SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #974 (42), Friday, June 4, 2004
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TITLE: Residents Stop Yard Building
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev 

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Residents of a building at 9 Institutsky Prospekt in the Vyborg district on Monday stopped a construction project in their yard.
 
For weeks they had clashed with officials who were acting against one of Governor Valentina Matviyenko's key election platforms last year: no additional construction in residential areas.
 On Monday, some 40 residents supported by the National Bolshevik Party prevented construction vehicles entering the yard by all but throwing themselves under the wheels.
 Preventing construction starting before Tuesday was crucial for the residents because OK Stroi, the construction company responsible for the project, had an agreement with City Hall to start the construction by May 31 or its building permit would expire, Andrei Dmitriyev, spokesman for the National Bolshevik Party, or NBP, said Monday in a telephone interview.
 "Last Thursday, guards hired by OK Stroi beat up two old ladies who had tried to stop workers from installing a fence around the yard," he said
 "On Monday the residents and us were standing right by the vehicles' wheels preventing them from moving any further, although they tried to," he said Monday. 
 City officials signed the agreement with OK Stroi illegally, because the yard of the building belongs to the neighborhood community, residents said.
 OK Stroi could not be reached for a comment. Phonecalls, were repeatedly transferred to a store, "because something happened to the telephone line," according to a store assistant.
 For several days in a row last week, residents organized 24-hour patrols to prevent construction starting.
 "Did they tell you they weren't going to build anything?" one resident, who wished to remain anonymous, said Wednesday in a telephone interview. "But they have already fenced around the whole yard ... We're very old, 80 years old and there won't be any room left for us to walk. There are buildings, polyclinics and buildings again all around." 
 "Everything went fine this time," Dmitriyev said. " Once again, we have succeeded in protecting residents' rights and stopped the construction." 
 "Basically we have become a non-governmental organization to protect human rights that are being violated more and more blatantly since [President Vladimir] Putin's and Matviyenko's elections."
 The NBP, led by controversial writer Eduard Limonov, is best known for its radical statements and spectacular actions aimed at attracting media attention. 
 Vyborg district authorities said the construction had been stopped because the situation around the project had become overheated. 
 "There was a demonstration, but it doesn't mean the construction was illegal," said Grigory Margulin-Kagansky, spokesman for the Vyborg district administration, said Wednesday in a telephone interview.
 "This is quite a difficult question because the residents say the land belongs to them, so City Hall has recommended construction be suspended," he added.
 "We've been trying to find a compromise in cases like this and in most cases we reach it," Margulin-Kagansky said. "Sometimes a construction company offers residents a children's playground, to fix pipes or to replace windows in a local school. This way most of the conflicts calm down."
 Before last year's gubernatorial elections, Matviyenko signed a pledge to stop construction projects in residential areas. At the end of 2003, Matviyenko visited the site at Institutsky Prospekt and told residents it was unsuitable for a new building, Greenpeace said in a statement last Friday.
 "There is a feeling that the governor, who repeatedly talks of the need to stop construction in residential areas and to save the city's green areas, has absolutely no control over construction in the city," spokesman Dmitry Artamonov said in the statement.
 The Legislative Assembly said late last month it intends to hold a vote of no confidence in Vice-Governor Alexander Vakhmistrov, who is responsible for construction in the city. 
 "It's very funny for me to read articles in all the local media that say City Hall has quit signing agreements to build in residential areas," said Boris Vishnevsky, a member of the Yabloko faction at the Legislative Assembly. "It looks like City Hall orders such articles as paid advertisements. 
 "All you have to do is examine the City Hall data base to see that it has issued about 250 permits since Jan. 1, and more than half of them are to build in residential areas," Vishnevsky said Wednesday in a telephone interview. "I have the impression we have two Matviyenkos, one is against construction and the other is signing contracts. I'm confused. Which is the real one?"
 City Hall will keep signing agreements for construction in residential areas for the next two years, Matviyenko said at the end of March. 
 A total of 1.7 million square meters of residential space was built in St. Petersburg in 2003, 2 million square meters is planned for 2004 and in 2007 about 3 million square meters will be built, the governor said.

TITLE: Concern as NTV Fires Parfyonov
AUTHOR: By Caroline McGregor

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - NTV fired star journalist Leonid Parfyonov in a dramatic decision that his colleagues and media experts decried Wednesday as the latest setback to press freedom.
 
Parfyonov was fired for breaking his contract, which required him to "support the policies of the company's leadership," according to the statement signed by NTV general director Nikolai Senkevich.
 His weekly current affairs program "Namedni," one of the station's top-rated shows, was cancelled.
 Parfyonov unleashed a public scandal by releasing to Kommersant an internal memo ordering him to cut an interview with the widow of a slain Chechen separatist leader Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev from his show's broadcast last Sunday because it could negatively influence the ongoing trial of two Russians charged with the murder.
 The show went ahead without the five-minute segment, but Parfyonov said the decision forcing him to drop it amounted to censorship.
 And, he added bitingly in an interview given to Izvestia after that decision but before he was sacked, "I do not need to be taught to love my motherland."
 Some of the debate Wednesday swirled around whether Parfyonov had forced NTV's hand by going public, but Parfyonov told Ekho Moskvy that his contract only barred him from giving interviews to competitors, and whether or not his comments to Kommersant can be construed as such is unclear.
 "I was expecting it sooner or later," Parfyonov told The Associated Press. "Everything was leading up to it."
 What complicates the picture further, is that, in Senkevich's absence, the contentious memo was issued by Alexander Gerasimov, who, in addition to his position as deputy general manager for political and information programming hosts a current affairs show of his own, called "Lichny Vklad," which rivals "Namedni."
 Savik Shuster, host of the NTV talk show "Svoboda Slova" and perhaps the only independent voice left at the station, called Parfyonov's ouster "an enormous loss for the channel," The Washington Post reported.
 But he said Parfyonov has served as a "whistleblower" in a way that might help. "Now - at least for a short period - I don't think anyone will threaten my program,'' Shuster was quoted as saying.
 Among Moscow viewers, "Namedni" was the top social-political program for the last week in May, according to TNS Gallup Media ratings published Tuesday in Kommersant. The week before it came in second to Channel One's weekly news wrap-up "Vremya."
 Taken overall, it was NTV's most popular program together with a series about the life of single women, "Balzakovsky Vozrast."
 Such high market share means high advertising revenues, which NTV has now jeopardized along with its reputation, said Yasen Zasursky, the dean of Moscow State University's journalism faculty.
 "It's a bad day for Russian television," he said, calling the decision proof of NTV's infamously bad management. 
 He added that NTV's decision to sacrifice its best asset over a minor dispute damages its claim to being an independent channel.
 The decision to fire Parfyonov was announced at 11 p.m. Tuesday night. But many of the journalists who worked for him on "Namedni" and "Strana i Mir," a late-night news program he launched as a training ground for protegees, only learned the news from reporters seeking their comment.
 Where the newly unemployed Parfyonov will land is not clear. 
 NTV journalist Pavel Lobkov, who worked for "Namedni," played down the chances of a walk-out similar to the one led by Yevgeny Kiselyov when the private station was acquired by Gazprom-Media, a company partly owned by the state. 
 "Leonid was always opposed to any kind of mass actions and believed that such issues aren't resolved on public squares," he was quoted by Interfax as saying.
 In his statement, Senkevich called Parfyonov "unconditionally one of the most talented journalists working in contemporary Russian television." But, he said, "this incident was not the first."
 Parfyonov's relationship with station management had been rocky since Senkevich was brought in last spring to replace Boris Jordan, with whom Parfyonov had worked closely. Parfyonov, 44, had worked at NTV from 1993, making a reputation for having an ironic tone and, in contrast to Kiselyov, being apolitical.
 Despite their differences, Kiselyov said Wednesday that he was pained by Parfyonov's dismissal. 
 "Everyone loses from the loss of Parfyonov and 'Namedni,'" he told Ekho Moskvy.
 Ekho Moskvy's television observer, Yelena Afanasyeva, said press freedom had not disappeared, though the trend was in that direction.
 "NTV still has space to, say, not open the news program with Putin's meeting some minister and instead be the first to show footage of a terrorist explosion in Grozny," she said. "But that space is constantly shrinking."
 Yelena Savina, a producer for NTV's news program "Segodnya," framed the sacking even more starkly. "The Kremlin never trusted Parfyonov. We, as newspeople, understand that this serious attack is a warning for us. I see this as the first attack in a pre-planned campaign," she told Newsru.com.

TITLE: City Hall Mulls Safety of Foreign Tourists
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: With tourist season in full swing, the city administration on Thursday held a special meeting dedicated to the security of foreigners as travelers' complaints appear to be growing. 
 
City officials were joined by the police, health officials and travel industry representatives to discuss ways to improve St. Petersburg's tainted reputation.
 The officials, appeared to be simultaneously in a truculent and self-critical mood, throwing tantrums at critics as well as at each other.
 "When walking along Nevsky Prospekt, I feel ashamed, as the city's main street has been monopolized by beggars and swindlers," said Andrei Chernenko, vice governor of St. Petersburg responsible for issues concerning security and foreigners. "At stake is the pride of St. Petersburg, so we really have to clear the center together."
 But Chernenko was quick to add that the image of St. Petersburg as racially intolerant was deliberately being created by its rival cities.
 "These vicious cliches about the city are nothing, but underhand tactics used against us by our rivals," he said. "I can assure you that in other regions of Russia the situation is much worse, whereas here almost all crimes committed against foreigners get solved."
 According to city police, crimes against foreigners account for 3 percent to 6 percent of all cases, which means about 500 crimes last year. But alternative sources suggest the real scale of the problem is much larger because many crimes against foreigners are never reported, let alone solved.
 Safety issues present a serious concern for consulates operating in St. Petersburg. Mark Woodham, of the British Consulate General, said Thursday at least one incident is reported to his office daily. "There are likely to be many more incidents that do not get reported to us," he said.
 The consulate is working on preparing a leaflet with recommendations and warnings about danger spots in St. Petersburg, where theft, robbery and attacks on foreigners happen most. 
 "The leaflet would mention particular areas, where tourists should be aware and especially cautious of the risk of incidents happening," he said, listing Gostiny Dvor, Palace Square, St. Isaac's Square and all of Nevsky Prospekt, particularly around hotels, as the most risky locations. 
 The local police has prepared a list of recommendations for foreign tourists, which they believe should reduce the level of crime. Highlights include a reminder that all cash payments in Russia should be made only in rubles, a warning against using gypsy cabs or prostitutes, exchanging foreign currency anywhere other than at banks, leaving luggage unattended, and keeping wallets and documents in bags - they should be kept in inner pockets.
 Woodham said local police should be much better equipped to deal with foreigners so that they can tackle the problem effectively. "I would welcome the creation of a central police station where foreigners could file their complaints, and where an English-speaking officer could assist them," Woodham said. "It is also essential that an English-language copy of the report is available to them so that they know what exactly they are signing." 
 The police recommend that foreigners who are victims of crime contact the duty district officer. They can also call 02 or 278-30-14 to contact the police division that investigates such incidents.
 Over the past five years, the authorities have routinely held meetings and made bold statements and ambitious promises on the safety of foreigners, but their efforts, verbal or otherwise, seem to have been in vain.
 Nevertheless, tourism professionals felt encouraged after Thursday's meeting. 
 Sergei Korneyev, head of the Northwest branch of the Russian Union of Tourism Industry, said the significance of the meeting was that there is a clear intention by everyone involved to confront the problem.
 "A deadline has been set to report on progress in one week's time," he said. "Our proposal to set up a coordinating body, with representatives of the city administration, the police and tourism industry professionals, to monitor and improve the situation was accepted."
 Meanwhile, extra patrols will be organized in high-risk areas, plus a series of special police raids is being planned to prevent crimes, Korneyev said.

TITLE: Plaque Marks Link Between City, U.S.
AUTHOR: By Simone Kozuharov

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Former U.S. president John Quincy Adams joined the small list of foreigners to be honored in St. Petersburg by a memorial plaque on Thursday.
 
"It's a way of reminding people of the long history of our relations and also honoring our first diplomat here who kind of has been a model for all 60-plus ambassadors that have come after him, including myself," U.S. Ambassador Alexander Vershbow said in an interview after unveiling the plaque.
 Unveiled at 66 Naberezhnaya Reki Moika near St. Isaac's Square, the brown granite plaque was sponsored by Alfa Bank and created by city artist Alexander Pozin. It commemorates Adams, the first American diplomat to be officially recognized by the tsar.
 Adams, the sixth U.S. president and first son of a president to become president himself, befriended Tsar Alexander I during his tenure in St. Petersburg.
 "'From the first meeting, we became friends,'" Yelena Andryushenkova, a researcher at the U.S. Consulate General in St. Petersburg, quoted Adams as writing in his diary.
 The two dignitaries continued to meet and remained close friends.
 Adams "would take walks along the Neva with Alexander I and they talked about all sorts of things ranging from politics to granite," said David Siefkin, public affairs officer at the U.S. Consulate. 
 "Alexander was interested in the United States and he had received copies of the Declaration of Independence and other documents from Thomas Jefferson, and he was very interested in how the American Republic was different from the Russian experience," Siefkin said. "They hit it off quite well."
 So well that Alexander I wanted to be a godfather of Adams' daughter, Liza. Adams declined the offer, fearing what Americans might think of a European monarch being godfather to an American diplomat's daughter. 
 Liza later died of dysentery and is buried in an unmarked grave in a city cemetery. Andryushenkova has tried to find her grave, but with no success.
 "All the archives were burned, so we just simply can say that she is here somewhere in Smolensky cemetery."
 Adams first came to Russia when he was 14, and spent two years as a secretary and translator from English to French for a foreign diplomat. He returned in 1809 aged 42 as the U.S. minister to Russia and stayed six years. 
 He was fascinated by science and impressed by the Russian observatory at Pulkovo. As president, he lobbied congress to build an observatory modeled on the one at Pulkovo. Congress rejected the proposal because of the cost.
 "But later the United States did have an observatory and Adams was at the opening of the observatory," Siefkin said. "It was clear that this was a debt owed to Russia."
 Adams also worked with Noah Webster, author of the first U.S. dictionary, in gathering material on Russia. 
 "He also gave books to the various libraries in the United States on Russian grammar and literature, which began the study of Russian culture in the United States," Siefkin said. "He was the founder of Russian studies in the United States and really got Russian-American relations off to a positive start."

TITLE: Election Result Annulled in District 207
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev 

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The St. Petersburg City Court has annulled the results of elections for the State Duma in the city's District 207, saying that Alexander Morozov, who received the most votes on March 14 won as a result of violations at polling stations.
 
A complaint filed shortly after the election by Morozov's rivals Sergei Andreyev, Anna Markova, Elvira Sharova and a voter, Alexander Anikin, said that six polling stations had illegally stopped giving ballots to voters.
 "We believe the decision taken by the court is illegal and is based on its biased position," Roman Moskvin, spokesman for Morozov, said Thursday. "They don't have any credible evidence so we are going to appeal to the Supreme Court."
 After the election, City Election Commission head Alexander Gnyotov said the number of voters at the six polling stations, 12,000 people, was less than 25 percent of the total number of 450,000 eligible voters in District No. 207 and the election could therefore not be annulled.
 Anonymous sources close to Morozov said they believe the court's decision was based on personal relations Markova has with one of the judges participating in the case. 
 Markova is a former city vice governor who was Governor Valentina Matviyenko's main challenger in gubernatorial elections last year. 
 "I believe today our St. Petersburg City Court has proved the Constitution rules in our country, and not money and that any citizen can achieve his [or her] rights and freedom," Interfax quoted her saying Thursday.
 She said she had filed her complaint not because she wanted to contest the seat, but in the interests of justice.
 The elections were repeated in March after more people voted "against all" than for any individual candidate in federal Duma elections on Dec. 7.

TITLE: Stations Shut Before Metro Link Restored After 9 Years
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg residents who live north of the Lesnaya metro station will in less than a month be able to ride the subway into the city without having to transfer to surface transport between the Lesnaya and Ploshchad Muzhestva stations. 
 
"We plan to completely open the metro's red [Kirov-Vyborg] line by June 26," said Dmitry Burin, deputy head of the city metro. "Yet to complete the works and connect the tunnel between the troubled stations to the other tunnels we'll need a bit more time."
 From Saturday until June 11, the Lesnaya and Vyborgskaya stations will be closed, Burin said Wednesday.
 For that week, trains will run from Prospekt Veteranov to Ploshchad Lenina, and from Devyatkino to Ploshchad Muzhestva.
 From June 12 to June 25, four stations will be closed - Lesnaya, Vyborgskaya, Politechnicheskaya and Ploshchad Muzhestva. Trains will run from Prospekt Veteranov to Ploshchad Lenina, and from Devyatkino to Akademicheskaya. Additional free buses will transfer people between stations. "We are sorry for this inconvenience but we have to do that, and also spend some time on letting empty trains go through those tunnels for a while to check them," Burin said. "It's also a matter of providing safety for our passengers."
 The section between the Lesnaya and Ploshchad Muzhestva stations has been out of action since December 1995, when part of the tunnel collapsed into an underground river.
 Since then about half a million citizens in the northeast of the city have been cut off from direct travel to the center on the red Kirov-Vyborg line
 St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko rode in the engine cabin of the first train to travel over the restored section on June 25.
 The complete cost of the contract to restore the line was $180 million. 
 Burin said next year the city plans to close Vladimirskaya metro station to repair its escalators. However, passengers will be able to get to Vladimirskaya through Dostoyevskaya.
 "The escalators are 49 years old at that station and need to be changed," Burin said.

TITLE: Pskov: Investors Consider the Risks
AUTHOR: By Sophia Kornienko

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Finding itself suddenly neighboring the EU, Pskov administration is putting a lot of effort into publicizing the city's investment advantages to the West. 
 
One of Russia's most ancient cities, Pskov is crying out for investments. And no matter how crude and old-fashioned the PR campaign seems, the opportunities are there - even though few businessmen have dared to go for them so far.
 "Western businessmen don't show enough willingness to take risks for the sake of future profits. They only think short term," said Vasily Ignatyev, director of Pskov Electrical and Mechanical Plant - one of the city's largest manufacturers - during the St. Petersburg International Business Association visit to Pskov on Wednesday. 
 "Legislation does create obstacles. It is true that the customs legislation is absolutely absurd. But investors should still take a risk. We can only move forward from here, there is no way back," Ignatyev said to western investors.
 Pskov's attractions are cheap labor, a large stock of natural resources and raw materials and the local investment climate, said Anatoly Galyshev from the region's division for investment policy. The "Investment Climate Improvement Program" that was passed last year created tax benefits to support investors. 
 Profit and property taxes were cut down to 20 and 0.01 percent, while their regular rates are 24 and 2 percent respectively, Galyshev said. 
 Likewise, the transport tax was reduced by five times, he said. The lower rates will be kept until investments pay back. The regional budget also provides investors with subsidies, loans and guarantees to help them deal with the local banks, Galyshev said. 
 Bordering on Estonia and Latvia, Pskov region is the most western Russian region after Kaliningrad. Over the past three years, trade with the E.U. went up 2.2 times while trade with Baltic states increased by 1.2 times. Equally distant from St. Petersburg and Riga, the region is crossed by several important highways and 1,100 kilometers of railway. Pskov also has a river port which connects the region with the port of Tartu in Estonia, and a small international airport. The region's annual freight turnover is 60 million tons, Galyshev said.
 Industrial goods production accounts for 21 percent of the gross regional product, agriculture has a 19 percent share. Other significant areas include trade, with 15 percent, and communications, with 12 percent. One third of the local manufacturers concentrates on machine production, while another third produces food. As many as 15 percent are involved in the electrical energy sector. Pskov's growing sector, with a modest share of 6 percent for now, is the textile industry, while the wood treatment industry remains under-developed. Forests cover 40 percent of the region, with 3.5 million square meters fit for development and only 30 percent of that area used. 
 The Pskov region has a population of nearly 800,000 people, and its environmental situation was reported as good. "We want to propose tourism as another niche for investments in Pskov," Galyshev said, referring to the opportunity of exploring the region's 1,000 year old history and architecture, represented by its Kremlin and cathedrals, and the region's wild nature, which boasts 21 kinds of animals. 
 In 2002, 821,000 tourists visited Pskov. 
 Meanwhile, the region has hardly got any hotels. "They just wouldn't come to build hotels," an administration official said, referring to the unknown scared investors during a walk along the beautiful well-preserved fairy-tale Kremlin wall - once the center of old Russian civilization.
 Today, Pskov remains a subsidized region - one of the country's regions that doesn't manage to cover expenditures from its local budget and receives help from the federal government. However, Pskov's revenues increased by 20 percent over the past few years, administration officials said. The crisis after the breakdown of the Soviet Union hit Pskov the hardest, as many of its local products were employed for further use in the manufacturing process in other regions. With many of those factories collapsed, Pskov's industrial failure amounted to 75 percent in 1992. This explains the enormous average growth of 20-25 percent reported by factory directors, one of the SPIBA delegates said.
 "Everything is halted by our lack of modern equipment. If only we could be given good equipment, we would find ways for mutually profitable cooperation with the equipment supplier," said Aleksei Timofeyev, director of Drevpogonazh, a wood treatment company created in the mid-nineties. The same problem was voiced by a Pskov dairy plant that has the space, the steam and the capacity to produce ice cream, "but cannot manage it alone." The Electrical and Mechanical Plant is 53 percent owned by American company Alliance, who have invested $300,000 in the plant so far. "We barely make ends meet, as there can hardly be any profit when the average age of our machine-tools is 27 years old," Ignatyev said. His plant rents out vacant production space to the mobile phone operator BeeLine.
 When asked about the annual revenues of Slavyanka, Pskov's famous textile factory producing men's suits under Truvor brand, the factory's director Elena Kosenkova said, "They are big. So big I don't think I can tell you." Contemporary German and Italian machines are used to tailor a variety of jackets and trousers made from thin modern fabric, as dozens of women pack the stuffy narrow halls at Slavyanka. Proper ventilation and good floors are the greatest aspirations for the factory today - Slavyanka can't afford them yet, Kosenkova said. 
 
 


TITLE: New US Bank at Lenta
AUTHOR: By Simone Kozuharov

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Citibank will be opening its first consumer branch in St. Petersburg by the end of this summer, Citibank officials said.
 
The new consumer branch "is under development," said Ludmila Botsan, Citibank's public relations manager in Moscow. 
 The branch will be located inside the new Lenta superstore, scheduled to open June 5th, on the Tallinnskoe Shosse. 
 Neither Lenta nor Citibank officials would confirm an opening date for the Citibank consumer branch or give further details about their partnership, other than to say it is a new venture.
 The new consumer branch will employ about 10 people - similar to Citibank branch sizes in Moscow, Botsan said. 
 The St. Petersburg location will be a full service consumer bank where customers can open accounts, apply for loans and receive credit cards. The ATM will have the capacity to distribute both rubles and dollars to customers. 
 Citibank has a long history in St. Petersburg. It first opened here in 1917, when St. Petersburg was still Russia's capital. It closed several months later "because of the revolution," Botsan said. 
 Citibank returned to Russia at the end of 1993 to launch a representative branch in Moscow, opening its first commercial location there at the beginning of 1994. Citibank's first consumer branch didn't open in Moscow until 2002, Botsan said.
 The bank returned to St. Petersburg for the first time in 79 years to open a corporate branch in 1996. 
 Botsan called the decision to open the consumer branch here a "logical development." "Its time to go to St. Petersburg," she said.
 Raiffeisen Bank, one of Citibank's major competitors, opened its first branch here in 2001, serving both private and corporate clients.
 "It's normal competition," said Roger Delous, Raiffeisen's general manager for North-West Russia, when asked about Citibank's development. "I think we are going to see more of it ...we are ready to sustain competition."
 Other Citibank employees refused to comment, including a Citibank vice-president. The American Chamber of Commerce in St. Petersburg could only confirm that the bank is planning to open a consumer branch sometime this summer.

TITLE: EU Meat Imports Stopped at Border
AUTHOR: By Lyuba Pronina 

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia stopped clearing beef, pork and poultry shipments from the European Union on Tuesday in a spat over certification that could have dire consequences for European producers.
 
"We have suspended meat imports as of June 1 and are not signing off on old veterinary certificates," a spokeswoman at the Agriculture Ministry said Wednesday.
 "Consultations [with the EU] are continuing," she added but refused to elaborate.
 Moscow has pushed for Europe-wide certificates that would replace bilateral certificates it had negotiated with each EU member state. The government wanted the new certificates to come into force on May 1 but extended the deadline until June 1 when no agreement was reached.
 Yet the EU is claiming it was caught off guard by the decision to stop accepting the old certificates.
 "We don't know yet what is going on," Gregor Kreuzhuber, a European Commission spokesman, said by phone from Brussels.
 It is still too early to quantify lost business, but if the meat ban lasts much longer, it could turn into a "disaster," Jean-Luc Merieux, secretary general of the EU's livestock and meat trading association, said in a telephone interview.
 "For the European industry it is a very difficult situation. Russia is our No.1 client, [accounting] for 60 percent of beef exports and 23 percent of pork exports," Merieux said.
 This year Russia plans to import from the EU 205,000 tons of poultry, 227,300 tons of pork and 331,800 tons of beef, according to the Russian National Meat Association.
 "We are going down to zero from tomorrow - from a lot of business to no business," said Jens Rahbek, export manager for meat giant Danish Crown in Copenhagen. "I don't know how long it will last but hope for a quick solution."
 Russian market players agreed.
 "Shutting out Europe is bad both for Russia and European producers," said Veronika Maximova, deputy head of the Russian National Meat Association. "Suspending deliveries will be quite painful for domestic meat processing plants, which are very dependant on European meat."
 Prices on meat products may go up by 5 percent as a result of the suspension, said Musheg Mamikonyan, president of the Russian Meat Union.
 Mamikonyan and Maximova said they understand why Russia is demanding a new certificate but expect a compromise soon.
 EC spokesman Kreuzhuber said he was not too sure of a speedy resolution, despite ongoing negotiations."So far, we see no solution to the problem," he said.
 The stumbling block is that a new EU-wide certificate would shift administrative duties from member-state governments to Brussels, which is wholly unprepared for the flood of extra paperwork.
 Kreuzhuber said that the existing system worked well and that it is unclear how the Russian demands can be implemented. He refused to elaborate on the details of the negotiations.
 "We would like to have more solid guarantees of safety on products delivered to Russia," Sergei Dankvert, the head of the Russian Veterinary Control said last month, Interfax reported.
 Conceivably a single certificate would imply that a safety violation by one member state could reflect on the rest of the EU, Maximova said.
 Dankvert conceded, however, that each individual EU country would have to amend legislation to meet Russia's demands for a single certificate. "Russia has the right to demand this certificate, as this is a single economic space and meat can come from anywhere," Mamikonyan said.
 "Russian consumers will suffer from the suspension, but this is not enough of an argument because we're talking about safety."

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>New RusAl Plant 
 </b>

LONDON (Bloomberg) - Russian Aluminum, which makes an eighth of the world's aluminum, said it may build a 600,000-ton aluminum smelter in the Irkutsk region, in what will be its largest-ever expansion. 
 RusAl hired San Francisco-based Bechtel, the world's No. 1 construction and engineering company, to study the feasibility of the proposed smelter. 
 The study should be completed in January 2005, with the smelter ready by 2009, the company said. 
 The plant's output equals 2.7 percent of last year's world production. "This is a major step in our expansion drive that will let us capitalize on the favorable forecasts for the global aluminum market," Valery Matviyenko, deputy general director of RusAl's aluminum business said in a statement.
 
<b>Goldman: Buy Yukos
 </b>

MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - Yukos, Russia's biggest oil exporter, has two of its three biggest owners on trial for fraud and said last week a $3.4 billion tax bill may drive it into bankruptcy, but banks including Goldman Sachs are telling investors to buy the company's shares.
 The stock has fallen by more than half from an October record, erasing $20 billion from Yukos' market value as the company's assets were frozen by the government.
 While brokers such as ING say bankruptcy is a possibility, Goldman, Renaissance Capital and others say the potential returns warrant the gamble.
 "A bankruptcy of Yukos is not the government's aim and we reiterate our outperform rating, despite the high risk," Goldman said in a report on Thursday.
 That was after the Moscow-based company said it might be forced into insolvency. <b>Banking Congress
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The 13th International Banking Congress, opened Wednesday in the Pribaltiyskaya hotel.
 Over 600 participants from commercial and central banks, as well as credit and insurance companies, top government officials and international economic organizations plan to discuss a number of international and local issues over three days during the congress. 
 Main topics are the integration of international financial standards, the development of deposit insurance systems, currency control and corporate governance. Deputy Central Bank chairman, Andrei Kozlov is also expected to announce whether the government will take on any new debt by issuing bonds this year.
 
 
<b>Lenoblast Investments 
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Three international companies announced plans to start construction in the Leningrad Oblast this week, Interfax reported.
 Henkel KgaA plans to invest 550 million rubles in business development in the oblast before the end of 2004, the company said in a press-release.
 Nash Elmo Industries GmbH plans to build a factory for vacuum technology production, announced company representative Vladimir Grigoruk in a press-conference Wednesday.
 Nash Elmo was formed from a merger between Nash Engineering (US) and Elmo vacuum technology, a Siemens subsidiary. 
 Bosch-Siemens Hausgeraete GmbH is also looking to build in the Oblast, said Viacheslav Alekseyev, deputy head of the district administration for economics and investments. Alekseyev would not disclose the possible amount of Siemens' investment, saying that the company first needs to value the preliminary project. 
 
 
<b>Subway Guide
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ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Metrocom's public phones operating in the city's subways will now offer an information service. The new service provides subway-to-destination directions, about-town highlights and addresses as well as a weather forecast. The service, obtained by dialing 706 is free until June 30, after which a fee will be charged.
 Metrocom is a fiber-optics operator with over 600 public phones installed at city subway stations. 



TITLE: D-Day Unity Wears Thin
AUTHOR: By Quentin Peel

TEXT: When veterans of the D-day landings gather in Normandy this weekend to be feted by assorted heads of state and government on the 60th anniversary of their epic assault, it will probably be the last time they do it in such style.
 
In another 10 years, their ranks will be sorely depleted. No doubt the politicians will still seek to celebrate, but it will be a much more modest affair. Yet already, for a whole new generation, the D-day commemoration must seem strangely irrelevant. It is not about today's world. It is history. It is a matter for television documentaries, Hollywood films and historical tomes, museums and dusty war memorials.
 The Normandy landings, and the Allied advance to victory in Germany in 1945, are about as far removed from today's teenagers and twentysomethings as the Boer War was from the baby boomers in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. The deeds that were done in June 1944 were very brave and exciting, and even necessary. They look good in the semi-mythical world of films. But their immediate relevance to the world of today is no longer entirely apparent to anyone below the age of 30.
 That is not the message that George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac and the others will be trying to put across. They will seek to stress how much we owe the wealthy world we live in today in most of Europe and in America to the generation that fought in World War II.
 Of course they are right. The very fact that such an argument is no longer immediately obvious is a tribute to what that wartime generation achieved. Sixty years of relative peace and prosperity on both sides of the Atlantic, after two horrendous world wars that left millions dead, is a remarkable feat, better still than what they did on the battlefield.
 More than that, D-day and what it led to - the ultimate victory of the Allies over Hitler's Germany - provided the justification and the popular legitimacy for everything that followed in the West. Both the Atlantic alliance and the European Union were inspired by those times: the one built on the support of the United States for Europe in its hour of need; the other on the determination that rivalry between France and Germany should never again be the cause of such bloodletting.
 That legitimacy was reinforced by the Cold War with the Soviet Union, in particular in the case of the NATO alliance. U.S. soldiers came to Europe to defeat the Nazis, and they stayed to see off any threat of communist expansionism from Moscow. Year Zero for all those who fought in the war, and for the postwar generation that followed, was 1945. It was the decisive moment that determined the course of the rest of the 20th century.
 Today, the Cold War is over, communism has been defeated, and the events of 1944 and 1945 are something one's grandfather used to reminisce about before he died. It sounds old hat to try to justify the Atlantic alliance in terms of fighting Hitler and Stalin, or the EU as a project to guarantee peace in the world's most bloodstained continent. Today we take that peace for granted.
 If we want to preserve those institutions, to give them the popular support and appeal that they need in order to flourish, we need a new legitimacy, and it is not entirely obvious where it will be found. Perhaps we need a new Year Zero against which we can define our political progress and our new ambitions.
 For some, such as Bush and many of his fellow Americans, that Year Zero looks like 2001, the year of Sept. 11, when the mighty United States was attacked on its own soil, and the war against terror was launched. In Europe, the relevant moment was rather different: It was in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, the Iron Curtain collapsed, and the Cold War ended for good.
 It seems unlikely that the opposite sides of the Atlantic can agree on a common moment of truth, and therefore on a common cause to legitimize their old alliance.
 There is no consensus about the war on terror, neither on its definition nor on the tactics used to fight it. Few in Europe believe that the invasion of Iraq was justified by the threat of terrorism, although it has undoubtedly contributed to the spread of terrorism in its aftermath. Even to call it a war on terror dignifies the terrorists quite wrongly.
 Bush may well seek to use this D-day anniversary to rally his erstwhile allies to his cause, arguing that just as they joined forces to defeat Hitler, so should they do so now to defeat global terrorism. They may pay lip service to this campaign, but they will scarcely be enthusiastic. It is the wrong cause, one that threatens to divide the world with a clash of civilizations, rather than unite its peoples against a manifest evil.
 The fall of the Berlin Wall is also not an adequate inspiration for future solidarity, to preserve the twin pillars of the EU and the Atlantic alliance. It is as much about the past and the collapse of the Soviet empire as about the future. It has led to EU enlargement, but that alone remains a project of the elite, not the people.
 So there lies the dilemma. We are victims of our own success in preserving the peace for so long. Surely we do not have to fight another (real) war to realize how lucky we are?
 <i>
 Quentin Peel is international affairs editor at the Financial Times, where this comment first appeared. </i>

TITLE: Crooked Cops Are Not a Joking Matter
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev

TEXT: A selection of letters and phone calls to The St. Petersburg Times about the activities of the police shows our readership has no illusions about the people who are supposed to enforce the law.
 
Our readers say directly - it is not pickpockets that tourists should beware of, but of people wearing gray uniforms who are on the streets to maintain order, but do exactly the opposite thing; they rob pedestrians.
 It is quite unlikely that the numerous domestic soap operas that have recently appeared on the main state-owned and private television channels, which aim to give the police an extremely positive image, will achieve their goal. They are especially doomed to fail with those members of the community who at some point lost a couple of hundred dollars after a routine document check.
 An acquaintance told me he was stopped about two years ago on Vasilyevsky Island by a plainclothes policeman, who invited him to a nearby police station to witness the searching of a detained man.
 &quot;He was behind bars and I saw very clearly that while they searched him they put something in his pocket,&quot; my acquaintance says. &quot;When they searched him again in front of me they found a small bag of marijuana, which had been planted in his pocket. I refused to sign a statement and thought there would be problems for me, but after they asked where I worked and who my parents were, they let me go.&quot;
 Unfortunately, it was quite common to hear such stories during random encounters in bars, but they did not start appearing in the media until recently. That is why I was very glad to read an article in Kommersant this week about two policemen detained in Moscow on suspicion of drug dealing. Two members of an anti-drug squad were allegedly caught selling heroin from their office. 
 More good news is that a whole bunch of the senior Moscow traffic was last week charged with selling stolen cars.
 In St. Petersburg a group of serving and former policemen has been charged with organizing the assassinations of several payroll security officers and preparing to rob a unit delivering money to Sberbank to pay pensions.
 That the miscreants were caught in these three cases seems to be a really good development, but the reality, I think, is that the whole system of national law enforcement is rotten to the core with few exceptions.
 People hate the police so much that they come up with bad jokes such as this one:
 A golden fish offers a fisherman anything he wants if he lets go of the fish.
 &quot;I want all the policemen sailing in coffins along this river,&quot; the man says.
 &quot;How can you say such an outrageous thing - there are good and bad policemen, you know,&quot; the fish says.
 &quot;OK ... Then let the good policemen sail in good coffins and the bad policemen sail in bad coffins,&quot; the man replies.
 Jokes have always been a mirror of public attitudes toward different sensitive issues. Sometimes they sound quite insulting, but if the government is serious about not being laughed at, it should change the whole system.
 The three recent cases seem like a good start, although the city police department that deals with crimes by police officers says their work is routine. The city prosecutor's office has opened about 70 criminal cases against former and serving officers in the last year.
 It seems to me 70 is not all that many. So I think rounding up crooked cops should not be routine work, but a widespread operation. The only catch is: if that happens there is a chance that the jokes about the police will be less cruel.

TITLE: Everyone Is Losing With Parfyonov
TEXT: Whoever's idea it was to fire NTV anchor Leonid Parfyonov and cancel his feisty and irreverent &quot;Namedni&quot; show - consistently one of the top five most-watched programs on NTV -would seem to have shot themselves in the foot quite spectacularly.
 
Over the past couple of days, endless column centimeters have been devoted to the events leading up to Parfyonov's dismissal and to speculation about the combination of personal, political and professional factors that precipitated the coup de grace delivered by NTV general director Nikolai Senkevich on Tuesday night.
 The danger in all this, however, is that the big picture gets clouded by the wealth of minutiae. If one takes a step back, at least two points come clearly into focus:
 First, if the decision was taken by NTV's bosses without prompting from the Kremlin, it betrays an alarmingly cavalier attitude on their part toward one of the channel's most valuable assets. Parfyonov's show was regularly watched by more than 15 percent of the viewing public, and commanded advertising rates estimated at twice that of NTV's other weekly current affairs program, &quot;Lichny Vklad.&quot; One would not expect Parfyonov to be dismissed with such alacrity, even despite his questionable corporate (though not journalistic) ethics in airing the station's dirty laundry and his difficult relationship with Senkevich. Such a move belies NTV's claims that the Gazprom-owned station is in fact a commercial company that is run for profit - particularly at a time when the channel's ratings have been on the slide.
 The obvious conclusion is that when it comes to the crunch, politics take precedence over any commercial considerations.
 Second, if the initiative to sack Parfyonov and yank &quot;Namedni&quot; came from the Kremlin - as seems highly plausible, given the program's trademark irreverent and even caustic tone toward the powers that be - it is an incredibly shortsighted decision.
 When accused of cracking down on media freedoms (particularly vis-a-vis national television), the Kremlin's trump card until now has always been to point to NTV and programs such as &quot;Namedni&quot; and Savik Shuster's &quot;Svoboda Slova.&quot; It provided cover for the bland conformity pervading all other national television stations. Now that fig leaf is rapidly coming unstuck.
 The natural assumption will be that the Kremlin is preparing to further crack down on the media, as tolerance for any kind of criticism drops to almost zero. What an excellent way to kick off Putin's second term, undermining the president's emphatic rhetorical commitment to strengthening democratic institutions (a key theme in his post-re-election speeches).
 Thus a lose-lose situation all around. And that's not even taking into account the loss to millions of viewers across the country.

TITLE: carillon master does it again
AUTHOR: By Larisa Doktorow

PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: For five days after May 26, Petersburgers in the know were able to enjoy carillon concerts in the Peter and Paul Cathedral given by the Belgian master musician who was responsible for the reinstallation of this medieval instrument in St. Petersburg in 2001 and who has returned periodically since to perform and to promote the cause. 
 
Jo Haazen is the director of the Royal Carillon School in Mechelen, near Brussels. His enthusiasm and energy helped to collect the necessary $350,000, principally in Belgium but also in the U.S., Japan and Australia, for the manufacture, transportation and installation of the new carillon in St. Petersburg. As Haazen said, the project has now been expanded to include the installation of an additional instrument in Peterhof on its 300th anniversary next year and the establishment of a proper carillon school in Russia.
 The carillon is a musical instrument with a keyboard and pedals controlling a set of bells to perform liturgical, classical and folk music. It was first introduced into Russia by Peter the Great, who acquired a couple of carillons during his travels in Holland. Eventually one of these instruments was installed in the Peter and Paul Cathedral within the Peter and Paul Fortress. But with the passage of time the carillons fell into disrepair and the concerts stopped until September 2001 and Haazen's first public concert at the fortress.
 Now three years later, having heard from the director of the Peterhof State Museum that the Peterhof Palace also once possessed a carillon, Haazen is ready to do it again. 
 &quot;It is a pity that Russia has only one carillon. We in Belgium have 120, in France there are 80 and 70 in Germany,&quot; Haazen said.
 The planned 300th anniversary of Peterhof in 2005 gives Haazen a perfect opportunity to initiate another project. It is one more step in the reestablishment of Peterhof's tradition as a center for Russian and foreign music. With the support of the Peterhof Museum and under the presidency of Haazen a special foundation has been created with the purpose of collecting funds for a Peterhof carillon. 
 Haazen explains why he has become so engaged by the next project. &quot;Seeing the bell tower in Peterhof where we are planning to mount the carillon, I understood that it could be a real gem. Until 1917 the tower at the Upper Park contained the bells announcing the arrival of the royal family. The 51 bells will be smaller in size than the bells set at the Peter and Paul church, but it will have four octaves and will be suitable to play religious and classic music. I believe it will be one of the best carillons in the world&quot;
 The problem is the shortage of time. In 15 months it is necessary to collect the means, cast the bells, bring and install them. How is the fund raising proceeding? 
 &quot;Our foundation stresses the importance of Russian sponsors,&quot; said Konstantin Yepachtin, the coordinator of the project. 
 &quot;We cannot ask Belgians to donate money for another Russian carillon. They can reply: Where are the Russian sponsors? By now we have already several Russian sponsors and Jo Haazen has attracted four Belgians. The project progresses nicely. The Dutch Foundry Petit and Fritsen which made the Peter and Paul church carillon has put aside time for making our carillon. There are only five foundries in the world for making bells. So imagine how busy they are. The donors will have their names and inscriptions chiseled on the bells they buy. What a beautiful and noble opportunity to immortalize your name! We need 250,000 euros, but the price tag of the whole project will be more.&quot;
 Installing a carillon is not everything. Musicians must also be available locally to perform on it. Yepachtin said that the project includes means for training Russian musicians, who would over time replace Haazen. For this to succeed there should be a carillon school here in St. Petersburg, he said.
 As Jo Haazen puts it: &quot;The idea of having a carillon school was approved. We will bring from Mechelen the school keyboard. I will give courses. There is an evident interest among young Russian musicians and we will have two carillons already. Now we are looking for accommodations. I am optimistic. I hope that after the city has received a generous present from us it will find means to make a reciprocal gesture, giving us a place for our school.&quot; 
 During this summer. in addition to regular concerts, there will be two carillon festivals. The first will start on the last Friday in June and will last for 10 days. The second will take place at the end of July. In both cases Haazen will be joined by two musicians from Portugal, Marina Nevskaya, the first Russian carillon player from Moscow, and Russian students of the Mechelen Royal Carillon school.

TITLE: best of british presents 'othello'
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The innovative British director Declan Donnellan is coming to town next week with his company Cheek By Jowl to perform a rendition of Shakespeare's &quot;Othello,&quot; which first premiered in France in April. The troupe, listed as one of the 10 great theater companies in the world by Time Magazine, has won international recognition for their daring interpretations of British, French and Russian classics.
 
&quot;Othello&quot;, produced jointly with Theatre du Nord in association with Odeon-Theatre de l'Europe Paris, is showing at the Maly Drama Theater - Theater of Europe on June 10 and 11.
 Declan Donnellan was born in 1953 in Britain to an Irish family. The director describes his childhood as rather lonely and in some ways unhappy.
 &quot;I was 16 when I discovered theatre and it gave me peace,&quot; he recalls. &quot;There is no greater gift that a person can be given than to be put in touch with his creativity. It transformed my life.&quot; 
 Donnellan founded Cheek By Jowl in 1981 with his partner, designer Nick Ormerod. What the duo had in mind was to give modern interpretations of, and fresh look at, eternal and once-inviolable classics. The company has since given about 300 performances of many different plays across the globe from Rio De Janeiro to Cairo to Katmandu, winning rave reviews and a string of theatrical awards.
 The director offers a straightforward answer about the motivation to turn to &quot;Othello.&quot; 
 &quot;We found a fantastic actor called Nonzo Anozie who was just made and built to do Othello, and it is always good to do Othello and to examine racism and what we do to people who are different from us,&quot; Donnellan told reporters.
 Several performances in Moscow and St. Petersburg are part of an extensive, year-long international tour supported by the British Council. After Russia, the company will visit Spain, Portugal, China, Australia and the United States. 
 Over the past five years, the director has produced two works in Russia, both of them being bold takes on Shakespeare. &quot;The Winter's Tale&quot;, staged in 1999 and still running in repertory at the Maly Drama Theater, won the Golden Mask, Russia's top theatrical award. Last summer he produced &quot;Twelfth Night&quot; with actors from Moscow's International Confederation of Theatrical Unions.
 &quot;Othello&quot; received a most enthusiastic response in France. &quot;Young Anglo-Nigerian actor Nonzo Anozie, the savage force of nature personified, is equally convincing smoking and in colonial British military uniform,&quot; reads a review in Le Figaro. &quot;He performs the title character with sharp penetration ... Donellan brilliantly stages the tragedy on an almost empty space: five long low wooden boxes standing uncovered, at times resembling coffins, while at other times turns into Desdemona's (Caroline Martin's) deathbed when she is strangled by Othello.&quot;
 &quot;Nonso Anozie is a magnificent Othello, fragile, bewildered, who dies because he fails to see that fate is as insubstantial as a silk handerchief,&quot; writes Le Monde.
 In Donnellan's take on the tragedy, Iago (Jonny Phillips) becomes the central character, skillfully manipulating other characters and playing on their fears and ambitions. It is not Iago's diabolic intelligence that kills Othello. Rather, it is Iago's knowledge of Othello's weak points that allows him to provoke Othello's self-destruction.
 &quot;Jonny Phillips' Iago is invested with sufficient cunning to convincingly run rings round such overweight opposition,&quot; reads a review in Britain's The Stage. &quot;In a performance showing a commendable propensity for forward planning, he is able to witness with grim satisfaction most of his schemes fall into place.&quot;
 
 <i>
&quot;Othello&quot; will be performed in English with Russian translation available via headphones. Links:http://www.cheekbyjowl.com/ </i>

TITLE: chernov's choice
TEXT: The concert season should be at its height, but this week seems to be deprived of truly exciting musical events. There are a couple of exceptions, though.
 <strong>La Minor,</strong> the local band that offers sophisticated, live and jazzy treatment of vintage Soviet-era urban folk - not the simplified, loutish version that one usually hears in cabs or on local radio - will give a concert at Fish Fabrique on Sunday.
 La Minor's frontman Slava Shalygin claimed last week that the band will not perfrom locally until the fall, but the concert has been arranged specially for a German documentary. According to Shalygin, the filmmakers who filmed the band in Germany, came to St. Petersburg to capture La Minor in its normal setting.
 Apart from the band, the film will be covering the Hamburg-based Datscha-Projekt, which has promoted Russian-related concerts and parties in Germany since 2001. It has promoted Leningrad, Billy's Band and Iva Nova, among others. More information about the Datscha-Projekt is available at its Web site at www.datscha-projekt.de.
 The <strong>Vermicelli Orchestra, </strong>an art-rock band formed by a former Akvarium accordion player will perform at Red Club on Sunday. 
 However, summer promises more international events - apart from <strong>Paul McCartney, </strong>who will perform at Palace Square on June 20.
 Svetlaya Muzyka, or Light Music, the promoters of <strong>Stereoleto</strong>, which proved to be possibly the finest local pop event last year, revealed this year's lineup this week.
 Judging from its program, Stereoleto seems to have shrunk a little since its eight-date series in 2003, offering only four events.
 Also it seems to be losing its very happily chosen location at Molodyozhny Theater's inner gardens, with only one event taking place there, while the other three will take place elsewhere, from the Manezh Kadetskogo Korpusa, the venue opened last year which normally hosts techno parties, to such an exotic site as the governmential residence K2 on Krestovsky Ostrov.
 However, the festival will open on its usual place, at and near Molodyozhny Theater on the Fontanka River, on July 3 with a concert from London's <strong>Asian Dub Foundation</strong>, whose most recent album &quot;Enemy of the Enemy&quot; was released in February 2003 and includes contributions from guitarist Ed O'Brien from Radiohead, Sinead O'Connor, and Hindi vocalist Sonia Mehta, among others. Local talent will be represented by the St. Petersburg Ska-Jazz Review.
 Even more intriguingly, <strong>David Byrne</strong> will perform as part of Stereoleto on July 17. The former Talking Head, who is now on world tour to promote his new album &quot;Grown Backwards,&quot; will be backed by the six-piece Tosca Strings band from Austin, Texas. The concert will take place at the Manezh Kadetskogo Korpusa.
 <strong>Stereolab,</strong> Britain's sophisticated pop band with a French vocalist, will provide some competition to Byrne by playing very close to his concert - at TyUZ, or the Young Spectators' Theater, the day before, on July 16.
 Meanwhile, <strong>Live Park,</strong> the local alt-rock club launched at Alexandrovsky Park in early April only to be closed after its first four nights for no apparent reason, said it would resume its activities as an open-air stage near to its original site next week. Watch this space.
 
 <i>
- By Sergey Chernov </i>

TITLE: sail away in an armenian ark
AUTHOR: By Adam Federman
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The final page of the menu at Noyan Tapan (Noah's Ark) is a list of prices for broken dishware. One-hundred and fifty rubles for a ceramic mug, 300 rubles ($5-$10) for an earthenware plate, and so on.
 
Perhaps it's a gentle warning designed to limit the amount of Armenian cognac consumed or just a pragmatic response to previous mishaps. 
 Anyway, the oversized oil painting of Noah descending with his flock from Mount Ararat, seemingly into the dining room itself, will put you on guard before you even get to the menu. Mount Ararat - a dormant volcano nearly 17,000 feet high in northeastern Turkey and ten miles from the Armenian border -is believed by many to be the final resting place of Noah's Ark. Whether you're taken by such myths or not it's a good reason to raise a glass in honor of the biblical story and in honor of God's destruction of the earth. Or just in honor of Mount Ararat.
 Finding something to fill your glass with isn't difficult given that Armenia is home to over 200 varieties of grapes, most of them native to the region. One of the most well-known grapes is the <i>areni</i> from the Vayats Dzor region. A bottle bearing the name of the grape is 390 rubles ($13.44) and is a good dry table wine. 
 Noyan Tapan also has close to fifteen varieties of Armenian cognac, though not all were available. The <i>otbornoi</i> select is 85 rubles ($2.93) for 50 grams or 850 rubles ($29.31) for a bottle. The three-star Ararat is 55 rubles ($1.89) for the same amount and the seven-star 80 rubles ($2.75) . The number of stars denotes the number of years the cognac has been fermented. Armenian cognac has long been highly regarded and won its first Grand-Prix gold medal in France in 1904.
 It's best to start with the wine and save the cognac for the end of the meal, even if by that point there's a greater risk of dropping a glass or throwing a plate at your partner. Cognac, especially good cognac, is best sipped without the distracting flavors of food.
 The menu at Noyan Tapan is a mix of Russian and Armenian cuisine. They have everything from <i>kholodets,</i> meat in aspic jelly (39 rubles, $1.34), to hot and cold borshch (50 and 60 rubles, $1.72, $2.06), and anumber of Russian salads. 
 The <i>tolma </i>(92 rubles, $3.17) - rice and meat wrapped in vine leaves served warm with a light sour cream - were as good as any in the city. The <i>shorba</i> (65 rubles, $2.24) - a beef soup with garbanzo beans and potatoes - is good rainy day fare. Its garlicky broth goes well with <i>matsun</i>, a sour yogurt (15 rubles, 51 cents), and the thin Armenian <i>lavash</i> bread (5 rubles, 17 cents). The only complaint is that the meat is a bit tough.
 The same can be said for the house specialty, the <i>razdan,</i> a filet of pork rolled with cheese, red and green peppers, and dill (149 rubles, $5.13). The meat was overcooked and under-seasoned. 
 The home-style pork ribs (129 rubles, $4.44) were better. They were meaty with plenty of fat and not dried out. The vegetable side dish for 30 rubles ($1.03) however was a disappointing pile of green beans, cauliflower, and carrots evidently from a bag. The peasant-style potatoes were markedly better, browned nicely and served with chopped dill and garlic. 
 The assorted kebab (110 rubles, $3.79) with lamb and chicken was served, to our surprise, with a fried egg on top. It was good but not much different from the ambiguous Russian cutlet found on menus throughout the city. All entrees are served with pickled cabbage and enough raw onion to last a few days. 
 Noyan Tapan's dining room is small, with just seven tables and a piano in the corner with a television sitting idly on top. They don't have live music but apparently whoever can play the piano is welcome to. And this would certainly be welcome as Love Radio plays nonstop, oozing from the speakers mounted on the wall. 
 The restaurant has been around for eleven years and even on the far end of Sadovaya, a good half-hour from Nevsky, has kept its doors open. It's a friendly spot and if nothing else a good place to drink some cognac away from all the traffic and noise of the city.
 
 <i>
Noyan Tapan (Noah's Ark), 81 Sadovaya Ulitsa. Cash only, open daily until 11 p.m. Menu in Russian only. Dinner for two with cognac and one bottle of wine 1,116 rubles ($38.48). </i>

TITLE: the hermitage honors balanchine
AUTHOR: By Larisa Doktorow

PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The U.S. choreographer George Balanchine, who was born Georgy Melitonovich Balanchivadze in St. Petersburg in 1904 and whose centenary is being marked by a newly opened exhibition in the Hermitage Theater, was one of the 20th century's leading creative forces with a worldwide impact on dance. 
 
The exhibition, held in the foyer of the Hermitage Theater and one of the first joint projects between St. Petersburg's dual cultural jewels, the Mariinsky Theater and the State Hermitage, runs until June 30.
 At the opening ceremony on Wednesday, U.S. ambassador to Russia Alexander Vershbow thanked St. Petersburg for giving America one of the most influential artistic figures of the last century and cited Balanchine's words: &quot;I am Georgian by blood, Russian by culture and a St. Petersburger by nationality.&quot;
 The exhibition provides photographs, drawings and other documents from the St Petersburg period of his life up to 1924, some of which have never before been shown publicly. Balanchine studied and worked as a dancer and later a choreographer at the Mariinsky Theater. There are also film excerpts from his later ballet productions in New York, where Balanchine founded the New York City Ballet - effectively inventing modern ballet in the process - and photos by Paul Kolnik and Costas. 
 One of the most striking items is the pastel portrait of the 18-year-old dancer by Zinaida Serebryakova from 1922. Next to it there are Balanchine's costumes from the roles of Bacchus and Jester from ballets by Cesar Pugni and Nikolai Cherepnin respectively. 
 In the section called &quot;Balanchine's St. Petersburg&quot; the organizers have exhibited paintings of poet Anna Akhmatova, composer Alexander Glazunov and other leading figures of the age with whom Balanchine is associated, as well as costume designs, theater posters and announcements about his first works performed in St. Petersburg. 
 The importance of St. Petersburg in Balanchine's formation was underlined by Lourdes Lopez , the executive director of the George Balanchine Foundation in New York. Among other VIPs present at the opening of the exhibition Wednesday were Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky and the director of the Mariinsky Theater's ballet company Makhar Vasiyev.
 Although Balanchine, who lived in the U.S. from the early 1930s until his death in 1983, found fame as an American choreographer, the exhibition takes us back to his roots in Petrograd's Imperial Ballet School, where he absorbed the techniques and canons of a ballet tradition going back to the court of Louis XIV. It takes us through his dance career in the turbulent years of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and Civil War (1918-21) when Russian ballet almost disappeared - most of the seasoned ballet staff fled abroad and the Mariinsky troupe barely managed to rid itself of Red Navy visitors who for several years displaced the general public in the audience. 
 The vacuum left by the emigration of leading artists through these years gave the young dancer enormous opportunities to stage his work. He was not a leading star in the Mariinsky troupe - he was just a dancer in the corps-de-ballet - but in the three and a half years before his emigration he mounted a number of successful stagings, which this exhibition shows.
 We see Balanchine in the context of innovation when the Mariinsky choreographer Fyodor Lopukhov introduced his &quot;Dance Symphony,&quot; which many say strongly influenced the young Balanchine. 
 A reproduction of Lopukhov's seminal work &quot;Dance Symphony&quot; was performed this week in the Mariinsky as part of its Balanchine Century season within the Stars of The White Nights arts festival.
 The exhibition is one part of a multifaceted program to celebrate the centenary here and in New York. While the New York City Ballet Theater and the American Ballet Theater are featuring Balanchine ballets throughout the year, the Mariinsky Theater is giving special attention to Balanchine works this week. 
 The opening of the exhibition formed the prologue to a symposium called &quot;George Balanchine: Past, Present and Future' which will run until Saturday and brings together outstanding Russian and American ballet critics and choreographers including Vasiyev, Alexey Ratmansky, director of the Bolshoi Theater ballet, and Francia Russel, director of the Pacific Northwest Ballet. 
 On Saturday soloists from the Mariinsky Theater will talk about their experiences of &quot;dancing Balanchine.&quot; 
 
 <i>
For performances in The Balanchine Century program, see listings. Links: www.hermitagemuseum.org, www.mariinsky.ru
 </i>

TITLE: breathing new life into 'ivan susanin'
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The scraping of a carpenter's plane mingled with the first sounds the orchestra made shortly after the Mariinsky Theater's famous blue curtain rose to unveil the premiere of Mikhail Glinka's &quot;A Life for The Tsar,&quot; Russia's first classical national opera, on May 30. 
 
Director Dmitry Chernyakov has turned away from grandiloquence and patriotic pomp, to carve out a very human story focusing more on one man's tragic sacrifice than the issue of the never-ending quest for a Russian national identity.
 The opera tells the moving tale, based on historic events, of a Russian peasant who gives his life to save the tsar as the country is invaded by marauding Polish forces.
 Vocally and musically, much-rehearsed and well-performed in a concert version which has been played at the Mariinsky, the production was a genuine success. The peasant Ivan Susanin (Sergei Aleksashkin) has power, sense and generosity of heart, a patriarch for the family, while the rest of the cast - daughter Antonida (Olga Trifonova) and son Vanya (Zlata Bulycheva), and Antonida's fiance Sobinin (Leonid Zakhozhayev) - were very much suited to their roles. 
 Visually, the opera skillfully interweaves the ages. In Act One, introducing the main characters, 17th century costumes are juxtaposed with 20th century lamps and a bulky white plaster elk as if taken from a Soviet era public park enters the scene. Act Three shows the Poles crashing into Susanin's house, dressed in black parkas of the kind that Vladimir Putin favors on trips to Siberia. The Susanin family - sorting out a meal with pickles, home-made jams, and other delicacies from the dacha - are given a mid-20th century feel.
 Act Two makes a striking contrast to the visual simplicity of the rest of the work. Taking place in a kitsch hall resembling a Russian <i>terem</i>, or old-style wooden house with church elements, it shows the Poles - men dressed in suits and women wrapped in furs - plotting the capture of the tsar, Mikhail Romanov. Two guards stand by the door armed with mobile phones. The Poles watch a series of dance performances, a horrendous mish-mash of styles, where the entrance of classical ballerinas topped with giant <i>kokoshniki </i>headresses, cabaret-style, interchange with the little students of the Vaganova Ballet Academy dancing with guns, exactly the height as them, paired by military officers, twice their height.
 The act's gaudy aesthetics served to unmask the genuine enemy of the peasants, which appeared not to be the Poles at all but the country's own ruling class, the people in power. However, not all members of the audiences seemed to have gotten the message right. Complaints and accusations of vulgarity could be heard among perhaps the less-sophisticated members of the audience, those who are not very strong in allegories.
 Written in 1836, &quot;A Life For The Tsar&quot; is believed to have been inspired by the Russian victory in Napoleonic war in 1812. In that year, the Glinka family estate was ravaged by the French army on its way to Moscow, which left a dramatic imprint on the heart of young Glinka, who was 8 years old at the time. 
 The subject for the opera was proposed by poet Vasily Zhukovsky during one of the frequent gatherings of the artistic <i>beau monde,</i> where the literary and musical elite of Glinka's time discussed the ailing motherland. 
 After the 1812 victory, the quest for the Russian cultural identity - as opposed to the Gallomania of the 18th century - preoccupied the minds of the country's aristocracy and intellectuals, fascinated by the bravery, spunk and devotion shown by the Russian peasants on the battlefield. 
 For Glinka, the parallels between Susanin's courageous self-sacrifice in 1612 and the patriotism of peasant soldiers in 1812 were obvious. The opera, heralding the virtues of simple men, reflected the tendency in 19th century Russia of a growing number of aristocrats to seek the genuine, sincere Russia in the provinces and reject the Western way of life as alien. The &quot;Slavsya&quot; (Glory) chorus from the opera has several times been offered up as a potential national anthem for Russia.
 In Soviet times, the opera was shown in a much-altered version with the tsar replaced by the partisan rebel Kuzma Minin, and Susanin therefore losing his life in the name of the people's cause.
 Typically entitled &quot;Ivan Susanin,&quot; the Soviet renditions burst with timpani and patriotic fever, offering little reflection on Susanin's loss of life. What brigdes Soviet renditions with the Glinka's original work is the never-questioned rightness of Susanin's sacrifice.
 In Chernyakov's version, Susanin's death appears much more tragic, with his wretched family members huddled together, lost and emaciated as the choir indulges in the triumphant &quot;Slavsya.&quot; Their mournful monologues overshadow Glory's power.
 


TITLE: and loudly flows the debate
AUTHOR: By Victor Sonkin 

PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: <i><strong>A century after the birth of Soviet Nobel laureate Mikhail Sholokhov, author of &quot;And Quiet Flows The Don,&quot; opinions on the writer's legacy are as divided as ever. </strong></i>
 With the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mikhail Sholokhov just around the corner, official centennial celebrations are already in the works. After all, Sholokhov, who died in 1984, went down in history as the only Nobel laureate of the Soviet era who was not at odds with the regime. But as a handful of prominent journalists and historians proved at a news conference last week, the legacy of the Soviet Union's literary giant is still up for debate.
 
Even Sholokhov's birth date is a matter of dispute. While official records list the year of his birth as 1905, other estimates put him between one and 10 years older than that. Much more serious, however, are claims that Sholokhov's masterpiece - &quot;And Quiet Flows the Don,&quot; published in four installments from 1928 to 1940 - was mostly plagiarized, and that his subsequent glory, place of honor in the Soviet establishment and 1965 Nobel Prize were undeserved.
 In the novel, Sholokhov sets the wavering political sympathies and tragic love affair of a Cossack officer, Grigory Melekhov, against the broad backdrop of the Civil War and Cossack subjugation to Soviet rule. After the novel was published, however, Sholokhov's creativity faded steadily away, reaching its lowest point in the socialist realist cliches and banalities of his 1956 short story, &quot;The Fate of a Man.&quot; Still, he remained a prominent figure in the Soviet literary hierarchy, and a staunch supporter of the Party line. In 1959, he accompanied Nikita Khrushchev on a trip to Europe and the United States, and in 1961 became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
 Although the literary climate has opened up since the Soviet period, opinions on Sholokhov remain as divided as ever. Manning a discussion marking the 99th anniversary of the writer's birth at the Mir Novostei press center was a group of literary-minded historians and journalists, from dissident historian and Sholokhov skeptic Roy Medvedev to journalist and literary critic Lev Kolodny, who has published two books in defense of the writer's work.
 Charges of plagiarism plagued Sholokhov throughout his literary career, as it became increasingly obvious that neither his previous nor subsequent work could measure up to his seminal novel. According to Kolodny, those doubts were finally given a platform in 1974 with the anonymous publication of a pamphlet supporting the popular hypothesis that &quot;And Quiet Flows the Don&quot; was originally written by the Cossack writer and White Army officer Fyodor Kryukov. Prefaced by an introduction by dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the pamphlet quickly drew supporters.
 &quot;It was just an unsubstantiated hypothesis,&quot; Kolodny said of the pamphlet last Friday. &quot;But Solzhenitsyn's preface and Kryukov's family photos created the kind of emotional impact that dies hard.&quot;
 Participants in last week's discussion included Medvedev, Kolodny and Svetlana Kolosova. Medvedev first addressed his doubts as to the authorship of Sholokhov's novel in 1977 with the publication of &quot;Problems in the Literary Biography of Mikhail Sholokhov&quot; in the West. Revisiting these doubts, he pointed to the unlikelihood of so youthful an author - Sholokhov was 22 years old when the first volume was written - producing such a mature literary work. 
 &quot;It's hard to believe that this young, virtually uneducated boy could have written the best Russian novel of the 20th century,&quot; Medvedev said. &quot;Even his closest friends had difficulty coming to terms with this apparent contradiction.&quot;
 At last week's press conference however, Medvedev drew back slightly from his 1977 conclusions, saying that his book had been poorly researched, and that he had only published it as a protest against the KGB, which had exerted pressure on him and confiscated his archives as a result of his dissident activities. 
 Speaking up for Sholokhov at the conference was veteran journalist Kolodny, who in his books &quot;Who Wrote 'And Quiet Flows the Don'&quot; and &quot;How I Found 'And Quiet Flows the Don,'&quot; has taken credit for finding rough copies of the novel and proving beyond reasonable doubt that Sholokhov was indeed the author. 
 &quot;The absence of manuscripts plagued Sholokhov studies,&quot; Kolodny said about his past research. &quot;The papers I found prove that Sholokhov actually worked on the novel, that it had many drafts, that it was not just copied from somewhere. He had an outstanding memory and an inborn feeling for language. You can't fake that.&quot;
 As part of the build-up to Sholokhov's centennial, discussion will fan out to wider audiences on Monday and Wednesday with the airing of &quot;The Writer and the Leader,&quot; a two-part television documentary on Channel One. Appearing at last week's press conference, director Vladimir Meletin said that although the documentary was initially commissioned by the state-owned television channel, he soon found himself obsessed by the complexities surrounding Sholokhov's career.
 In the documentary, Meletin dwells on the stormy politics behind the novel's third volume, which was denied publication because of its sympathetic description of an anti-Soviet Cossack rebellion. Sholokhov applied for passage to Italy to rally support from Soviet literary doyen Maxim Gorky, only to be turned down. It was only after Gorky returned to Moscow and secured Sholokhov a meeting with Josef Stalin that the volume was finally published - and historians have consistently been at a loss to explain that decision, since it was forbidden to as much as mention the rebellion in Soviet historical studies.
 Tending toward the bright side, however, the film glosses over controversial aspects of Sholokhov's biography, such as his denunciation of dissident writers Yury Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky at the 23rd Communist Party Congress in 1966. Sholokhov's statement produced a bewildered outcry from left-wing Western politicians and Russian intellectuals like Lidiya Chukovskaya, who wrote that Sholokhov had cut himself off from the charitable tradition of Russian literature.
 According to Kolosova, the head of documentary programming for Channel One, decisions about content are often determined by anticipated viewer ratings. However, she went on, while the historical sweep may be slightly limited as a result of this practice, the dangers are outweighed by increased interest in documentary films overall. 
 &quot;It is reassuring that certain documentaries, even those aired late at night, get larger audiences than Hollywood movies, even outside Moscow,&quot; Kolosova said. &quot;People are hungry for knowledge and want to know more about their history.&quot;
 Part of a larger project, &quot;The Writer and the Leader&quot; will be followed by a series of films about the uneasy relationships between other authors, such as Gorky, Konstantin Simonov and Kornei Chukovsky, and the Soviet leaders ruling at the time. In addition, Kolosova said, Channel One is already at work on another Sholokhov feature, &quot;The Mysteries of 'The Quiet Don,'&quot; which will air on the writer's 100th birthday, a year from now.

TITLE: the word's worth
TEXT: One of these days I'm going to apply for a grant to write a dissertation on &quot;Cross-Cultural Equivalents and Divergences in Bathroom Behavior and Terminology,&quot; since the subject seems relatively unplumbed (pun intended) and as fertile as a pile of compost. Once you finally figure out what to call the bathroom and excuse yourself politely (or not so politely), you still need to know how to describe what you did there (other than read, that is). Here Russian provides a wealth of colorful expressions.
 
But to start with the basics, if you're discussing your bodily 
<i>Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator. </i>

TITLE: Bush: Terror Fight Like WWII
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: AIR FORCE ACADEMY, Colorado - Likening the fight against terrorism to the World War II struggle, President George W. Bush urged support Wednesday for his efforts to spread freedom and democracy in the Middle East despite the distrust of many Arabs.
 
&quot;This is the great challenge of our time, the storm in which we fly,&quot; Bush told 981 Air Force Academy cadets graduating in a stadium at the foot of the Rockies.
 Just as events in Europe determined the outcome of the Cold War, events in the Middle East will determine the fate of the fight against terrorism , Bush said in a 45-minute foreign policy speech. He said that beyond jailing terrorists, free nations must nurture openness in oppressed societies to head off the resentment and anger that breeds violence.
 He said such a transformation would take generations and was essential to America's security.
 &quot;If that region is abandoned to dictators and terrorists, it will be a constant source of violence and alarm, exporting killers of increasingly destructive power to attack America and other free nations,&quot; Bush said. &quot;If that region grows in democracy and prosperity and hope, the terrorist movement will lose its sponsors, lose its recruits and lose the festering grievances that keep terrorists in business.&quot;

TITLE: Cinema Pirates Under Scrutiny
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON - No, they are not Lord Voldemort's Death Eaters - but they sure could give you a scare.
 
Ushers at British cinemas showing the new Harry Potter film have been issued military-style night vision goggles to thwart cinema pirates.
 Vue Cinemas said Monday its staff will spend all two hours and 22 minutes of the film &quot;Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban&quot; scanning the theaters in an effort to uncover anyone trying to secretly record the film.
 The goggles were distributed to Vue cinemas around Britain, along with copies of the film, by Warner Brothers. The company is determined to fight back after a deluge of poor quality copies of the first two Harry Potter movies hit the black market.
 &quot;It is an incredible response and makes you realize why the distributors are so keen to protect the film from pirates,&quot; said Jamie Graham, who manages a Vue complex in central England. &quot;I have been working in the cinema industry for 10 years and I have never heard of anything like this before,&quot; he said.
 The movie, which opened Monday in Britain, opens in the U.S. on Friday.
 &quot;Our ushers are using the goggles in every screening to check nobody is making any illegal recordings,&quot; he said. &quot;If anybody is caught, then they will be reported to the police.&quot;
 


TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Moore Has Distributor
 </b>

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Michael Moore's award-winning documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" has found a U.S. distributor and will hit theaters June 25.
 The film will be released by a partnership of Lions Gate Films, IFC Films and the Fellowship Adventure Group, which was formed by Harvey and Bob Weinstein specifically to market Moore's film.
 The film, which recently won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival criticizes President George W. Bush's response to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and connects the Bush family with Osama bin Laden.
 The Weinsteins, who run Miramax Films, bought the rights to the movie from The Walt Disney Co., which owns Miramax and refused to distribute "Fahrenheit 9/11."
 
 
<b>IOC's Kim Jailed 
 </b>

SEOUL (Reuters) - International Olympic Committee vice-president Kim Un-yong was sentenced to two and a half years in jail on corruption charges on Thursday by a court in South Korea, Yonhap news agency reported.
 The 73-year-old Kim, for a long time one of the most powerful officials in the IOC, was arrested while in hospital in January on charges connected with his leadership of the South Korean National Olympic Committee and the World Taekwondo Federation.
 The agency said Kim was also fined 780 million won ($670,100).
 Prosecutors had charged him with taking 3.8 billion won ($3.27 million) from taekwondo federations and taking bribes from sports officials and businesses. 
 
 
<b>Troops Take Congo City
 </b>

BUKAVU, Congo (AFP) - President Joseph Kabila accused neighboring Rwanda of being behind the renegade soldiers who captured a provincial capital in the volatile east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
 Bukavu, the capital of Sud-Kivu province, fell to renegade troops led by two generals from the Congolese Rally for Democracy, a former Rwandan-backed rebel group that is represented in the transitional government in Kinshasa under the terms of a 2003 peace deal.
 Fighting in Bukavu has left around 60 people dead over the past week.
 
 
<b>Australian Wins Pageant 
 </b>

QUITO (AFP) - Miss Australia, Jennifer Hawkins, was crowned Miss Universe in a glitzy tuxedo-and-gown event in Ecuador.
 Hawkins, a 20-year-old model and dancer, made the traditional strut along the 15-meter runway after receiving the crown from outgoing Miss Universe Amelia Vega of the Dominican Republic.
 Miss USA, Shandi Finnessey, was voted first runner-up by the panel of judges that included actress Bo Derek and music producer Emilio Estefan. Miss Puerto Rico, Alba Giselle Reyes, was second runner-up.
 
 
<b>Olympic Flame Tours
 </b>

ATHENS (Reuters) - The Olympic flame is set to blaze a global trail during a six-week odyssey before it returns for the Aug. 13 opening ceremony.
 Sydney 400 meters champion Cathy Freeman was on Friday to run the opening leg of a relay that will travel to 33 cities in 34 days and take the torch to all five continents for the first time.
 Celebrities from U.S. movie star Angelina Jolie to Japanese pop singer Yukio Hashi will join the 3,600 torchbearers. About $45 million will be spent on taking the torch around the world on its own private jumbo jet dubbed Zeus. 



TITLE: Are Horses Athletes?
AUTHOR: By Steve Wilstein

PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: Sourpusses argue that a racehorse, even one as grand as Smarty Jones, is not an athlete. 
 
They say that it (not a he or a she) does not aspire be a champion, does not consciously train to win and break records. 
 A racehorse, not being human, therefore lacks the essential qualities of the athlete to achieve something noble of body and spirit. All the beast does is carry out its genetic imperative: It is bred and born to run. 
 A more felicitous view of the way most people see Smarty Jones is that this is one heck of an athlete by any measure, and a better one than many of the human varieties. 
 Neither greedy nor arrogant, Smarty Jones has a more endearing personality than a lot of NBA, NFL and baseball players. He - let us at least give him a friendly pronoun - doesn't mouth off with stupid opinions, draw attention to himself with staged celebrations, and commit assaults or other crimes. 
 He displays a sense of the moment, coming up big in the Kentucky Derby and Preakness and preparing now for the Belmont Stakes on Saturday. Ears pricked up, eyes alert, he plays to the crowd. He wins in slop or on dry ground, from the rail or on the outside. 
 The world loves Smarty Jones for all the reasons people have always embraced certain champions more than others: 
 . His story has the great mythic quality of overcoming obstacles - his own brush with death and the murder of his first trainer. 
 . He is pursuing perfection - 8-0 and trying to become only the second undefeated Triple Crown winner in history. Seattle Slew did it in 1977 and no horse has won racing's three jewels, even with a loss along the way, since Affirmed in 1978. 
 . He has the look of an underdog, a red chestnut colt smaller than his rivals, but possesses a regal bearing. 
 . He inspires awe. His record 11 1/2 -length victory in the Preakness was reminiscent of Secretariat's 31-length rout in the 1973 Belmont. 
 In picking The Associated Press top 100 athletes of the 20th century as the year 2000 approached, several voters left off Secretariat simply because he was a horse. It was a blatant case of equine discrimination, but Big Red, arguably the greatest Thoroughbred in history, still got enough support to be ranked No. 81. 
 Man O' War, Seabiscuit, Seattle Slew - all beloved champions - got a smattering of votes but didn't make the final cut. 
 Maybe voters 95 years from now will feel the same reluctance to rank horses among human athletes. But if Smarty Jones captures the Belmont in a manner similar to the way he did the Preakness, chances are that more than a few will cast ballots for him. 
 This is a horse that has a chance to transcend his sport, as Seabiscuit and Secretariat did in different ways, and bring it a desperately needed infusion of fans. 
 Seabiscuit, as recounted in Laura Hillenbrand's bestseller and the hit movie it inspired, captured the American imagination by enduring &quot;a remarkable run of bad fortune, conspiracy, and injury&quot; during the late years of the Depression from 1936 to 1940. She called him &quot;one of history's most extraordinary athletes,&quot; but, of course, she was biased. 
 Secretariat was so beautiful to watch in full, muscle-rippling gallop that some fans by the rail wept with joy as he crossed the finish line at the Belmont. 
 It was one of the most breathtaking moments anyone had ever seen in sport. There, truly, was a phenomenal athlete, but, of course, I'm biased. 
 Children and adults wrote letters to those horses and to Seattle Slew. 
 It's happening again with Smarty Jones, bundles of letters arriving each day from all over the country. Young and old, the fans write about their love of this colt and tell how much he means to them. 
 Smarty Jones' trainer, John Servis, was especially moved by an e-mail from an 11-year-old Florida boy born with a rare skeletal muscle condition. The boy, Beach Cutler, breathes through a ventilator and receives food and liquids through a button attached to his stomach. 
 &quot;I watched you win the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, and I think you will win the Belmont, too,&quot; the boy wrote. &quot;I am so excited. You have inspired me to run like a racehorse while walking with my physical therapist. And when I walk in the pool with my mom, my nurse times me when I'm pretending to race. I even whinny like a horse. You've lifted my spirits.&quot; 
 The sourpusses may go on insisting that Smarty Jones is no athlete, but there are darn few humans out there in sports these days lifting spirits like this intrepid little colt.

TITLE: Russian Final Makes French Open History
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: PARIS - Anastasia Myskina has made history by setting up an all-Russian French Open women's single final when she defeated an out-of-sorts former champion Jennifer Capriati of the United States 6-2, 6-2 in the semi-finals.
 
Myskina, the 6th seed, will on Saturday play fellow Muscovite Yelena Dementyeva, seeded 9th, in the first ever all-Russian final in Grand Slam tennis.
 The at-times fiery Myskina was a picture of cool control and concentration as her all-court game proved too much for 28-year-old Capriati, who was having one of her distracted, bad-tempered days.
 &quot;I am really surprised that I am still in Paris with a Russian final. That's just great for us,&quot; Myskina said.
 &quot;I played really good, but she didn't play her best. It was a nervous match at the beginning especially for me, but something was wrong with her today, definitely.&quot;
 The stage had been set for the 2001 champion with her own defeat of Serena Williams in the quarter-finals, and the demise of Venus Williams, Amelie Mauresmo, Lindsay Davenport and Justine Henin-Hardenne.
 Capriati was the only big name left in the last four and with a crushing advantage in Grand Slam experience over the 22-year-old Myskina, she was the hot favorite to make the final.
 However Capriati got off to a dismal start falling behind 0-3 and 0-40 on her own serve before she even started to find her range.
 The American rallied to get back to 2-3, but another loose game allowed the Russian to break again for 4-2 and she promptly won the next two games to take the set 6-2 in 30 minutes.
 In stark contrast, serves were on top at the start of the second set.
 Capriati had chances to break the Myskina serve in a long fifth game, but failed to do so and she paid the price in the next game when Myskina made the vital breakthrough after a sequence of deuces.
 Playing better and better the Russian served to love to make it 5-2 and she put the match away in the next game with two thumping returns of serve that left Capriati gasping. Myskina's first appearance in a Grand Slam final confirms her arrival amongst the elite of women's tennis after steady progress up the rankings over the last five years.
 And the fact that she will be playing another Russian represents a landmark for women's tennis. Olga Morozova in 1974 was the last Russian woman previously to get that far in Paris.
 &quot;For us it's a real surprise to be in the final on clay because we prefer hard courts,&quot; Myskina said.
 &quot;Yelena and I are really good friends. We played doubles together and we have known each other for 10 years.&quot;
 For Capriati there will be despair at missing out on a golden opportunity to add to the three Grand Slam titles she has already, and as one of the oldest players on the tour she may never again have a better chance.
 &quot;Usually she plays hard-hitting tennis from the baseline, but today she played differently and I was thrown off rhythm. She hits serves at 50 mph and usually I hit winners of those. But I couldn't generate any pace and it was very difficult,&quot; Myskina said.
 &quot;It is a dream for me to be in the final,&quot; Dementyeva added. &quot;It was not very easy to play today because Suarez is a very good claycourt player. 
 &quot;I was tired and a little distressed in the second set but I tried to be aggressive and I ended up doing exactly what I wanted to do.&quot; 
 Morozova, Dementyeva's traveling coach, was the last Russian woman to reach a grand slam final, at Wimbledon in 1974, a month after reached the final at the French Open. She lost both matches to Chris Evert. 
 Belarussian Natasha Zvereva reached the final of the French Open in 1988, although she was representing the Soviet Union. 
 Suarez, a doubles specialist appearing in her first grand slam semi-final, appeared almost paralyzed by nerves in the opening set. 
 Moving slowly, the Argentine double-faulted four times and made 16 unforced errors to hand Dementyeva the first set in just 27 minutes. 
 But after being broken in the opening game of the second set, 22-year-old Dementyeva, whose only other grand slam semi-final appearance was at the US Open in 2000, began to struggle. 
 Mistakes flowed from both players as the first six games went against serve, Dementyeva sending down a succession of double faults to allow Suarez back into the match. 
 The Argentine grew in confidence and a lucky net cord gave her another break in the ninth game, leaving her to serve for the set at 5-4. 
 Again her nerve failed her, though, and Dementyeva broke back, held her own serve and then clinched victory when Suarez served her eighth double fault of the match. 
 &quot;I tried to take it point by point because it's very hard to think that you are playing a grand slam semi-final,&quot; Dementyeva said.
 Myskina's elimination of Capriati was the latest in a series of surprises over the past two weeks at Roland Garros. Upsets included not only the Williams sisters and Henin-Hardenne, but the world No. 2-ranked player Kim Clijsters missed the tournament with an injured wrist.
 <i>(AFP,AP)</i>


TITLE: Smarty Odds On In Stakes
AUTHOR: By Beth Harris

PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK - Purge is going to try - yet again - to beat Smarty Jones in the Belmont Stakes. 
 
If he succeeds after two previous failures, Purge would spoil Smarty's bid to give racing its 12th Triple Crown winner and first since Affirmed in 1978. 
 Preakness runner-up Rock Hard Ten is taking on the Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner again, too. 
 John Servis, Smarty's trainer, is worried about both challengers.
 &quot;Not only are they the toughest horses in the race, but any time this year I think those are going to be the toughest horses we run against,&quot; he said. 
 Undefeated Smarty Jones arrived at Belmont Park on Wednesday, having been made the 2-5 morning-line favorite for Saturday's race. After a van ride from his home base at Philadelphia Park, the chestnut colt walked into Barn 5, where 1973 Triple Crown winner Secretariat was housed. 
 Purge, who is 3-for-3 in races without Smarty Jones in the field, was the second choice at 5-1. 
 Purge enjoys a home-track advantage at Belmont Park. He lives in a stall not far from the paddock where he will parade before more than 100,000 fans Saturday. He came from just off the pace and won the Peter Pan Stakes by 6 3/4 lengths at Belmont on May 22, earning another shot at Smarty. 
 &quot;Smarty Jones has never run here. He's not stabled here,&quot; trainer Todd Pletcher said. &quot;Does that project we're going to beat him? No, but it gives you a little more incentive to want to try it.&quot; 
 Purge finished second to Smarty in the Rebel Stakes and fifth behind him in the Arkansas Derby. Both times Purge ran on the lead and Smarty overtook him. 
 Purge was favored over Smarty Jones in the Rebel at Oaklawn Park in March, the only time in Smarty's eight career races that he wasn't the wagering favorite. 
 Pletcher plans a change in tactics for the 1 1/2 -mile Belmont. 
 &quot;I don't want to be in a position where at the five-eighths pole, half-mile pole or three-eighths pole, Smarty Jones tells us when to move,&quot; he said. &quot;That's what happened in Arkansas. By reversing the positions, if Smarty Jones moves, we don't have to. We've tried twice to be in front of him and that didn't work, so we've got to try something else.&quot;
 Servis expects varying tactics from Smarty's eight challengers. 
 &quot;Let's face it, we've got a bulls-eye on our back,&quot; he said. &quot;There are going to be some things happening in this race that are going to be totally uncharacteristic for a normal race and Stewart [Elliott] is going to have to get through that.&quot;
 Jockey Elliott is 1-for-13 at Belmont Park since 1991. 
 Bobby Frankel, who spoiled Funny Cide's Triple bid last year when Empire Maker won the Belmont, entered 20-1 long shot Master David. 
 &quot;I had a much better chance last year,&quot; he said. Smarty Jones &quot;looks like 10 lengths the best. He seems like the perfect horse right now.&quot;
 
 <i>
See comment, page 11 </i>