SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #971 (39), Tuesday, May 25, 2004
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TITLE: Police Checking Roma to Protect Tourists
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg police have launched mass document checks of the Roma community in a move intended to protect tourists from being robbed in the street.
No police comment was available Monday.
The Russian Tourist Industry Union, or RST, said the checks were being made at its request and were intended to make the streets safe for the summer.
Nevertheless, Roma identified as thieves were still active around Kazan Cathedral, a top draw card for tourists, on Saturday.
The police operation, named Tabor or Gypsy Camp, began Thursday and is to run until next Monday in central parts of the city and popular tourist spots "where cases of theft and begging have become more frequent," Interfax quoted the city police as saying Thursday.
"We sent a letter to the police a couple of weeks ago asking them to provide some measures on the eve of the tourism season," said Sergei Korneyev, the local head of the RST, said Monday in a telephone interview.
"As far as I know the police are going to increase the number of patrols in the center as they did last year," he said. "They told us last year that they had arrested the organizers."
The most outrageous cases of theft took place last summer, when 21 of a group of 35 elderly British tourists were robbed on two consecutive days in August. On both occasions a group of Roma children encircled the tourists in broad daylight on Nevsky Prospekt near the Oktyabrskaya Hotel. The children prevented the tourists from moving in any direction. An official complaint sent to RST in September by Greencastle Travel Ltd., a British tour operation based in Hereford, England was followed by the police action against the local Roma community to get groups of beggars out of the city center.
"Judging from reports in the media, the police action last year was unsuccessful," said Olga Abramenko, head of human rights organization Memorial's project to protect the Roma, said Monday in a telephone interview. "It looks as if this is a case of persecution on the basis of nationality.
"The name of the operation, Tabor, summons unpleasant associations," she added, apparently referring to the Nazi extermination of the Roma during the Third Reich.
This time, the police say, they are going to check places where the Roma community is stationed in the city and deport from St. Petersburg those who do not have local registration. The police plan to increase the number of patrols in the Central, Admiralteisky, Vasileostrovsky, Petrogradsky, Petrodvortsovy districts and also the St. Petersburg subway.
Abramenko said the document checks quite frequently get out of control as happened April 21 when the police burned tents in a city suburb where some Roma lived.
"Last Friday we had a report from a camp located in Obukhovo that the police had shown up there that day and started shooting machine guns in the air and demanding that the Roma leave the city," she said. "About 20 families live there."
Abramenko conceded that some Roma steal, but said that the police were not addressing that problem correctly and use document checks as a pretext to mistreat the Roma.
Korneyev said he had received two letters from city police in October and December, informing the RST that two groups of teenagers had been detained on Nevsky Prospekt together with their adult organizers.
"The police management shares your concerns about frequent cases of crimes being committed in relation to foreign citizens and assures you that measures that are being taken will provide security for foreign citizens in St. Petersburg," Vladislav Piotrovsky, head of the city's criminal police department wrote in a letter to RST in December.
But foreign residents living in the city say the situation has not changed in any noticeable way since the operation began.
"Walking on Nevsky Prospekt, I was shocked to see a group of gypsies robbing tourists all day," Raymond Gorissen, a freelance photographer and journalist from Belgium, said Monday in an interview. "Everybody knows what they are doing and the authorities or police don't seem to mind. This is like a cancer for such a beautiful city as St. Petersburg and it's growing," he said. "Last Saturday I followed them for a few hours and I was able to do lots of detailed photographs of them while they robbed or even attacked people on or near Nevsky Prospekt."
Gorissen's photographs clearly show organized groups of Roma children and adults attacking foreign tourists in front of Kazan Cathedral, on Nevsky Prospekt, between the Griboyedov canal and the Moika river, and next to the canal.
Meanwhile, Korneyev said that the problem is unlikely to be as bad this year as last year.
"I hope this year there won't be any serious incidents," he said. "It looks like the police started taking this matter seriously after our repeated inquires."
"It is a problem of any big city," he added. "The same kind of thing happens in Paris, for instance, where groups of Roma people follow tourists. The main thing for the police is to monitor the most popular tourist routes in the central part of St. Petersburg."
More than 3 million tourists are expected to visit the city in the summer, he said.
TITLE: Tourism Ills Listed By Agencies
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Poor transport infrastructure, overpriced accommodation, procrastination over visa procedures and absence of strategic planning of cultural events count among the most frequent complaints encountered by St. Petersburg travel agencies working with incoming tourists.
These shortcomings were voiced this month at a round-table organized by the Northwest branch of the Russian Tourist Industry Union, or RST, for local tourism firms.
Tamara Kosobutskaya, general director of travel agency Troika Reisen, branded the local hotel market as monopolized, saying this has a negative impact on incoming tourism.
"The hotels are acting as they please," she said. "As a result, there are always vacant rooms at the highest prices and never any available at standard rates."
Valery Fridman, general director of travel agency Mir, said his company has begun to lose clients, because of the high cost of package tours to the city, with accommodation being the major expense.
"This year the packages have gotten even more expensive - by about $40 - as hotels and museums have hiked their charges," he said. "This has led to cancellations. We have almost lost the U.S. market and risk losing part of the French and Spanish market."
Top local hotels, which offer special deals combining accommodation with tickets to the Mariinsky Theater's two most important events, the "Stars of the White Nights" festival" and "The Mariinsky international ballet festival, said their packages have been very popular. Such events definitely help to raise average occupancy.
But while the St. Petersburg Philharmonic is capable of providing their schedule of events in advance, the Mariinsky Theater is rather more spontaneous. A detailed program of this year's the "Stars of the White Nights Festival" became available less than a month before it starts on Sunday.
St. Petersburg tends to have many tourists during the warmest parts of the year and a dearth for the remainder.
Alexei Zhukov, director of incoming tourist services at travel agency Actis, said that to change this more high-profile cultural events or top level business forums are needed in the low season.
"The economic forum is in the summer, most of the festivals are also in the summer," he said. "The city should really make an effort to spread events over the year and make the situation more balanced."
Last year, the city's 300th anniversary year, St. Petersburg received 3.12 million visitors, a 15 percent increase on 2002, according to City Hall's tourism committee.
Finns were far and away the biggest group of guests in the city, topping the list of tourists with 1,033, 794 visits.
They were followed by Americans with 118,089 visits and Germans with 111,074 visits. The French came in fourth with 77,691 visits, followed by Italians with 64,837 visits.
Britons came next with 62,730 visits, followed by Swedes with 28, 166, Poles with 20,988, Spaniards with 19,058 visits and the Dutch closed the top 10 with 16,970 visits. All experts agreed that promotion of the anniversary made St. Petersburg a fashionable destination, but said the city was unlikely to become a tourism Mecca in the near future.
Budget airlines don't operate here, and aren't planning to, and budget hotels are yet to be built in large numbers. No progress has been made in negotiations with the EU, the U.S. or Japan on easing visa requirements for foreign visitors.
In these circumstances, some analysts believe the answer to is develop business tourism.
"St. Petersburg is a destination for elite tourism," said Sergei Korneyev, head of the Northwest branch of the RST. "We are not in a position to change the factors that prevent the city becoming a mass tourism destination, but we have the resources to compete on the business travel market."
Foreigners themselves add safety concerns to the list of bugbears, which has changed little in the past five years.
Kari Halonen, marketing manager of the Helsinki Tourist & Convention Bureau, mentions the visa regime and safety fears as two major obstacles preventing more of his compatriots from coming to Russia.
Transport is another key issue in the tourism infrastructure, and it is still a subject of sharp criticism in town.
"There are very few decent buses here," Mir's Fridman said.
TITLE: Officer Slain 100 Years Ago Remembered
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Sebastian FitzLyon, Australia's honorary consul in St. Petersburg, on Sunday placed flowers on a plaque at the Suvorov Military Academy dedicated to Alexander Zinovieff, a 24-year-old Russian officer killed in the 1904-5 Russo-Japanese war.
The occasion was 100 years to the day since Zinovieff, FitzLyon's great uncle, was shot dead. But, in a quirk of fate, Zinovieff was remembered not only by his mourning family, but also for many years by the man who killed him, and by his family.
The oldest of seven sons of a St. Petersburg governor, Alexander attended the Corps des Pages - today the Suvorov Military Academy - as did his brothers. He was the top student in his year and for a short time the personal page of Tsar Nicholas II.
He was an exceptionally popular young man in the city's golden youth of the day.
He was one of the first Russian officers to volunteer and leave the capital for the war. It took Zinovieff a month to get to Manchuria by the single-track Siberian Railway.
Soon after arriving, Zinovieff, who held the rank of captain, was sent on reconnaissance with several Cossacks.
His task was to find out whether the Japanese had captured the Khabalinsky Pass and to report back to regimental headquarters. However, Zinovieff never managed to contact headquarters because he was killed.
He had left his horse with his companions and climbed alone to the top of a hill to look around. The Cossacks heard a few shots, then nothing more.
They waited until sunset and, without any news of Zinovieff, returned to their camp. They took the officer's horse with them and reported him missing.
When Zinovieff's father received the bad news he contacted the Japanese authorities through the British Ambassador, to find out what had happened to his son. He was soon informed that Alexander had died on the Khabalinsky Pass at Lichiapaotzu near the Yalu River.
Further enquiries to the Japanese military authorities produced details as to how Alexander had died, and maps showing the exact locations of the skirmish and place where he was buried with full military honors. This information enabled his body to be recovered after the Russo-Japanese war and he was reburied in the family crypt in the Koporie fortress near St.Petersburg.
The Zinovieff family was astonished when soon after receiving this information, it received a parcel with Alexander Zinovieff's belongings.
The parcel contained the cross that had hung around the young man's neck, various small icons, his pocket book, his leather case with various letters, some bloodstained money, his watch, rings and a gold cigar case.
However, Zinovieff's father still wanted to know more details about his son's death, and through the Orthodox Bishop Nikolai in Tokyo, he succeeded.
His hopes were surpassed in a most unexpected and original way that reflected Japanese psychology and traditions.
A plea placed by the bishop in one of Tokyo's leading newspapers received an almost immediate response from Sataro Minamitani, a wounded young Japanese officer.
Sataro, who was in a hospital, revealed to the bishop that it was he who had fired the fatal shot that killed Zinovieff, who had resisted after being surrounded by Japanese troops.
Sataro said that Zinovieff had kept shooting even after he was wounded. Sataro, himself badly wounded, shot back and killed Zinovieff.
Sataro's father, a well-off Tokyo tradesman, told Bishop Nikolai that according to Japanese custom unfading glory awaits a soldier killed in an honest fight, and that the family would commemorate his death in a Bhuddist temple on May 23 each year, the anniversary of the heroic death of the young Russian. Minamitani asked the bishop to forward a letter of condolence to the Zinovieffs.
Many years later, the slain officer's younger brother, Andrei Zinovieff, recalled the letter written in epic style. It described the fight, the immortal glory of the fallen soldier, and his undoubted happiness after death and the pride of his parents.
The Zinovieffs were deeply moved by the sincere sympathy of Minamitani and his son. And the two families exchanged gifts and began a regular correspondence.
In their letters the Japanese family told Alexander Zinovieff's parents that they had not forgotten the fallen Russian officer and that they continued to hold annual memorial services for him on May 23.
The last letter Zinovieff's father received from Japan was in May 1918. Soon after that the family went into exile to escape the Bolsheviks, who had taken over Russia.
For 42 years after the October Revolution, the family had no more contact with the Japanese family, Andrei Zinovieff wrote.
But by chance when he was in Washington D.C. in the 1950s, he found out that the Minamitani family was still keeping up the observance of his brother's death.
He read an article headlined "Japanese Has Service Held For Russian He Slew in 1904" from an English-language newspaper published in Tokyo.
The article related how a Japanese man, then 75 years old, went to the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Tokyo every year on May 23 to commemorate the Russian officer whom he had killed half a century before.
"It was a totally unexpected continuation of an old and nearly forgotten chapter in my life, and so I decided to renew the contact between our families," wrote Andrei Zinovieff.
He learned that Satoro Minamitami had died in 1958. However, his son, Ichiro, responded to a letter from Andrei, and for a few more years the correspondence between the two families was restored.
The chapel at the Suvorov Academy was closed in Communist times and the plaque covered over. It was only with the coming of perestroika that it was uncovered.
Sebastian FitzLyon has instituted a memorial prize vase in honor of his great uncle Alexander, to be awarded annually to the best platoon in the Suvorov Academy.
TITLE: Kronstadt: Fortress City Indelibly Linked to the Sea
TEXT: A small boy looks at the decorations in the Church of the Icon of the Vladimir Virgin.
Boys from Kronstadt's Navy Cadet Corps on their way to classes last week when the fortress town's anniversary was marked.
Nikolai Bavin, who served as an intelligence officer in World War II, with relatives.
A priest reading and gesticulating during a service in the Church of the Icon of the Vladimir Virgin.
Two sailors walking past ships of the Baltic Fleet decorated with flags for the anniversary celebrations.
TITLE: Decommissioning Awaits Akula Subs
AUTHOR: By Simon Saradzhyan and Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Navy chief Vladimir Kuroyedov has ordered the decommissioning of an entire class of strategic nuclear submarines despite proposals to modernize their armament systems after at least two failed missile launches, a senior commander said Monday.
"One could say that we have decommissioned an entire series of submarines ... that could have continued to serve [the Navy]," said Admiral Gennady Suchkov, who was recently suspended from his post as the head of the Navy's Northern Fleet, Interfax reported.
At issue are the huge Akula class submarines, which Suchkov described as the Navy's "most powerful" vessels.
Kuroyedov ordered the decommissioning after the abortive launches of ballistic missiles from Northern Fleet submarines during a strategic war game earlier this year, Suchkov said in a separate interview published in Novaya Gazeta on Monday.
The Navy Command was swift to deny the allegations by Suchkov, who has engaged in a mudslinging fight with Kuroyedov after his suspension over the sinking of a decommissioned diesel submarine last August, which killed nine men.
Navy spokesman Igor Dygalo said the Akula class "will continue to exist as it has existed, fulfilling the entire range of goals it has been tasked with," Interfax reported.
Dygalo went on to accuse Suchkov of divulging state secrets about the armaments of Akula submarines, which have a displacement of some 25,000 metric tons and are armed with 20 intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Suchkov told Novaya Gazeta that Kuroyedov issued an order on April 29 to decommission the Akula class after the launch failures in February. The Novomoskovsk submarine failed to launch an RSM-54 missile in the Barents Sea on Feb.17. Then on Feb. 18 a similar missile was destroyed in flight after veering off the planned trajectory shortly after launch from the Karelia submarine. The failures were caused by a faulty navigation system in one case and a glitch in the control system in another, Kommersant reported earlier this year.
The Novomoskovsk and the Karelia belong to the Delphin class, however, and are armed with RSM-52 sea-launched ballistic missiles.
It was unclear Monday how the abortive launches of RSM-54s from Delphin class submarines could have prompted Kuroyedov to order the decommissioning of a different class of submarines armed with different missiles.
Ivan Safranchuk, head of the Moscow office of the Washington-based Center for Defense Information, said Suchkov's attempt to link the decommissioning of Akula submarines with the abortive launches of a different type of missile from Delfin submarines "appears to be illogical."
He noted that the Navy has been retiring Akula submarines for some time.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Visa Easing Backed
MOSCOW (SPT) - Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen supports a mutual easing of the visa regime between the European Union and Russia, Interfax reported Vanhanen as saying Monday after he met with Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov.
"We've got to move in this direction and undertake practical steps," Interfax quoted Vanhanen as saying.
"We don't consider this in any way to be a political matter, but about a purely practical question that is being decided by Russia and the European Union," he said.
Negotiations on a visa-free regime are proceeding actively and "this question will be examined further," Fradkov said.
Island Resorts Planned
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The Northwest border control department plans to open several tourist resorts on islands in the Gulf of Finland where border guards are stationed, Interfax reported Monday, quoting Pogranichnik newspaper, an official publication of the FSB.
The islands of Gotland, Mochny and Seskar will be removed be from the list of territories that foreigners are not allowed to visit, the report said.
"There are regular seminars in the Finnish town of Kotka with participation of businesses from the Leningrad Oblast and public organizations interested in the islands' tourism development," Interfax quoted the paper as saying. "They have drafted and sent the Russian government a project to organize a border checkpoint on Gotland."
An unnamed company has already invested $500,000 in the project, building a tourist village and cleared the territory of mines, the report said.
Telephone Wait to End
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The 60,000 people waiting for fixed line telephone connections will get them within the next two years, Interfax quoted Vice Governor Andrei Chernenko as saying Monday.
One hundred and sixty-eight people have been on the waiting list since 1980-1985, the report said.
From now on developers will have to provide new residential buildings with telephone networks, the report said.
Chernenko also said the federal government owes Northwest Telecom 965 million rubles ($33.2 million) for discounts provided by the company.
TITLE: Chukotka Audit Finds Irregularities
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Audit Chamber on Friday unveiled a damning report of "massive" financial abuse by Roman Abramovich's government in Chukotka - and then grudgingly praised the tycoon for making life better for the 50,000 people who inhabit the remote Arctic region.
In its highly anticipated probe of the region's finances, the budget watchdog found that the richest free man in Russia awarded massive tax breaks to firms linked to his oil company Sibneft; illegally spent more than 1 billion rubles; presided over "massive" legal violations, and ran up the bankrupt region's debt to 9.3 billion rubles.
"[We found] ... massive violations of financial discipline, budget and tax legislation," auditor Sergei Ryabukhin told a packed news conference.
Auditors found that in the past three years, 12 billion rubles ($470 million) in profit and property tax breaks were awarded to 22 trading companies registered in Chukotka, many of which had one or two employees and no business activities in the region.
"Most of the tax breaks were given to enterprises that participated in financial transactions for large companies, first of all Sibneft," Ryabukhin said.
Auditors also found that roughly 1.5 billion rubles of budget funds were misused in 2003 alone, mostly "due to the government of Chukotka not observing the requirements of budget legislation and systematic mistakes," he said.
Ryabukhin said the chamber had forwarded its report to the prime minister, the Finance Ministry and the Prosecutor General's Office, although he went out of his way to stress that the audit was routine in nature and should not be linked to Kremlin calls for businesses to be more socially responsible.
"It was a professional, competent and thorough analysis," Ryabukhin said. "There was no bias."
Indeed, Ryabukhin downplayed the findings, saying that most of "illegally redirected" funds were spent on salaries for teachers and doctors, healthcare, construction projects, culture, education and sporting activities.
When asked by a Chukotka television crew if life had improved in the region since Abramovich was elected in 2001, he said: "Of course."
Audit Chamber chief Sergei Stepashin, however, said Sunday that judging from the results of the audit, Abramovich is "very much letting down the president of Russia" and called for him to step down as governor.
"He's a good guy, but he shouldn't continue to hold the post of Chukotka governor," Stepashin told Interfax. "He has a hobby, soccer, so let him continue to deal with that. But one shouldn't conduct experiments on the region and people."
As far as the 12 billion rubles in tax breaks are concerned, Ryabukhin said that those companies that received them fulfilled their obligations under Chukotka law to reinvest at least half of that amount in local development projects.
Still, this money technically came from the budget, not the companies themselves, he said. "This is a serious problem, which on the whole does damage to the consolidated budget of the country."
Abramovich's administration issued a statement, highlighting what it said was the "basic conclusions" made by the Audit Chamber - that there are no criminal cases to be brought as a result of the inspection."
Since the October arrest of Abramovich's erstwhile merger partner, Yukos billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Moscow has been abuzz with speculation on who might be next.
Analysts said that if the Kremlin were intent on launching a wide-scale assault on the oligarchs, Abramovich, with an estimated fortune of $12 billion and a taste for British soccer clubs, would be a likely target. But by publicizing what could be grounds for prosecution and then minimizing them, they said the government appears to be indicating that the Yukos affair is an isolated event - as long as it gets what it wants - unrivaled power and more revenues.
Chris Weafer, chief strategist at Alfa Bank, said Abramovich will have to pay a tribute for being let off the hook.
"Sibneft and [its parent company] Millhouse know what to do to get out of trouble," Weafer said. "Millhouse will be expected to pay an additional sum of $1.5 billion to reflect what was the true value of oil assets they bought under [former President Boris] Yeltsin, while Sibneft itself will have to come to an agreement with tax authorities to cover back taxes."
Tax authorities have already accused Sibneft of avoiding $1.4 billion in taxes.
"Abramovich was doing in Chukotka exactly what Yukos is now coming to grief for, which is taking advantage of offshore and onshore tax schemes," said Eric Kraus of Sovlink.
"But I don't think Abramovich will share the fate of his friend [Khodorkovsky] because he had the intelligence not to attempt to buy the State Duma or get in the way of the Russian government," Kraus said.
James Fenkner of Troika Dialog said that some people in the government may want to go after Abramovich, but they don't have the upper hand - at least for now.
TITLE: Abramovich Purchases Equal of Air Force One
AUTHOR: Lyuba Pronina
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: For billionaire Roman Abramovich, who started a multi-million shopping spree last year with the purchase of Chelsea soccer club, apparently the sky is the limit.
One of his recent buys is a brand new Boeing 767-300, which, equipped with a missile jammer, is the next best thing to the U.S. president's Air Force One, according to sources familiar with the deal.
The craft, which was purchased for an undisclosed sum last year from Ansett Worldwide leasing firm, is currently parked on the grounds of Jet Aviation, a business aviation services firm in Basel, Switzerland, the sources said. It has already been painted in Filton, England, in the same livery as the Boeing Business Jet 737 Abramovich already owns.
A new Boeing 767 costs roughly $100 million, but analysts said it is virtually impossible to estimate the price tag of Abramovich's jet because of the unknown cost of the plane's interior.
"It has all the toys in it. It has the best communications, which cannot be cracked, modeled on Air Force One," said a source in Russia who knows about the purchase.
President George W. Bush has two specially configured Boeing 747-200s. They can be refueled in mid-flight and are equipped with anti-missile defenses.
Accommodations include an executive suite consisting of a stateroom and the president's office. A conference/dining room is also available for the president, his family and staff. Other accommodations are provided for guests, senior staff, security personnel and reporters.
Asked to comment on Abra-movich's rival to Air Force One, U.S. Air Mobility Command spokesman Mark Voorhis said: "We cannot comment on this one, ma'am."
President Vladimir Putin has two Ilyushin 62 presidential jets. The interior of the Russian president's newest jet is a tightly kept secret, leading to the occasional report in the yellow press of toilets made of gold.
The new jet purchased by Abramovich will certainly rival those of many heads of state.
The firm in charge of the plane's interior design, Jet Aviation, refused to comment on the craft.
The company did say, however, that late last year it completed a full-size plywood and styrofoam mock-up of a Boeing 767 interior for a private customer the firm would not name. It was the first full-scale mock-up of a 767 interior that the firm completed.
The price of the mock-up ran between $150,000 and $300,000, according to Flight International, a London-based aviation industry magazine.
"It will make Air Force One look cheap," said one airline industry expert.
"Jet Aviation do a very high quality job and recently completed the outfit of an Airbus 340 for the sultan of Brunei," said Paul Duffy, a Moscow-based independent aviation analyst.
Duffy estimated that the missile jammer would set back Abramovich $1.5 million.
Not all Russian airports can accommodate the Boeing 767. But the craft would have no problems taking off and landing at Chukotka's capital Anadyr, the general director of the town's airport, Gennady Baiborodov, said in an interview last week. The airport is undergoing a $50 million reconstruction.
Abramovich's new plane will be registered with the Aruba Civil Aviation Register, Netherlands, the same as his first Boeing, sources said.
The plane was originally set to be delivered to Hawaiian Airlines, but later ended up in the possession of a Cayman Islands registered company, according to a British consultancy firm familiar with the situation.
TITLE: Gorbachev Quits Social Democrat Party
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW -Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev has resigned as leader of the small Social Democratic Party of Russia (SDPR) after falling out with its chairman, Samara governor Konstantin Titov.
Gorbachev announced his resignation at a meeting of the party's Political Council in Moscow Saturday after "losing political and human faith" in Titov, a source in the party quoted Gorbachev as saying.
The source said that Gorbachev praised the initial progress made since the party's registration in 2002, but then attacked Titov's behavior ahead of last year's State Duma elections, Interfax reported. During the run-up to the December elections, "intrigues emerged, some project, which boiled down to Titov trying to privatize the party," the source quoted Gorbachev as saying.
SDPR failed to either collect the required 200,000 signatures for the December 2003 elections or pay the 37.5 million-ruble ($1.25 million) fee to get on the party list ballot. Despite his resignation, the former Soviet leader decided to stay on in the party, but warned that the SDPR will not "develop properly" if his criticism is not heeded. SDPR's next congress in September is expected to confirm Gorbachev's resignation.
Titov responded to Gorbachev's criticism Sunday by noting that all but two members of the Political Council voted for the former Soviet president's resignation. The council has 29 members, according to SDPR's official web site.
Titov said his differences with Gorbachev were "more personal than public."
TITLE: Chechens to Vote on Aug. 29
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The Chechen Election Commission was to publish a resolution Monday that presidential elections for the war-torn republic will be held Aug. 29, Itar-Tass reported.
The election to replace Akhmad Kadyrov, who was killed by a bomb on May 9, had earlier been called for Sept. 5.
Commission chairman Abdul-Kerim Arsakhanov said candidates contesting the post of the Chechen president should either collect 6,000 votes - 1 percent of the total number of eligible voters in Chechnya - or pay a collateral worth 4.5 million rubles ($155.000) to get registered as a candidate, the report said.
Victory is possible in the first round if a candidate wins 50 percent plus one vote, provided that the turnout is no less than 50 percent. If that does not happen, run-off elections will be held in which the winner will be decided by a simple majority, the report said.
July 14 is the deadline by which all the candidates for presidency should submit their documents to the commission. Around 565,000 voters, including servicemen stationed in Chechnya on a permanent basis, are expected to take part in the early presidential elections in Chechnya, the report said.
TITLE: Fabergé Eggs Returned to Russia
AUTHOR: By Kevin O'Flynn
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Nearly 75 years after they left Russia, nine of the jeweled Fabergé eggs made their official return last Tuesday.
Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II was among the guests who attended the opening of a Fabergé exhibition in the Kremlin Patriarch's Palace, which along with the nine imperial eggs is displaying six other eggs and a number of other items created by Fabergé for the tsarist family.
Once bought by the richest men in the Russian empire, the tsars, they were bought and brought back home by the third-richest man in Russia, oil and metals magnate Viktor Vekselberg.
Vekselberg - who according to Forbes, the magazine owned by the family who sold him the eggs, is worth $5.9 billion - scooped up the treasures in a surprise pre-auction purchase worth more than $100 million. The eggs and 180 other items created by Fabergé were to be sold at a Sotheby's auction in New York in February.
"I'm extremely grateful that they have been brought back to the motherland," said Yelena Gagarina, director of the Kremlin museums.
"It's a positive step for the country," former Culture Minister Mikhail Shyvdkoi said.
He expressed hope that their return would encourage other businessman to bring back treasures from abroad and to open up the collections that they already own. The repeal of a tax on the import of cultural treasures was crucial in encouraging deals such as Vekselberg's, he said.
"It's very important for political and psychological reasons. ... When people are less scared to show what they have, it can only be beneficial for the country."
Russia has lost a lot of its most valuable art over the past century, especially Russian 20th-century art, and this could be the start of a trend to bring it back, Shyvdkoi said.
Vladimir Voronchenko, chairman of Vekselberg's nonprofit foundation Svyaz Vremyon, which was created for the purchase of the eggs and other cultural artifacts, called the eggs' return an attempt by Russian business to give something back to society.
"Every business that has earned money, hopefully in a legal way, has to pay off their debt," he said. "You could call this the social debt of Russian business."
Voronchenko said the eggs would not be the last of Russia's treasures to come home.
He said the foundation intends to make two or three purchases per year and is in negotiations to make two purchases even more spectacular than that of the eggs.
"We don't want our plans to be ruined. As soon as they happen, we will tell you," he said.
Vekselberg, who owns part of TNK-BP, made his fortune through the controversial privatizations of the 1990s, when much of Russia's natural resources were sold at knock-down prices.
In their time, the eggs were probably as far as one could get from making a socially responsible purchase. They were simply playthings, expensive but never outrageously expensive for their time, gifts of love between a tsar and his wife, and now mementos from a doomed dynasty.
The first Fabergé, now on display, was created in 1885 as an Easter present for Tsar Alexander III's wife. Painted white to look like an ordinary egg, it opened up to a golden yolk.
Within the yolk was a golden chick with a royal crown and a tiny ruby egg. The crown and ruby egg are now lost.
The present was so well received that it became an annual tradition for the imperial family. Each year Fabergé attempted to outdo the previous year's masterpiece.
Many of the eggs now on show are witness to the intimate nature of the gift.
A gentle tug on the 1898 Lilies of the Valley reveals three pictures of Nicholas II and two of his children. The Fifteenth anniversary egg from 1911 has detailed paintings of scenes from Nicholas II's reign as well as portraits of each of the family members.
Of the 50 eggs made, only one escaped the 1917 Revolution.
The Order of St. George, created in 1916 for the empress dowager, was smuggled out by the widow of Alexander III, Maria Fyodorovna. That egg is also on display.
After the Revolution, some of the eggs were lost when they were taken from the Winter Palace to the Kremlin. In 1930, Stalin, in dire need of foreign currency, ordered them to be sold.
Kremlin museum directors managed to save the 10 now on display in the Armory, but the rest are in collections all over the world, including that of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Rainier of Monaco.
TITLE: Kremlin's Media Law Limits Press Freedom
AUTHOR: By Caroline McGregor and Oksana Yablokova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - For two years, the Kremlin has been working on a new media law that would shorten its leash on the press.
By this fall, President Vladimir Putin is expected to introduce a bill to the State Duma that would replace the current media law, in place since December 1991.
The Kremlin-backed bill, according to people who have seen draft versions of it, threatens, among other things, to put newsrooms under the control of owners - not editors - and to take away journalists' right to keep their sources confidential.
Reporters would be required to name the source of their information, if called upon by a judge to do so during a hearing, Alexei Venediktov, the editor of Ekho Moskvy radio, said by telephone Wednesday.
"No other legislation in the world stipulates something like that," he said.
Beyond that, the bill would "eliminate any traces of editorial independence," said Andrei Richter, director of Moscow's Media Law and Policy Institute.
The new bill would do away with the statutes that journalists adopt to define and limit an owner's influence in the newsroom, he added.
"Owners will have the first and final word on any editorial issue, from graphic design to shaping a story," Richter said.
Owners are to be held accountable for editorial content, which is likely to make them more sensitive to what their journalists say, and how they say it.
But Richter said, "It's a big mistake for media owners to think the law was drafted in their interest. There may be some marginal benefit for them, but mostly it serves the interests of the government." Under the new bill, any violation of media legislation can be a pretext for shutting down a media outlet. "The state will have wider powers to reprimand, and stronger levers of influence," Richter said.
Which body will wield those overseeing powers on behalf of the state is unclear, Venediktov noted, in the wake of government restructuring that abolished the Press Ministry. Richter thought it was likely to be the Justice Ministry.
Richter said the Kremlin's decision to write a new media law, in the absence of public pressure and the presence of a perfectly serviceable old one, was just "precaution for the future."
It's not punishment for some publication's irreverence. "There's no event you can tie it to," Richter said.
Also, "if Putin gets private media subordinated, he can afford to keep just one state television channel and privatize the rest," as promised by former Press Minister Mikhail Lesin two years ago, Richter said.
The bill was initially drafted in 2002 by the Media Industry Committee, a group of leading figures chaired by Channel One general director Konstantin Ernst. Venediktov is a member.
Venediktov said a new law is necessary to identify media as business entities, but he took issue with the "political" clauses that endanger freedom of the press.
TITLE: Putin Delays His Address
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin has postponed his annual state of the nation address to parliament, probably because of the murder of Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov, reports say.
Putin initially planned to deliver the speech last Wednesday but rescheduled the event for Wednesday this week.
A spokesman for the presidential administration confirmed Monday only Putin would address a joint session of the State Duma and the Federation Council on Wednesday, but declined comment on the reason for the delay.
The Constitution does not set an exact date for the state of the nation address.
Last year Putin addressed parliament on May 16.
While the Kremlin's press service has refused to say when the address will take place, it began accepting accreditation requests from journalists for the address last Tuesday, and said the deadline would be Friday.
The reported delay might be linked to the assassination of Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov during Victory Day celebrations at a stadium in Grozny on May 9, said a research note from the Renaissance Capital investment bank.
Kadyrov and five others were killed when a bomb exploded beneath the stadium's VIP podium. Chechen rebel warlord Shamil Basayev on May 17 claimed responsibility for the bombing, and for the first time named Putin specifically as a terrorist target.
During an unannounced visit to Chechnya on May 11 Putin said he was shocked to see the devastation in Grozny and ordered Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref to oversee the reconstruction of the republic.
"This represents a dramatic policy shift, as all matters relating to Chechnya were previously under the de facto control of the 'siloviki,'" Renaissance Capital analyst Alexei Moisseyev wrote.
"Thus, we expect the address will contain some sort of new economic, rather than military, proposals for resolving the Chechnya problem," he added.
TITLE: Kommersant Editor Replaced by His Deputy
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Kommersant editor Andrei Vasilyev on Thursday handed over responsibility for the newsroom to his deputy, Alexander Stukalin.
An official announcement of the change came out of a Kommersant board meeting late Thursday in London.
The change was not linked to displeasure with his tenure but due to the fact that Vasilyev's broad responsibilities stretched him too thin, a Kommersant official said.
In addition to being editor of the newspaper, Vasilyev is general director of the Kommersant publishing house and responsible for other publications, including the magazines Vlast and Dengi.
The Kommersant board asked Vasilyev to stay on as general director.
Last week, Boris Berezovsky, the owner of the publishing house, sought to dispel the latest round of rumors that he might sell the company.
"I have not had, and do not have, any intention of selling the Kommersant publishing house," Berezovsky told Kommersant staff via a video link from London on Wednesday, Interfax reported.
Nezavisimaya Gazeta and Internet site Grani.ru will also remain in his hands, he said.
Berezovsky said he has received offers to sell to "the most powerful financial and industrial groups."
He said he was promised sums two times higher than the company's market capitalization, which he put at between $75 million and $90 million. This led him to believe the offers were politically motivated, he said.
"The coefficient of two - that's exactly the price of politics," Berezovsky was quoted by Vremya Novostei as saying.
TITLE: Liberal Democrats Plan Primary
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW- The Committee of 2008 last Tuesday laid out its strategy for picking which of its prominent members would lead the liberal democrat camp into the next parliamentary elections in 2007.
"Effectively, it's a primary," said former SPS leader Boris Nemtsov, referring to the preliminary elections in the United States used to determine a party's candidate.
Rather than leaving the question up to the politicians themselves, whose personal divisions have stalled past attempts at cooperation, voters will be polled to find out who they want to see as the face of the Coalition of Democratic Forces, into which the nonpartisan discussion club intends to transform itself.
Nemtsov said they hope to solicit the views of all 20 million people "who want to live in a truly free country," and that the undertaking would cost at least $2 million, most of that on buying television coverage, especially in the regions.
Nemtsov is one of five people seen as candidates for the "primary." Others are Garry Kasparov, who is head of the Committee of 2008, independent State Duma deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov, recent presidential candidate Irina Khakamada and Yabloko party leader Grigory Yavlinsky.
Order of popularity in the poll will determine the order of the party list.
TITLE: Moscow Expansion Proceeds With Banks
AUTHOR: By Sophia Kornienko
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Moscow's Globex bank opened its first branch in St. Petersburg on Friday. Globex is planning to launch a total of five branch offices in St. Petersburg in 2004 and 15 in the Northwest region within the next two years.
"St. Petersburg's market being tight is a myth," said Ilya Morozovsky, chief of the new branch office. "We want to see competition between quality products. Besides, we hope to sign agreements with the city government," he said. "We will have agreements with the city government, but not fix-ups," said Anatoly Motylyov, the bank's president.
In its annual TOP-1000 review, The Banker magazine ranked Globex, founded in 1992, as being 7th among Russia's 17 banks that have entered the list of the world's largest, 12th among the banks of Eastern Europe and 680th in the world. Globex's assets, as of April 1, 2004, amounted to 34,083 million rubles, while its funds equaled 10,471 million rubles. The bank's profits were reported at 428 million rubles.
Globex, which used to concentrate on funds clearing and still provides clearing services to 120 Russian banks with daily turnovers of above $100 million, has decided to become closer to retail banks, the bank's management said at a press conference Friday, where visitors were given fuzzy bears to symbolize warmth and comfort. The bank began to serve its first individual clients two years ago. "We intend to turn Globex into a normal national brand," Motylyov said.
Besides daily operations, another of the new office's key roles will be involvement in large investment projects in real estate and agriculture in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast. Globex expects to invest into a project worth about $15 million, given that the return on investments would be no less than 25-30 percent, Motylyov said.
"Working with foreign partners is a priority for us. In St. Petersburg, there is a demand for cheap loans, and foreign banks have lower interest rates, " Motylyov said. "We are not ready to give housing loans yet, but we provide loans on consumer goods. We also give banking guarantees for a fee," he added. "Our advances portfolio is 30 billion rubles. Doubling the portfolio cannot be ruled out," Motylyov said.
The bank holds no budget funds. "In the middle of the '90s, Globex used to provide services to the entire customs committee's budget of expenditures. This was a wrong strategy," Motylyov said.
Globex is a difficult bank to comment on, Richard Hainsworth of Rus Rating in Moscow said in a telephone interview Monday. The finances they publish are jump-around and rickety, he said. Globex's balance sheet has changed so radically over the past six months, that it may imply a radical change in their strategy, Hainsworth said. Thus, he added, it would be wise to wait and see that if strategy reveals itself.
Globex, currently operating in eight Russian regions via affiliates - Rosinbank-Sibir, Yuzhny Region and Avtovazbank - hopes to open offices in Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg, Perm, Chelyabinsk and Volgograd in 2004, and to enter all of the country's cities with populations of over 1 million by 2007. Globex has 12 offices in Moscow and plans to open 13 more this year.
TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: Aeroflot to Hike Fares
MOSCOW (SPT) - Flagship carrier Aeroflot plans to increase ticket prices on international flights, the airline said Wednesday.
"Aeroflot will soon begin revising its tariff policy," Interfax reported Aeroflot's commercial director Yevgeny Bachurin as saying.
"We plan to set our tariffs at a level lower than that of our international competitors by 5 percent," he said.
Bachurin would not say by how much Aeroflot ticket prices will grow, but he did say the price hike is linked to the airline's planned entry into the SkyTeam global airline alliance with Air France and Delta Air Lines.
He added that ticket pricing would remain unchanged on domestic flights.
Aeroflot said Wednesday that it carried 1.8 million passengers in the first four months of the year, up 17 percent from the same period last year.
Prices May Grow Soon
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - Consumer prices may rise 0.6 percent in May, Interfax reported Monday, citing Andrei Klepach, director of the Economic Development and Trade Ministry's macroeconomic forecasts department.
The government on June 10 may agree to raise this year's economic growth forecast from 6.4 percent after raising its forecast for the price of crude oil, Klepach said at the briefing in Moscow, Interfax reported. The current forecast for the Russian blend of Urals oil is $27.5 a barrel, the news service said.
The government may also raise the forecast for industrial output this year to between 6 percent and 6.1 percent from the current 5.9 percent, according to Klepach. Russia's gross domestic product expanded by 8 percent in the first four months of the year from the year-ago period, he said. The country's trade surplus totaled about $24 billion in the period.
Exports rose 23 percent to $51 billion, and imports advanced 21 percent to between $26.6 billion and $26.7 billion, Klepach reported, according to Interfax.
2nd Kempinski for City
St. Petersburg (SPT) - A second five-star Kempinski hotel is set to open in the city by the end of 2004. The hotel will be located in a renovated 19th-century historical building on the Moika embankment near the Hermitage.
The hotel will have close to 200 rooms, some opening to a panoramic view of Palace Square and the Church on the Spilled Blood.
Oil Production to Grow
NEW YORK (SPT) - Russia said it will continue to increase its oil production between 5 and 10 percent annually, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Sunday, Reuters reported.
"Last year we produced 421 million metric tons. Annually we increase production by 5 to 10 percent. We are going to maintain this momentum," Kudrin told reporters on the sidelines of the Group of Seven finance officials' meeting in New York.
"We do share the opinion of the G-8 [Group of Eight] in general. Currently the market needs an additional amount of oil.
We are sending the right message to the effect that the production of oil needs to be increased," Kudrin said.
TITLE: EU Backs Russia's Bid to Join the WTO
AUTHOR: By Alex Fak and Caroline McGregor
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The European Union has thrown its weight behind Russia's bid to enter the World Trade Organization in exchange for a promise from Moscow to gradually liberalize gas prices and trade and perhaps ratify the Kyoto Protocol.
"The EU has met us halfway in talks over the WTO and that cannot but positivelyaffect our position on the Kyoto Protocol," President Vladimir Putin told reporters after the two sides signed a more than 400-page trade deal at a summit Friday.
Putin stressed that Russia "did not package the issues of WTO and the Kyoto Protocol" - as many observers have suggested it was doing in an attempt to obtain better WTO entry terms from the EU.
"I cannot say 100% how things will be, because ratification is not an issue for the president but for parliament," Putin said of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming. "But we will accelerate this process."
The trade deal is vital because the EU, which recently increased from 15 to 25 members, is Russia's top trading partner, accounting for more than half of the country's foreign trade.
Bilateral trade talks began six years ago, though the bulk of the work took place in the last two years. They grew increasingly intense over the past month, after European Trade commissioner Pascal Lamy and Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref met in Luxembourg on April 27 as negotiators scrambled to get something ready to sign at Friday's summit.
"We've worked around the clock for the last three days," Gref said.
The resulting compromise clearly pleased the two sides. "Both sides gave way in order to accommodate the delicate political and economic issues important to each," EU Commission President Romano Prodi said.
Under strong pressure from the EU to raise low domestic gas prices for industrial users, Russia agreed to increase the price to $37-$42 per 1,000 cubic meters by 2006 and $49 -$57 by 2010, from the current $28. But Gazprom will remain the export monopoly, while the EU will gain limited access to Russian pipelines, not transit rights. Export duties on gas will be capped at 30 percent.
Despite the wishes of recently reinstated Telecommunications Minister Leonid Reiman, Rostelekom will lose its monopoly on long-distance telephone calls by 2007.
"The monopoly in this country is going to give way to a European-accepted mechanism of cross-subsidization of the local operators at the expense of the more profitable long-distance operators," Gref said.
Russia will by 2013 revise the fees that EU airlines pay to fly over Siberia, which the EU calls discriminatory. Russia secured a seven-year transfer period for lowering tariffs on new cars, although the complete details have yet to be worked out, Interfax reported, citing unidentified officials at the Economic Development and Trade Ministry.
Russia agreed not to exceed tariff levels of 7.6 percent for industrial goods, 11 percent for fishery products, 13 percent for agricultural goods and tariff rate quotas of 600 million euros ($720 million) on meat and poultry. It also said it would cut industrial import tariffs from 18 percent to 8 percent within eight years.
But Russia made only vague promises to liberalize telecommunications, transportation, construction, tourism and financial services sectors and refused to lift a ban blocking foreign banks from opening branches. "If you have red lines of your own" on which no compromise is possible, "sometimes you have to accept that the other side has red lines, too," Lamy said, explaining the EU's acceptance of a deal without Russian concessions on foreign bank branches or greater gas market liberalization.
"I'm happy with the deal as it is. If I weren't, there would be no deal," Lamy said. "This is the final document. We're not going back to the table," as happened in similar talks with China.
The Europeans promised to defend Russia's demand to keep subsidizing its farmers to the tune of $13 billion per year.
Gref said agricultural tariffs might even grow if necessary to protect the hard-hit sector.
The EU farm policy is among the most generous in the world, and is condemned by some economists for aggravating the plight of Third World farmers by artificially lowering world prices on their crops.
The centerpiece of the summit, however, was the agreement on gas prices - although here, too, Russia did not appear to give up much.
The agreed prices "fully match those already approved in the government's energy strategy," Gref said.
Industrial users in the EU have been paying more than $100 per 1,000 cubic meters as of 2002, or nearly four times as much as Russian corporate users, said Peter Westin, an economist at Aton Capital.
"The whole initiative for restructuring Gazprom has to be accompanied by an increase in tariffs because the split-off companies have to become self-sufficient," Westin said.
Noncompetitive domestic firms say low gas prices help offset the higher costs of doing business in Russia, including dealing with crumbling infrastructure, a colder climate and greater transport distances.
The one company most affected by higher gas prices will be electricity monopoly Unified Energy Systems, which consumes almost 40 percent of domestic gas sales. Its head, Anatoly Chubais, however welcomed the deal.
"They are sensible, economically justified prices for gas that correspond to our view," he told Reuters.
The idea behind higher gas prices is to give industry an incentive to use energy more efficiently - and thus reduce emissions.
"The efficient use of energy fits with the EU line to have Russia ratify the Kyoto Protocol," Lamy said.
"What Putin said about the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol means that today's summit was not Russia's diplomatic victory at all," said Mikhail Delyagin, chairman of the Institute for Problems of Globalization and a one-time economic adviser to former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov.
"In fact, Russia has paid for its accession to the WTO by giving up its position on Kyoto,'' Delyagin was quoted by the Los Angeles Times as saying.
Russia hopes to secure a seat at the WTO table by the time the trade body next meets in 2005. It still needs to sign bilateral agreements with China and the United States.
"When Russia and the EU act together, we can have a far-reaching influence globally," Prodi said. With the WTO agreement "we've done precisely this. We've shown the way forward" for U.S. and Chinese deals.
China, a WTO member since 1995 and currently facing a crisis as its rural labor force moves into the coastal areas, is likely to object to onerous labor migration restrictions put up by the Russians.
The Chinese also want Russia to lay a pipeline to Daqing instead of approving a rival Japanese-backed plan to deliver oil to the Far East port of Nakhodka.
U.S. Embassy officials declined to comment on Friday's agreement. But U.S. negotiators have said a main sticking point in WTO talks is Russia's failure to crack down on the theft of intellectual property, which they claim costs the U.S. media industry some $1 billion per year.
The United States may also be displeased with the hazy commitments Russia made Friday on the entrance of foreigners into the telecommunications and financial services sectors, as well as its steadfast determination not to cut hefty import duties on foreign aircraft, said Andrew Somers, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Russia.
EU negotiators may be hoping to leave it to their U.S. counterparts to resolve those sticky issues, said an American business official, who asked not to be identified.
"The U.S. and Europe are looking to each other to carry the weight on different issues," the official said. "It seems ... the Europeans are trying to get the Americans to take the heat."
U.S. trade officials have said they hope to come to a consensus with Russia by the end of this year.
"Agreement with the EU ... is an important step but is not the end of the process," said Chris Weafer, strategist at Alfa Bank. "Russia now needs to strike a similar deal with the U.S., and those negotiations are likely to be tough."
TITLE: 'Phishers' Target Citibank Clients
AUTHOR: By Simon Ostrovsky
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Blamed for going on e-mail "phishing" expeditions in the West, Russian hackers have now tried to bait customers of Citibank CIS.
The country's bankers, authorities and general public seem unprepared to deal with phishing, the latest e-mail borne plague that adds a criminal element to spam. Citibank - whose clients in developed countries have been targeted by electronic fraudsters for over a year - issued a statement earlier this week warning its clients in Russia not to respond to e-mails asking them to supply confidential banking data over the Internet.
"Citibank would never send an e-mail that asked customers to respond by providing sensitive information," the bank said in the statement.
A phishing scam typically entices victims to divulge their bank account and credit card numbers after receiving e-mails linked to what appear to be official company web sites.
In fact they are fake sites that ask victims to verify confidential financial information. Hackers skim this data before redirecting users to authentic web sites, using it to transfer money out of bank accounts or to purchase products over the Internet.
"The attacks started a few months ago, but we haven't registered a single case of somebody divulging their information yet," said Citibank CIS spokeswoman Ludmila Botsan.
Earlier this month, police in Britain arrested 12 suspects from the former Soviet Union alleged to have helped steal hundreds of thousands of pounds through a phishing scam. Phishing cost Americans $1.2 billion last year, according to high-tech consulting firm Gartner.
In Russia, phishing e-mails first surfaced in February, said Alexei Zernov, a representative of anti-virus firm Kaspersky Labs, based in Moscow. He too was not aware of any cases where web users fell for the trick.
"Historically Russian net users have been more savvy than their western counterparts because a much smaller, more exclusive portion of the population uses the Internet here," he said. "But as Internet use grows, this level of net knowledge may drop and more people will be susceptible [to phishing scams]," Zernov said.
One Citibank client said the bank is not doing enough to warn account holders about the threat.
"With the aggressive marketing campaign that they use to advertise their products, you'd think they could say something about the possibility of fraud," said Maria Nicholson, an account holder who said Citibank never informed her about phishing.
Nicholson said she received an e-mail from a phisher a few months ago but did not respond because she realized it was fraudulent.
"A smart person can figure it out," she said. "The subject line of the e-mail was 'Earn up to 75 percent net per annum.' Citibank never offers that much."
The bank said it was taking steps to inform clients. "There is information on our web site, and we plan to start printing a warning on all account statements," Botsan said.
Police too, have been slow to catch on to the trend.
TITLE: Yukos Trial Judge Picked
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: The same judge will preside over the trials of jailed billionaires Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, increasing the likelihood that their request to be tried together will be granted, Khodorkovsky's lawyer, Anton Drel, said Friday.
Drel said the date for trial of Khodorkovsky, who has been imprisoned since October on charges of fraud and tax evasion, will be set at a hearing on May 28. The trial of Lebedev, in jail on similar charges since July, convened on Thursday but was quickly postponed also till May 28.
"The judge will be [Irina] Kolesnikova, the same as for Lebedev," Drel said. "I don't rule out that the court will approve a defense request and merge the cases of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev."
Both tycoons face up to 10 years in prison if convicted.
May 28 may prove to be a defining day in the months-long legal struggle for Yukos, as it is also the day the company's appeal against a potentially crippling $3.4 billion back-tax bill is heard. A Moscow court on Friday upheld the tax evasion claim initiated by federal tax authorities, however due to a rare legal victory scored by Yukos on Wednesday, the court cannot make the company pay taxes or fines before its appeal is heard.
Tax officials completed their investigation into the oil giant in mid-April, concluding that the company owes the tax office 99.4 billion rubles in taxes and fines for the year 2000.
The official probe into Yukos and the October arrest of its then CEO Khodorkovsky are widely seen as a Kremlin-inspired effort to stifle the oil magnate's financial and political clout.
Asked at a news conference Friday what signal the government was trying to send with the Yukos case, President Vladimir Putin said, "The most important signal is that one must not steal."
"Everyone must observe the law, no matter what position he holds and how many millions or billions he has in his private or corporate accounts," Putin said, adding that he would not comment further in order to avoid pressuring the court.
(MT, AP, Reuters, Bloomberg)
TITLE: Club Owner Takes Jazz As Serious Business
AUTHOR: By Sergey Chernov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Ten years ago the JFC Jazz Club changed the local jazz scene by providing a cozy place with an atmosphere of almost no barriers between players and the public, where jazz lovers and curious visitors could feel at home.
Launched on April 12, 1994, as Novy Dzhazovy Klub, or the New Jazz Club, it has enriched the St. Petersburg jazz scene by adding diversity to the mostly mainstream repertoire of the older local jazz venues and hosting avant-garde acts as well as classic jazz players. Its driving force has been Felix Naroditsky, a trumpet player who decided to put all his energy into establishing a jazz venue of world quality.
From the beginning, the New Jazz Club had two competitors. The repertoire of the city's main jazz venue, the Jazz Philharmonic Hall, mainly consisted of two house bands with rare additions of outside jazz bands, while Kvadrat Jazz Club only offered concerts by younger jazz players who mostly played for their colleagues one night a week. But JFC set the goal of nightly performances by all kinds of jazz and jazz-related acts, which it achieved in the course of a few months.
Naroditsky, who played trumpet with the Admiralty Brass Band in the late 1980s and early 1990s, says he was inspired by West European jazz clubs, but also admits the influence of the local Kvadrat Jazz Club and the Jazz Philharmonic Hall.
"I toured quite a lot with the band... when Russian brass bands were a novelty [in Western Europe,] and we were well received at all kinds of festivals in, say, 1989. And when we came to European cities, we used our rare days off to go to music clubs."
Another reason for founding the club was to improve the way jazz musicians were treated at their jobs at primarily non-musical enterprises.
"The incitement was probably a call from a friend of mine, drummer Gary Bagdasaryan, together with whom I studied at music college. He played with saxophonist Mikhail Chernov at the Sadko restaurant. Somebody offered them beer, and they were both fired just for drinking beer. And it occurred to me then, what if there were a place where musicians could be bosses, where nobody could fire musicians?"
Officially, JFC Jazz Club has been registered as the St. Petersburg Regional Fund Novy Dzhazovy Klub (New Jazz Club) since 1994. Since it is a non-profit organization, all the proceeds are invested into thedevelopment of the club, with only modest wages going to the club's staff, Naroditsky said.
"Probably that's why we managed to make such a truly musical club: we have no owners. There's nobody who gave us $1,000,000 and wants $1,200,000 in return," he says.
"That's why we all make our living elsewhere - some work in business, some teach."
The club's first location was the Tauride Gardens, where it occupied the one-story wooden building of a defunct puppet theater, whose rooms were available for rent... except Saturdays, when a South Korean preacher held religious services. Naroditsky and his partner Vitaly Yudenok, who launched a jazz bar called JazzTime last year and now combines it with his duties as JFC's co-manager - originally invested $300. The sum went to buy paint, pay for basic redecoration and some equipment.
A few months later, the JFC team was augmented by jazz pianist Andrei Kondakov, who became the venue's art director and president.
After a massive event that the new club promoted, there was a misunderstanding with the Gardens' administration who thought they should raise the rent payment for the club. As a result, the club folded but reopened a few months later at its current location, 33 Shpalernaya Ulitsa, first as the Olbi Jazz Club - honoring the fruit-trading company that chose to sponsor the venue - but soon renamed after the same company when it changed its name to the Joint Fruit Company, or JFC. Hence, JFC Jazz Club.
The company supports some of the JFC Jazz Club's projects, though they are not owners or official founders of the club, hence the independence.
As with Kvadrat, JFC's main audience was jazz musicians and hardcore jazz fans but it also drew lots of expats who felt that the club had an international quality.
However, Naroditsky reckons that over its 10 year history the JFC Jazz Club brought up its own audience. "If in the beginning it was 70 percent foreigners and 30 percent Russians, now it's the other way around," he said.
The big problem in the mid-1990s was the habit street gangsters - the type with short-cut hair and gym suit attire - had of showing themselves at any newly opened place. But Naroditsky says JFC managed to keep them away without introducing any special security measures like face control, because the club's very interiors and atmosphere were alien to such individuals.
However, the ride was not always smooth over the 10 years of JFC's existence. In 2002, the club ran into trouble with KUGI, the City Property Committee, which refused to extend the rent agreement with the club.
"For me probably the biggest offence was when we were having problems with KUGI and I was told, 'Don't worry, we'll just close your place, that's all,'" Naroditsky said.
"It turned out that until that moment I simply didn't understand that what we were building for such a long time, little by little, is so illusory that it can be eliminated by the stroke of a pen or a single word from an official. It brought me back to earth. You could have your own vision and be well-known in the city but it could all still be shut down."
In the end, the dispute was resolved when the lease rate was reconsidered. Now the club pays a full rent fee as a commercial organization, rather than the nominal $0.1 it used to pay as a non-commercial structure. Naroditsky argues that the city administration should support such cultural enterprises as the JFC Jazz Club instead of giving them trouble.
"I think the Hermitage is good, but there should be something else besides the Hermitage," he said.
"If the place works successfully for 10 years, it probably deserves some attention and preferred terms, because things get harder and harder."
"It makes sense to differentiate between commercial and non-commercial clubs, because it is very hard to make money in the purely music business, and one should understand the value of such a product. It should be like in the European Union. We can't be different. Otherwise, only the strongest will survive, and we understand who is the strongest: it's casinos, striptease clubs - the things that don't involve much thinking."
Apart from directing the JFC Jazz Club, Naroditsky teaches showbusiness marketing at the University of Culture and Arts, and is an associate of the Center for the Development of Creative Industries, a non-profit organization sponsored by the European Union. He also runs the Art Sessions, a network of local club promoters. Last year, Naroditsky helped to launch the Peter and Paul International Jazz Festival, an annual open-air music event located at the Peter and Paul Fortress, and is the festival's art director.
Longtime local jazz promoter and now London-based BBC Russian service journalist Alexander Kan, who hosts the show "Otkrytaya Muzyka" (Open Music) values Naroditsky's activities highly.
"Felix Naroditsky didn't belong to the people who were known in the jazz scene during the Soviet era; he emerged in newer times," said Kan, speaking by telephone from London.
"He had a new quality from the start - that of an entrepreneur, a businessman, a man who created a structure of a new quality.... With the JFC Jazz Club, he provided a real, serious foundation - both managerial and financial- for the venue, and on the other hand, he was a jazz fan who understood the field. He also invited professional musician Andrei Kondakov as art director and together they managed to create an absolutely remarkable enterprise.
His achievements allow us to speak of the emergence of a new type of manager, one who take jazz seriously and deals with it on a new level."
TITLE: 'Unique' Insurance Demand Grows
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The clients of insurance companies operating in St. Petersburg aren't looking for anything special. They show pragmatism and common sense, mostly signing up for traditional, classical policies, insuring their cars, homes and health.
As managers from insurance company Gaide point out, the demand has only recently begun to change, with clients insuring expensive yachts and boats. "Such deals may reach up to $1,000,000," said a sales manager at Gaide. "It is also getting more common to insure pets and farm animals. A rare cat breed would cost $5000-7000 to insure, and an average cow costs just as much. The more exotic species naturally cost more."
A female client of Yukos-Garant, who was arranging a policy for her Mercedes, requested its "four regular passengers" to be insured as well. The passengers turned out to be the client's four dogs. But such deals are rather an exception.
According to Tatyana Anokhina, an advertising manager at AIG Russia in St. Petersburg, local clients are more conservative in their requests. "We sell a very standard range of policies," she said. "Most of our clients insure their health and property."
As Sergei Safronov, general director of Avesta points out, even the classic insurance policies have not yet become common in St. Petersburg. "Even though it is believed that the mentality of people in St. Petersburg is close to the Western way of thinking, the idea of insurance is still very far from the masses," he said. As extreme sports get more popular, the teams are looking for partnerships with insurance companies. Thus, Avesta has an agreement with Drive, a local windsurfing club. The company is also currently involved in "Russian Extreme," a project in Morocco, which involves making a documentary about top-flight Russian surfers competing there.
"The spirit of surfing is very close to the philosophy of our business. You can't predict the elements but you can get insured from the consequences," Safronov said.
Bruce Springsteene's voice is insured for $6 million, while Marleen Dietrich had a $1 million policy. In Russia, sport and art insurance deals are typically not as highly valued as in Europe and in the United States, for obvious reasons. "You should sign your deal where you earn most of your money to increase the sum of the policy," said Yevgenyi Gurevich, head of the marketing department of Russkyi Mir, another local insurance company. "We provide insurance for the local soccer club Zenit, and the policies are not as expensive as in most of the European clubs because it all depends on how much a player earns. If a Spanish club player earns $5 million a year, and can't play for four months due to an illness or trauma, his insurance company would pay him $2 million. Even if you value your legs highly, insurance companies don't get the figures out of the blue."
For the above reasons, Russian sportsmen, musicians, dancers and singers who frequently perform abroad prefer to insure their "instruments" outside of Russia. The companies employing the artists usually don't insure their bodies or voices.
"The Mariinsky Theater insures sets and costumes from the shows as well as musical instruments because many of them are very old and valuable," said Oksana Tokranova, the company's press secretary. "But all of the above is our property. We don't insure our dancers' legs or singers' voices as this is the property of the performers, which helps them earn money."
Sometimes the performers get a complimentary insurance package valid for the duration of a particular tour. Thus, local insurance company Class granted the Mariinsky medical insurance worth $6 million valid during their week-long tour to the United States last November. Such contracts attract much publicity and become a good self-promotion opportunity for the firms.
According to Gurevich, in Moscow there is almost the same range of services available as in St. Petersburg, despite a much larger market size. "The only difference is that we operate on a regional level, while Moscow-based companies work on a federal level," Gurevich said. "The demand for, say, anti-terrorist insurance is very low everywhere."
In St. Petersburg, with its 7,500 historical monuments, there is quite some room for the insurance business. Russkyi Mir attempted to draw attention to this niche two years ago, insuring the sculpture group Chariots of Glory situated at the top of the General Staff Building in Palace Square for $100,000 after the monument was severely damaged by fire.
"With more wealthy people in town, there will be more variety," the manager from Gaide said. "Over the past several years more wealthy clients began to insure graves. Some of them have burial vaults or even chapels decorated with marble statues designed by well-known architects."
Generally, however, the Russian insurance market is still well behind Europe and the United States, where there is a demand for literally everything.
London-based company Goodfellow Rebecca Ingrams Pearson (GRIP) sold about 4 000 insurance policies for the Immaculate Conception to religious British females. The policy was a bargain of $150 per annum but in the event of the occurrence insured against each victim would receive $1.5 million from the company. American insurance giant Lloyd's offers a policy covering death from the fall of a Russian satellite. The prominent Australian cricket player Mervyn Hughes, known for his extravagant moustache, took out a $200,000 policy to protect his facial treasure.
GRIP provides another extravagant and popular service: a policy for being kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. GRIP sold over 20,000 such policies but a Russian insurance company would only shrug at such a request, as it is impossible to get a license for such a service in the country. Judging from the high numbers of UFO societies across Russia, there is a certain potential for such deals here.
TITLE: More Jobs Created By Offshoring
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: Technology investors in India, Russia and other emerging markets must be willing to roll up their sleeves when they open their pocketbooks, participants in a World Bank conference in Washington said Tuesday.
"What companies need at this stage is more than capital. They need hands-on support and management expertise," said Moshen Khalil, director of information and communications technology at the World Bank.
The success of high-tech manufacturing in China and technical services in India has created opportunities across the Third World that will increase as markets develop, investors said.
Countries like Brazil and Russia boast rapidly growing economies and large, educated populations willing to work for low wages, providing an irresistible lure for U.S. companies looking to keep costs down and venture capitalists hoping to find the next Google.
But investors must negotiate a thicket of unstable government policies, underdeveloped financial markets and shaky infrastructure in much of the world, participants at the International Finance Corporation Global Technology Conference said.
"You have to be willing to be intrusive in these places in ways you don't have to in Arizona," said David Bonderman, a founding partner of the investment firm Texas Pacific Group.
While citizens may have ample technical knowledge, marketing expertise is rare in countries governed by communist or authoritarian regimes, experts said.
Delta Capital Management CEO Patricia Cloherty said her company was looking to invest in telecommunications and pharmaceuticals in Russia, despite weak intellectual-property protection and a population that has little management experience.
"The Russian population clearly has resident brainpower. The enablers are not in place for it to be capitalized on," she said.
Khalil said that domestic markets were beginning to develop, ensuring that goods and services do not flow entirely to the United States and other developing economies.
Still, new figures on offshore outsourcing suggest that U.S. companies are sending even more white-collar jobs to low-wage countries such as India, China and Russia than researchers originally estimated.
Roughly 830,000 U.S. service-sector jobs - ranging from telemarketers and accountants to software engineers and chief technology officers - will move abroad by the end of 2005, according to a report released last week by Forrester Research.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based firm projected in 2002 that 588,000 jobs would move overseas by the end of next year.
Forrester also increased its long-term job loss prediction, estimating that 3.4 million jobs will leave the United States by 2015. The company originally predicted a long-term job loss of 3.3 million positions - a figure that members of Congress and U.S. labor activists said was cause for great alarm. Researchers said the short-term losses surged as companies began experimenting, but the long-term numbers will probably be moderate.
(Reuters, AP)
TITLE: Tick-Borne Diseases Roam the Countryside
AUTHOR: By Simone Kozuharov
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Long the thorn in the Russian side, tick season has officially arrived bringing with it diseases for dacha, or country house, enthusiasts and the like.
"In Russia, ticks are particularly active in early May, peak throughout June and taper off in August and September," said Yulia Koshcheeva, an epidemiologist at EuroMed Clinic.
Alexander Routchenkov, a family practitioner at International MEDEM Clinic and Hospital, said that there are "two periods of high tick activity in the St. Petersburg region: April through June and August through September."
Risk of infection for those who never visit forests, fields or pastures is low, but beware not just the die-hard dachniki, but those who plan to take at least one trip to the dacha this summer for a little rest, relaxation and shashliki. Even brief exposure to the tick's habitat invites a bite and later, possible infection.
Tick-borne diseases include "Lyme disease, tick-borne encephalitis, Q Fever, Tularemia, Rocky Mountain and Spotted Fever," Routchenkov said.
"According to the statistics for 2003 in St. Petersburg, there were 691 registered cases of Lyme disease and 134 cases of tick-borne encephalitis - no registered cases of Tularimea [or] Q Fever, though they are a potential threat in the area," he said. "The other tick-borne diseases do not occur in the [Leningrad] region."
Lyme disease, also occurring in North America, is an inflammatory disease affecting the skin in its initial onset and then spreads to affect the joints and nervous system in more advanced stages. It can also affect internal organs, although not as severely, in these stages, Koshcheeva said.
"The first symptom is usually an expanding rash," she said.
The area bitten usually serves as the rash's epicenter, is often solid red or blotchy "or a central spot surrounded by clear skin that is in turn ringed by an expanding red rash - [it] looks like a bull's eye," she said.
The rash occurs on average one week after infection, but has a range of one to 30 days. The average diameter of a tick bite is about 12 to 15 centimeters, could be warm to the touch and is not usually itchy or painful, Koshcheeva said.
"Other symptoms such as joint pains, chills, fever and fatigue are common, but they may not seem serious enough to require medical attention," Koshcheeva said. "These symptoms may be brief, only to recur as a broader spectrum of symptoms as the disease progresses.
"Untreated, the bacterium travels through the bloodstream and other symptoms including severe fatigue, a stiff, aching neck and peripheral nervous system involvement such as tingling or numbness in the extremities of facial palsy [paralysis] can occur," she said.
Tick-borne encephalitis, while more dangerous, is less infectious and far less likely to be contracted from a single tick bite.
It is a "virus maintained in nature in small mammals, domestic livestock and certain species of birds. The disease is transmitted to humans by the bite of an infected tick or, less commonly, by ingestion of un-boiled milk from infected animals, especially goats," Koshcheeva said.
Unpasteurized milk from friends' and loved ones' dachas might seem like a fresh alternative to the store bought, packaged variety, but it may be dangerous if it comes from an infected animal.
Infection risk areas include parts of western and central Europe, Scandinavia and the former Soviet Union, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Health Information for International Travel.
"The severity of disease, incidence of sequelae (after effects) and case-fatality rates are higher in the Far East and eastern regions of Russia than in western or central Europe," the advisory said.
There is an existing vaccine against tick-borne encephalitis, but it should only be administered until the beginning of April in order to be affective.
"It has to be done before the beginning of tick season," Routchenkov said. "If you are planning to stay here for the next season, you should get the first series of the vaccine starting next November."
If vaccination has not been done by April 1, it is important to take other precautionary steps.
"You can prevent all of the tick-borne diseases by avoiding areas of high risk, wearing long-sleeved shirts and pants," Routchenkov said. "It helps to use repellents with DEET, which you can buy at the pharmacy."
Other preventive measures should not be overlooked, like avoiding ticks in the places they often hide.
Such places included shady, moist ground coverings, in tall grass and other shrubbery.
"They also inhabit lawns and gardens, especially at the edges of woodlands," Koshcheeva said.
"Potential hosts, which include all wild birds and mammals, domestic animals and humans, acquire ticks only by direct contact with them; an infected tick can transmit the infection to the humans and animals it bites," she said.
The disease often manifests itself as a vague form of flu-like illness that lasts about a week.
"It may also present as a benign, aseptic meningitis," Koshcheeva said. "There is an abrupt onset of signs of encephalitis such as tremor, dizziness and altered sensorium."
Only about 1 percent to 5 percent of cases result in death.
"If you find a tick - don't remove it yourself - visit your doctor immediately," Routchenkov said.
Immediately is the operative word because, according to Koshcheeva, ticks can be attached to skin for 36-48 hours before transmission of Lyme disease occurs. "If you find a tick attached to your skin, there is no need to panic," she said. "Therefore, your chances of contracting Lyme disease are greatly reduced if you remove a tick within the first 24 hours.
"Remember, too, that the majority of early Lyme disease cases are easily treated and cured."
Koshcheeva also noted that not all ticks are infected with disease.
"Inspect yourself after a visit to the countryside," Routchenkov said.
Dr. Koshcheeva's words on prevention:
. Wear enclosed shoes and light-colored clothing with a tight weave to spot ticks easily.
. Stay on clear, well-traveled trails
. Avoid sitting directly on the ground or on stone walls [which are] havens for ticks and their hosts.
. Keep long hair tied back, especially when gardening.
. If you tuck long pants into socks and shirts into pants, be aware that ticks that contact your clothes will climb upward in search of exposed skin. This means they may climb to hidden areas of the head and neck if not intercepted first; spot-check clothes frequently.
. Clothes can be sprayed with either DEET or Permethrin. Only DEET can be used on exposed skin, but never in high concentrations; follow the manufacturer's directions.
. Upon returning home, clothes can be spun in the dryer for 20 minutes to kill any unseen ticks.
. A shower and shampoo may help to dislodge crawling ticks, but is only somewhat effective. Inspect yourself and your children carefully after a shower.
. Any contact with vegetation, even playing in the yard, can result in exposure to ticks, so careful daily self-inspection is necessary whenever you engage in outdoor activities and the temperature exceeds 4 degrees Celsius - the temperature above which deer ticks are active.
TITLE: Good Grounds to Be Shy of Kyoto
AUTHOR: By Amity Shlaes
TEXT: Russia, what a tease. First, it dithers on ratifying the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Next, its bad-boy diplomats humiliate the blue suits from the European Union by continuing to dither - even when the EU types beg. Finally, President Vladimir Putin says Russia will probably ratify. But he will string out the process as long as possible, even though the EU will now support his country's World Trade Organization membership.
Russia's inconsistency seems rash. Kyoto will go into effect if it is ratified by nations that emit 55 percent of the developed world's carbon gases. Because the United States, that other rogue, refuses to ratify, only Russia carries the weight to take the treaty across that 55 percent line. Under the treaty, developed nations must cut their carbon emissions; the same rule won't apply to developing nations.
One might think that Russia would leap at a chance to prove itself the world's multilateral hero. After all, there are things Russia wants from Europe as well - not least that WTO membership. Besides, it is not every day that a former superpower gets the chance to save the planet.
Still, the image of Russia as a rash tease is too simple. Presidential economic adviser Andrei Illarionov noted during a recent swing through Western capitals that it is possible to defend Russia's Kyoto stalling in four simple words: "Russia needs to grow," he said over the phone last week from Washington, where he was preparing the ground for next month's Group of Eight summit in Sea Island, Georgia. Russia is not "developed" - it is "developing" and therefore cannot afford to cut emissions, he reasoned. As for the Kyoto treaty, Illarionov calls it "a killer of living standards;" compliance would simply cost Russia too much.
This argument sounds like a stretch. After all, Russia has come so far that it is beginning to feel "developed" to outsiders. Under Putin its economy has expanded by more than 5 percent per year. Surely Moscow can spare a percentage point or two if it means doing something important for the environment. Surely sacrifice is part of what it means to be a G-8 member: noblesse oblige.
Well, no, not really, Illarionov says. There is almost no instance when a government should put a grand international cause before domestic growth, he contends. Indeed, the country that ceases to view itself as "developing" and instead views itself as comfortably "developed" sets in train the mechanism of its own decline. As he speaks, the listener imagines a sort of Platonic ideal: the eternally developing nation.
The growth-above-all rule is not one the Putin team worked up retroactively to get out of Kyoto responsibility. It is its philosophy, one it intends to be very different from the socially driven philosophies of postwar Western Europe. Just as communist Russia once pursued top-down growth with zeal, Russia's free marketeers are enthusiastically seeking to establish the small-government conditions for growth from the bottom up.
Recently Putin ordered government offices and ministries to reduce staff by 20 percent. He has reduced the number of ministries by a third. Oil money has helped the budget, but so have policy changes: A radical flat tax of 13 percent reduced tax evasion and increased revenues.
Some may ask whether such a go-for-broke policy would not be lethal for the environment. Certainly that was the case in the Soviet era. Again, not really, Illarionov says. The difference is that Russia is now a freer market. In such a market, progress leads to environmental protections, but only when the nation puts private sector growth first. His argument springs from economic research showing that when economies grow they begin to do away with pollution because it is simply wasted output. This phenomenon is known to economists as the environmental Kuznets curve.
What's more, Illarionov argues, the best environmental reforms come out of voluntary actions by the locals in the private sector, municipalities and so on; the worst come out of compulsory international law. Of Kyoto, he says: "It looks like it is very nice, similar to the way in which communism and socialism looked very nice." Despite Kyoto's talk of market-friendly mechanisms, its potential to become a supranational monster is "a fact of life." Such arguments will be too strong for some. They may not even determine Russia's Kyoto policy, as Putin indicated recently.
Regardless of whether Russia ratifies Kyoto, the general Russian emphasis on dynamic growth is important, especially in the context of the Sea Island summit. G-8 attendees France and Germany these days seem to confirm the Illarionov thesis that the term "developed" can be treacherous and that big-spending, complacent and collectivist nations bring about their own decline. In France, one in four youths is unemployed. In Germany, the consensus is now that the country muffed the economics of reunification and brought disaster upon itself by spending when it should have cut. Western Europe's crises are genuine and demand action.
Of course French and German leaders may choose to make their own lives easier by devoting Sea Island and future summits to chattering about growth while doing nothing about it. Or to dithering over Iraq, oil prices and Kyoto while neglecting growth. But doesn't that make them the rash ones?
Amity Shlaes is a columnist for the Financial Times, where this comment first appeared.
TITLE: Putin Should Heed Ruling On Gusinsky
TEXT: A rebuke from the European Court of Human Rights will hardly have President Vladimir Putin quaking in his boots. Yet this week's verdict in the case of the exiled businessman Vladimir Gusinsky sends the Kremlin an important reminder of the standards by which it will be measured if it wants to be ranked among Europe's democracies.
The timing could hardly be better, with legal proceedings gathering speed in the Yukos affair, Putin's latest and most significant assault on the oligarchs. The trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the company founder, on fraud charges is due to start in a few weeks. The trial of Platon Lebedev, his main associate, began Thursday.
Gusinsky was arrested on fraud charges shortly after the president took office. Proceedings were dropped after Gusinsky promised to sell his media empire to the state-controlled company Gazprom. The human rights court found the authorities had abused Gusinsky's rights by employing legal instruments for commercial ends. The judges did not say so, but as Gusinsky's outlets often attacked Putin, there was also clear political purpose to the Kremlin's action.
The tactics employed in the Gusinsky affair have since become standard practice under Putin's increasingly authoritarian rule. The president often speaks of enforcing the rule of law when dealing with the oligarchs. But his idea of law is the efficient imposition of the Kremlin's authority, not the defense of a set of rules to which all, including the Kremlin, are subject.
The judges hearing the Khodorkovsky and Lebedev cases must now show true independence. Any sign of official pressure on the courts would further undermine faith in Russian justice. However, the real damage has already been done in the arbitrary way that the Yukos two have been selected for attack. They were clearly chosen because of Khodorkovsky's willingness to challenge Putin politically.
Admittedly, in pursuing Khodorkovsky, Putin is challenging the grotesquely unfair way in which a few rapacious businessmen seized control of Russia's wealth in the 1990s. But it is wrong to tackle this grave injustice by targeting some politically awkward individuals while allowing others to keep their ill-gotten gains. A fairer approach would be to set out first the standards by which the actions of the 1990s are to be judged, then act on clearly established legal criteria.
Having easily won a second term, Putin faces few effective critics at home. But he does want Russia to be a respected member of the clubs established by the world's leading democracies. So he should listen, at least with one ear, to well-founded international criticism. Russia accepted the authority of the European Court of Human Rights when it joined the Council of Europe. So it must accept the court's judgment in the Gusinsky affair, and recognize that its implications go far beyond the treatment of one man.
This comment first appeared as an editorial in the Financial Times.
TITLE: A Market-Based Communal Service Is in Sight
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Gryaznevich
TEXT: City Hall's plans to reform the communal housing services sector are advanced, but has the government thought of all the fishhooks?
The plan applies mainly to old houses built during the Soviet era, which are serviced by district housing administrations. The ultimate aim of the reform is to make communal housing services a normal branch of the modern economy, in which demand determines supply and service-providers operate in an open, competitive market. The role of the government will be restricted to the establishment of a minimum standard of housing maintenance according to prices based on standards it will set. Social assistance will be offered to the less well-off who are unable to pay enough for these standards. The content of the reform is a program of concrete measures implemented to transform the existing communal housing services system into a more desirable one.
Taking into account the current state of affairs, the main developer of the reform, Oleg Vikhtyuk, vice-chairman of the housing committee, has set out four fundamental tasks for the reform. The first is the concentration in the hands of the population of all means - extracted from all sources - for the servicing and maintenance of housing. The second is the transition to management of each individual residential building. Each house will have its own manager, either an individual or a managing company, and tenants will be able, either indirectly or through a management organization, to select the firms that will service their house. The third task is the organization of a free, competitive market of service-providing organizations. The fourth and final task is to achieve genuine self-management of housing so that at least the majority of dwellings will be managed by tenants who will form condominiums.
For the completion of the first task - the concentration of all means in the hands of the population - individual accounts for everyone in the city renting flats and all those on state benefits will be set up. As the main reformer points out, there is also a possibility that accounts will be able to be grouped for whole buildings and an account can be set up for each house. This mechanism will enable a condominium to take over financial management of a property.
After this the city government will have to transfer money to these accounts. However, the main problem will be to get citizens to join the condominiums. This is absolutely essential, because without direct, active and responsible participation by the tenants in the management of their house, improving communal housing services will be unsuccessful. In a market economy, the consumer runs the show, and if he is unable to dictate his will, then there can be no market. But as we all know, we behave highly irresponsibly. Reformers don't want to force us to join condominiums by using the law - as has been done in Estonia, for example - and are suggesting a whole range of other incentives.
Significant easing of the procedure concerning the formulation of a condominium - the most expensive part of which is the cadastral survey of the territory adjoining each house - will be shouldered by the authorities themselves, which makes the procedure itself a lot simpler.
The beginnings of a market in St Petersburg, both for managers and service-providers, is already visible. Around 60 private companies service new houses. Reformers intend to attract them to work on the old housing stock. Business is in agreement with this, since the new tariffs being brought in by the Legislative Assembly suit them. Moreover, as entrepreneurs admit, the reforms brought in by the city, as well as tenders, are progressing in an honest fashion. Thus competition will be completely fair.
In general, the scheme is a good one, and the first signs of good prospects are there for all to see. However, in every ointment there is a fly. This will be the focus of next week's article.
Vladimir Gryaznevich is a political analyst with Expert Severo-Zapad magazine. His comment was first broadcast on Ekho Moskvy in St. Petersburg on Friday.
TITLE: Chris Floyd's Global Eye
AUTHOR: By Chris Floyd
TEXT: Goon Squad
Matters of great importance are suddenly in the air all around us: stark evidence of war crimes by the leaders of the West; the growing certainty of a humiliating geopolitical defeat inflicted on the world's greatest power; terrorism and torture as the mirrored emblems of the age, a deadly double helix giving rise to a hideous global reality.
It's tempting in such times to inflate the image of those in the forefront of events, painting them, for good or ill, in the colors of legend: bold, outsized figures, Great Ones playing dice with nations, characters whose roiling depths - tragic, evil or heroic - transcend the puny limits of the common herd.
Although on rare occasions this viewpoint might hold true, the squalid history of our ill-cobbled species provides endless examples to the contrary.
And they don't come any more squalid than the crew now steering the American boat straight into the shoals of disaster. For despite all the grandiose political rhetoric and world-historical perturbations emanating from the Bush Regime's imperial project, we should never lose sight of one simple fact: Deep down, these guys are nothing but cheap hoods, two-bit chiselers hustling for loot, thug-brained goons with no more grandeur about them than the meanest pack of Mafia knee-breakers. For them, statecraft is just a crowbar for bashing heads and jimmying open lock-boxes. Two recent stories, both obscured by the blood and thunder of the Iraqi crack-up, illustrate this ugly truth.
Throughout the spring, as hundreds died in the spiraling conflict, as Regime bosses applied their hardcore "anti-terrorist" tortures to innocent bystanders raked up in their occupation nets, as Regime mouthpieces prated endlessly of "liberation" and "sovereignty," Bush viceroy Paul Bremer was quietly signing a series of edicts that will give the United States effective control over the military, ministries - and money - of any Iraqi government for years to come, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Bremer has placed U.S.-appointed "commissions" made up of Americans and local puppets throughout Iraqi government agencies; the ministers supposedly in charge weren't even told of the edicts.
These boards "will serve multiyear terms and have significant authority to run criminal investigations, award contracts, direct troops and subpoena citizens," the Journal reports. Any new Iraqi government "will have little control over its armed forces, lack the ability to make or change laws and be unable to make major decisions within specific ministries without tacit U.S. approval, say U.S. officials."
Earlier Bremer edicts laid the Iraqi economy wide open to ruthless exploitation by Bush-approved foreign "investors;" dominance of such key sectors as banking, communications - and energy - is already well advanced. The latest dictates aim to ensure that this organized looting goes on, no matter what kind of makeshift "interim government" the United Nations manage to piece together.
Bush's plans to build a Saddamite fortress embassy in Baghdad and 14 permanent military bases around the country are designed to provide the knee-breaking "security" for these lucrative arrangements.
Each passing day of scandal and carnage makes this sweet dream seem ever more unlikely, of course. But not to worry; Bush always has another country to loot - his own. The second ignored story tells of domestic corruption small in scale, but large in revelatory power.
In April, Bush quietly gave a mining conglomerate larded with his top contributors a little gift: $155 million worth of federal land, the Denver Post reports. Invoking an obscure 1872 law designed to help frontier prospectors gain title to their small mining claims, Bush turned over a swathe of prime Colorado mountaintop property to the firm of Dodge Phelps, whose board is packed with oil men, military contractors and official Bush "Pioneers": corporate fat cats who've strongarmed at least $100,000 from their friends - and employees - for Bush campaign coffers.
Because the never-updated 1872 law requires that federal mining land be sold for $5 per acre, Bush's bagmen only had to pony up $875 for the whole spread - in an area where land is worth a staggering $1 million per acre. The idea is to build an elite ski playground on the looted public property - even though the law requires that such land sales be used for actual mining.
But what is law in this bold new Abu Ghraib era, when Bush's own legal team pronounces the Geneva Convention "obsolete"? In fact, as Newsweek reports, they explicitly told Bush to repudiate the law, to establish the precedent that there is "no binding legal effect on either the President or the military" in wartime. Otherwise, they warned, he could be "subject to prosecution [under U.S. law] for war crimes" - especially "if the political climate changes."
In the Colorado caper, as in so many others, Bush is following in the mucky footprints of his father. In the waning days of his failed presidency, George I used the 1872 law to cut a sweetheart deal with Barrick, the Canadian mining giant. For $10,000 in chump change to the federal treasury, Old Bush gave Barrick government land containing $10 billion in gold, The Observer reports.
Afterwards, Bush I became a "special advisor" to Barrick, pocketing kickbacks from the gold deal for seven years and traveling the world on behalf of his corporate master, trying to rig up insider deals with his "old friends" - bloodthirsty dictators like Indonesia's Suharto and Zaire's Mobutu. In return, Barrick later poured streams of its Bush-gotten gold into Little George's 2000 campaign.
That's how they operate, these cheap hoods. Like Saddam, like Osama, they mouth great pieties, they strut and preen on the world's stage. But underneath they're still nothing but witless, murdering, money-grubbing goons.
For annotational references, see the Opinion section at www.sptimesrussia.com
TITLE: Economist Chosen as Next German President
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BERLIN - Horst Koehler, a former head of the International Monetary Fund, was elected Germany's ninth postwar president on Sunday with calls for fresh optimism and innovation to secure the nation's standing in the world.
Chosen by a special national assembly in the Reichstag parliament building, Koehler launched into an acceptance speech that touched on themes roiling Germany as it struggles with the need for economic and social change.
"As a trained economist, I cannot spare you the conclusion that I am worried about the state of the German economy, jobs and social security," he said after defeating the government's candidate, university professor Gesine Schwan.
Nominated by the center-right opposition, he foiled Schwan's bid to become the country's first female president.
Koehler will take over as head of state from President Johannes Rau on July 1, moving into the Bellevue presidential palace in Berlin for a five-year term.
Though largely ceremonial, the 61-year-old's new post gives him influence on major national topics, moral authority and an important role representing Germany abroad.
Koehler spent most of the last four years in Washington as head of the 183-nation IMF and headed the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development before that.
Koehler said Sunday he will encourage Germans to become more self-reliant and his country to become "a land of ideas."
"We have to face reality: Germany has to fight for its place in the 21st century," he said, calling for "a renewal from the bottom up."
Conservative opposition leaders claimed Koehler's win as a boost to their ambition to unseat Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in 2006 - a recurring theme since Koehler quit the IMF post when the center-right Christian Democrats and Free Democrats nominated him in March.
Schroeder's poll ratings have slumped amid an unpopular drive to cut social programs, meant to push Germany out of its economic doldrums and 10 percent unemployment rate.
Members of Schroeder's Social Democrats and the Greens among the 1,204 assembly delegates were disappointed.
"It would of course be nice if Germany could have a female president for a change," said German biathlete Kathi Wilhelm, a Social Democratic delegate.
Koehler has been praised as a leader who can make sure that Germany does not fall behind in an age of globalization, and a man with a strong international background, both professionally and personally.
Before his international career, he held a series of finance posts in the German government and helped negotiate German reunification in 1990.
Yet he was so little known among the general public that a newspaper headlined "Horst Who?" when he was nominated.
TITLE: N Korea Supplied Uranium
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: VIENNA, Austria - Evidence gathered by the U.N. atomic agency suggests North Korea was the source of nearly two tons of uranium sent to Libya as part of attempts by Moammar Gadhaffi to build nuclear warheads, diplomats said Sunday.
The diplomats, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, cautioned that the investigation was not yet complete and other sources still could not be ruled out.
Still, they said evidence increasingly points to the secretive communist country, leading to fears that it could have supplied other nations with fuel, components and knowledge needed to build nuclear weapons.
The evidence also focuses on the North's secret weapons program using uranium technology. North Korea, initially thought to have only a plutonium-based program, acknowledged developing a parallel program based on uranium enrichment after U.S. disclosures of its existence two years ago, but details remain sketchy.
Pakistan, the key country implicated in a worldwide black market nuclear network, had been thought to be the source of the 1.87 tons of uranium hexafluoride handed over to the Americans in January as part of Libya's voluntary decision to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction.
But "now, we believe that it might have been" North Korea who supplied the substance, said one of the diplomats. "It's a definite possibility."
The diplomat said the evidence from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency was based on interviews with members of the clandestine network headed by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist implicated in selling his country's nuclear secrets to Libya, North Korea, Iran, and possibly other countries.
The evidence collected by the IAEA sheds more light on the North's program using uranium enrichment to make nuclear arms parallel to its better-known plutonium-based activities. North Korea is demanding U.S. economic aid and other concessions in exchange for scrapping its nuclear weapons programs.
U.S. officials believe North Korea already has one or two nuclear bombs and could make several more within months.
TITLE: Roof Collapses At Charles de Gaulle Airport, At Least 5 Dead
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ROISSY, France - The vaulted roof of the new, showcase terminal at Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport - touted as a jewel of design, safety and comfort - collapsed early Sunday, killing at least five people and forcing authorities to revisit problems that preceded the fanfare opening of Terminal 2E less than a year ago.
There were some cracking sounds and some dust, and then tons of concrete, steel and glass came crashing down on a waiting area inside the gleaming terminal. The 98-foot section of roof fell just before 7 a.m. local time as passengers were starting to arrive.
Officials said there was no sign a terror attack caused the collapse. Of those confirmed dead, one was Chinese and the other four also were apparently foreigners, said Michel Clerel, chief doctor of Aeroports de Paris, which runs the airport.
Michel Sappin, prefect for the Seine-Saint-Denis region, where Roissy is located north of Paris, said there was only a moderate number of passengers in the terminal at the early hour.
President Jacques Chirac asked that investigators quickly determine the cause of the collapse. Two separate probes were being opened.
The $890 million terminal, with slots for 17 aircraft, opened to the public last June 25 after two construction delays. The French television station LCI said the delays were caused by safety issues.
Also, a huge light fixture fell in the departure area as inspectors were checking the facility before its opening, and there were leaks in the ceiling, said Brun, the airport director.
Still, he and other officials said the problems were not structural. "There were never signs of cracks or other major abnormalities," Brun said.
TITLE: Israel Ends Bloody Siege of Rafah
AUTHOR: By Ibrahim Barzak
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: RAFAH, Gaza Strip - Israeli troops withdrew from a besieged Palestinian neighborhood in this refugee camp early Monday, leaving behind dozens of demolished homes and acres of leveled agricultural land.
The military said that as part of a partial redeployment, Israeli forces ended the quarantine of Tel Sultan neighborhood, and residents were free to come and go. Troops continued to operate in the Brazil area of the refugee camp.
Tel Sultan was the first focus of the Israeli sweep through the sprawling refugee camp on the Gaza-Egypt border in an operation to destroy weapons-smuggling tunnels and round up militants.
Residents said the tanks pulled back in the direction of a Jewish settlement after midnight. However, the six-day Israeli raid continued in other areas of the camp.
Wary residents who left their homes - many for the first time since Israel launched its offensive - confronted streets and homes bulldozed into mounds of rubble, razed farms and greenhouses and sewage running through streets decorated with downed electric and telephone cables.
Israel's operation has led to sharp international and local criticism. Israeli Cabinet Minister Yosef Lapid caused an uproar Sunday when he said images of Israel's destruction in the Rafah refugee camp reminded him of his grandmother, who suffered Nazi atrocities during World War II.
In the bright sun, the destruction looked even worse than residents had originally anticipated.
"In one simple word: This is Hiroshima 2004," said Rafah Mayor Saed Zourab in a telephone interview while touring the Tel Sultan neighborhood.
Rumors of the destruction leaked out of the neighborhood during the army's six day quarantine, but no one could enter or leave the area during the operation.
Every house in the neighborhood has been damaged in some way, whether by bulldozers and other heavy military vehicles maneuvering through the camp's narrow alleys, or by machine-gun fire, Zourab said. "Even the mosque has been burned," he added.
Israel's "Operation Rainbow" was launched to uncover and destroy weapons-smuggling tunnels along the Gaza-Egypt border and round up militants, according to the army.
However, only one tunnel has been uncovered. The operation left 41 Palestinians dead and dozens of homes destroyed.
The widespread destruction has raised questions in Israel and the world over the goals of the invasion - which was launched less than a week after 13 Israeli soldiers were killed by Palestinian militants.
Some critics said the campaign makes little sense from a military standpoint. Some said it was meant as revenge against the militants and to boost the morale of Israeli troops. Others questioned why Sharon approved it, even though he is pushing for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
Sharon announced Sunday he plans to request Cabinet approval next week for his proposal to evacuate all Gaza Strip and four West Bank settlements.
After having the contentious plan rejected by his hard-line Likud Party in a referendum earlier this month, Sharon made minor changes in the hopes of obtaining a majority in Cabinet.
Despite the revisions - including breaking the plan up into phases, each of which will be brought for separate Cabinet approval - Sharon is not guaranteed a majority, and the vote could bring down his government.
TITLE: Spain's Felipe Marries TV Newscaster
AUTHOR: By Mar Roman
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MADRID, Spain - Crown Prince Felipe married former TV anchorwoman Letizia Ortiz on Saturday in a ceremony that the couple dedicated to the victims of a terrorist bombing two months ago. Afterward, tens of thousands of Spaniards lined the streets to catch a glimpse of the first commoner ever to be in line to be queen.
A driving rain fell as Ortiz, wearing a flowing off-white gown, entered the 19th century Almudena Cathedral in Madrid's scenic old quarter.
The congregation of some 1,700 royals and other dignitaries - protected by security including fighter jets and 20,000 police - included Britain's Prince Charles, former South African President Nelson Mandela and Jordan's Queen Rania.
The archbishop of Madrid, Cardinal Antonio Maria Rouco Varela, thanked the couple for dedicating their wedding Mass to the 191 people killed in the March 11 train bombing in Madrid, blamed on Islamic militants.
"The people of Madrid celebrate your wedding, with gratitude for your tender gesture in memory of the victims of the despicable terrorist attack of March 11," Rouco Varela said.
Despite the lingering sense of mourning, it was a festive day in a city brought to life with hundreds of thousands of geraniums, pansies and other flowers.
The cost of the wedding has been estimated at $24 million, although some planned events like a light show Saturday night - and the prince's bachelor party - were scrapped to avoid looking frivolous in the wake of the bombing.
On Saturday, people crowded on balconies to catch a glimpse of the couple as they took a post-wedding ride in an armor-plated vintage Rolls-Royce, waving to tens of thousands of well-wishers holding small red-and-yellow Spanish flags and pink and silver fans. The crowds were, however, thinner than expected.
Just one year after she started dating the prince, Ortiz, a 31-year-old divorcee, now has the title of Princess Letizia of Asturias.
The prince met Ortiz at a dinner party in late 2002 and they started dating secretly the following spring. Word of their engagement in November took the country by surprise, though polls suggest Spaniards don't mind that Ortiz is a divorcee and has no royal blood.
TITLE: Video May Show Iraqi Party Before U.S. Attack
AUTHOR: By Scheherezade Faramarzi
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: RAMADI, Iraq - A videotape obtained Sunday by Associated Press Television News captures a wedding party that survivors say was later attacked by U.S. planes early Wednesday, killing up to 45 people. The dead included the cameraman, Yasser Shawkat Abdullah, hired to record the festivities, which ended Tuesday night before the planes struck.
The U.S. military says it is investigating the attack, which took place in the village of Mogr el-Deeb about five miles from the Syrian border, but that all evidence so far indicates the target was a safehouse for foreign fighters.
"There was no evidence of a wedding: no decorations, no musical instruments found, no large quantities of food or leftover servings one would expect from a wedding celebration," Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said Saturday. "There may have been some kind of celebration. Bad people have celebrations, too."
But video footage that APTN shot a day after the attack shows fragments of musical instruments, pots and pans and brightly colored bedding used for celebrations around the bombed-out tent.
The wedding videotape shows a dozen white pickup trucks speeding through the desert escorting the bridal car - decorated with colorful ribbons. The bride wears a Western-style white bridal dress and veil. The camera captures her stepping out of the car but does not show a close-up.
An AP reporter and photographer, who interviewed more than a dozen survivors a day after the bombing, were able to identify many of them on the wedding party video - which runs for several hours.
The singing and dancing seems to go on forever at the all-male tent set up in the garden of the host, Rikad Nayef, for the wedding of his son, Azhad, and the bride Rutbah Sabah. The men later move to the porch when darkness falls, apparently taking advantage of the cool night weather. Children, mainly boys, sit on their fathers' laps; men smoke an Arab water pipe, finger worry beads and chat with one another. It looks like a typical, gender-segregated tribal desert wedding.
As expected, women are out of sight, but according to survivors, they danced to the music of Hussein al-Ali, a popular Baghdad wedding singer hired for the festivities.
Kimmitt said U.S. troops who swept through the area found rifles, machine guns, foreign passports, bedding, syringes and other items that suggested the site was used by foreigners infiltrating from Syria.
The videotape showed no weapons, although they are common among rural Iraqis. Kimmitt has denied finding evidence that any children died in the raid although a "handful of women" - perhaps four to six - were "caught up in the engagement."
However, an AP reporter obtained names of at least 10 children who relatives said had died. Bodies of five of them were filmed by APTN when the survivors took them to Ramadi for burial Wednesday. Iraqi officials said at least 13 children were killed.
TITLE: Timberwolves Keep Cool to Beat Lakers
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota - Sam Cassell is too quick, too vocal and too important to the Minnesota Timberwolves to be replaced by just one man.
So when Cassell's aching back limited him to a token appearance in Game 2 of the Western Conference finals, Kevin Garnett raised his voice, Darrick Martin raised his game - and when the Lakers raised their dukes, Minnesota kept its cool.
Garnett had 24 points and 11 rebounds, and Martin scored 15 points in place of Cassell, leading the Timberwolves to a 89-71 victory over Los Angeles on Sunday night.
Latrell Sprewell scored 17 points and Wally Szczerbiak had 16, but the Wolves needed an impressive group effort to even the series in a game dominated by good defense and bad feelings - including seven technical fouls and several trash-talking staredowns in the fourth quarter.
Martin played 36 minutes when Cassell's back tightened up after just 43 seconds of play. Martin had a few regrettable shots, but he made no turnovers and got six assists - and he even got flattened by Karl Malone, who was ejected for a flagrant foul.
Though the statistic says more about the Lakers' apparent boredom than Martin's excellence, he outscored Los Angeles' entire frontcourt in the first half. He scored on a wild fling at the hoop shortly before halftime - and he even got cocky, glaring at the Lakers' bench after making a 3-pointer with 3:02 to play.
Garnett did the rest, scoring 14 points in the second half.
Garnett closed the third quarter with a 3-pointer that helped Minnesota hold off a one-man rally by Kobe Bryant, who scored 27 points and briefly roused the Lakers from their game-long slumber. The Lakers matched the lowest-scoring playoff game in franchise history while making less than 37 percent of their shots.
Malone acknowledged he lost his head when he threw a shoulder into Martin with 2:31 left, but it only added spice to a series that appeared to be a bit one-sided after the Lakers' victory in Game 1. Instead, the teams are tied heading to Game 3 in Los Angeles on Tuesday.
Shaquille O'Neal had 14 points and 16 rebounds, but didn't strike fear in the Timberwolves as he did in Game 2. He picked up a technical early in the fourth after jawing with Gary Trent.
Cassell's back has bothered him since early in the playoffs, and he had trouble even walking without pain before Game 2. He returned to the Timberwolves' bench in the closing minutes, exhorting his teammates in his typically theatrical fashion.
The Lakers trailed 58-40 early in the third before Bryant scored six straight points, hitting jumpers and making big defensive plays. Los Angeles got within seven points moments later, but Minnesota made an 11-3 run and never was threatened in the fourth.
"We weren't desperate. They were," Bryant said. "They played harder. We didn't match their intensity. We'll have to live with the split."
Minnesota's reserves outscored the Lakers' 41-14 - but Szczerbiak and Martin played starters' minutes in the backcourt in place of Cassell and Trenton Hassell. Szczerbiak also had seven assists in his most impressive performance of an injury-plagued season.