Houston has won six of its last seven games and Yao, with 10 rebounds against Orlando, registered double-doubles in all the victories. In his last seven games, Yao is averaging 22.9 points and 11.3 rebounds.
"Obviously, not too many teams have a weapon like that other than the Lakers," Rockets reserve point guard Mark Jackson said. "The guy is so big and skilled, it's unbelievable. He's a big guy with great hands, great touch and he makes you look good."
Orlando is challenged inside even against average players, and the 7-foot-6, 310-pound Yao is anything but average. Also, Magic coach Johnny Davis decided against double-teaming unless Yao was dribbling while backing down his defender.
That put Orlando center Andrew DeClercq, eight inches shorter and 55 pounds lighter, in a very lonely place.
"I told Andrew, 'Hold your ground as best you can,'" Davis said. "We were going to give him help on the dribble, but it didn't get there the way it should have."
While Yao was making a career-high 15 field goals in 23 attempts, DeClercq was knocked to the floor twice and bulled out of the way another time. DeClercq more often than not got a hand in Yao's face on his jumpers, but to little effect.
Reserve center Zaza Pachulia fared no better, fouling Yao twice within a minute during the third quarter.
"I didn't want to be passive and let them come and defend me," Yao said. "I wanted to attack them."
Yao scored 15 straight points for the Rockets in the third. For the period, he made seven of 11 shots and sank all seven of his free throws. His two free throws at the 2:27 mark of the third quarter broke his previous career best, set Nov. 21, 2002 at Dallas.
Despite Yao's performance, Houston led by just seven entering the fourth quarter after Tracy McGrady scored 14 of his 31 points in the third.
"Yeah, I had the hot streak," McGrady said.
"But it didn't matter because they were coming down and Yao was doing the same thing."
Yao came out 39 seconds into the fourth, but the Rockets found a way to get another big man going inside. Maurice Taylor extended Houston's lead to 87-75 by scoring 10 straight points.
Taylor finished with 20 points, shooting 8-for-13, and eight rebounds.
"He was another guy who just kind of beat us on the interior," Davis said.
The Rockets led by 11 with five minutes to go when Yao checked back in. Two minutes later, he hit a 17-foot jumper that gave Houston a 97-80 advantage.
Houston's big men needed to step up because Steve Francis had a poor game. The Rockets' leading scorer only had seven points - 10 below his average - while missing eight of 11 shots. His first field goal didn't come until 38.2 seconds remained in the third quarter.
Jackson filled in as playmaker, coming off the bench for 10 assists.
"Mark Jackson played a great game on the offensive end," Houston coach Jeff Van Gundy said. "He kept us organized and made some terrific passes."