SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #977 (45), Tuesday, June 15, 2004
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TITLE: Outrage At Amber Room Book
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Russian cultural figures have reacted with outrage to a new book on the fate of the Amber Room, which the book says was destroyed in Koenigsberg during World War II.
 
It is not clear that any of the critics have read the book and none of them have presented any evidence that the book is wrong. 
 The book, "The Amber Room: The Untold Story of the Greatest Hoax of the Twentieth Century", was published this month. 
 Russians have heavily criticized the book, with former Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi accusing the authors of trying to rewrite history. 
 Even the thought that the Red Army could, willingly or not, be behind the destruction, is perceived as blasphemy in Russia.
 British journalists Catherine Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy spent several years researching Russian archives, most of them in St. Petersburg. Their conclusions are largely based on the diaries of Anatoly Kuchumov, former curator of the Amber Room, who was involved in the search of the room after the war, and the evidence of several witnesses.
 But Russian scholars argue that Kuchumov's diaries contain no speculations of the kind made in the book.
 "Kuchumov's diaries have been well examined, and there is nothing in them alluding to the idea that the Amber Room could be destroyed by the Soviets," said Adelaida Yolkina, senior researcher at the Pavlovsk Museum Estate. "He also never made oral or written statement suggesting that the Red Army was to blame."
 Yolkina said she found the accusations insulting.
 "Back then it was a principle of the state to find and preserve cultural valuables that perished during the war," she said. 
 "Every little thing was looked after and returned, even a small fragment of a toe of a sculpture wouldn't be thrown away. It is impossible to see the Red Army being so careless that they let the Amber Room be destroyed."
 But the authors insist they weren't trying to make a political point with the book. 
 "It was about reporting the evidence only," Scott-Clark said Monday in a telephone interview from Albany in the United States. "Furthermore, when we started working on this issue we were hoping to be able to find the Amber Room. But eventually, through the evidence that we received it became obvious that the Amber Room was gone in the fire."
 Avenir Ovsyanov, director of the Kaliningrad Center for Coordinating the Search for Cultural Relics and one of those quoted in the book, said he was bewildered by the attitude of the authors.
 "If they presented their story as one of many already existing versions, then people who are involved in research around the Amber Room could probably consider tactful silence in regard to it," Ovsyanov told Izvestia. "But they pretend their research has a final say whereas the verdict made in the book is both amateurish and groundless."
 Ovsyanov, who personally knew Kuchumov and met him several times to discuss the issue, said the curator believed until his death that the Amber Room would be found one day.
 Ovsyanov said Kuchumov's finding of the burned remains of Italian mosaics from the Amber Room in the Knight's Hall, can't be considered sufficient basis for a claims made in the book that all panels had gone up in flames.
 "You need to discriminate between the main details of the Amber Room's interior, like wall or floor panels from additional ensemble, which Kuchumov's findings represent," he said. "It is unreal to suggest that all the interior was kept in the same hall, considering its modest size." 
 "Also, the curator's finds were clearly identifiable, with even their numbers visible, so if we imagine the impossible that the entire Amber Room was there, then there had to be traces of amber, if not whole fragments of items on the spot," Ovsyanov added. "What about the remains of the mirrors or the fire-resistant types of wood used in the floor panels? None were found."
 Perhaps predictably, nobody at the Catherine Palace in Tsarskoye Selo, home to the original and the restored Amber Room, accepted the book's version of the fate of the Amber Room, according to the museum's press secretary Tatyana Zharkova. 
 "The history of the Amber Room has always been surrounded by numerous versions, assumptions and hypothesis," she told Interfax. "This book presents but one more, and this one is not taken seriously at the museum."
 In the meantime, Leonid Arinshtein, an adviser to the president of the Russian Culture Foundation, agreed with the British researchers that the Amber Room had been destroyed, but argued that the Red Army is not to be blamed.
 Arinshtein, at the time an infantry platoon commander, visited Koenigsberg castle on the evening of April 8, 1945, before the fire began, to be one of the last people to see what was remaining of the masterpiece. He was certain that the Room was destroyed in the blaze but said the Red Army had nothing to do with the demise. 
 "The castle caught fire only two or three days after the city had been captured," Arinshtein told RIA-Novosti.
 "Panels of the Amber Room were kept in the basement packed in boxes," Arinshtein said. "Fires in Koenigsberg started before the storm of the city as a result of massive bombings by American and British aviation. So if the question of who is responsible arises. then it would be more appropriate to accuse the Allied air forces."
 "We didn't say we blame the Red Army for destroying the Amber Room," Scott-Clark said. "What we said was that the fire in the castle didn't take place until the city was completely under the control of the Red Army. Such was the evidence of eye witnesses, including Arinshtein." 
 The authors have sent their conclusions to Russian and German officials, but have not yet received any official reaction on their book. 
 Arinshtein's interview to RIA-Novosti was one of the first reports read by the authors. "I can only regret that he didn't make that statement before," Scott-Clark said. "That would have saved many people a lot of trouble. His words confirm the report by Moscow expert Alexander Brusov, who was sent to Koenigsberg after the city was taken over by the Red Army."
 Dealing with the Catherine Palace proved frustrating for the British journalists. 
 "It took us five months to secure a meeting with director Ivan Sautov and three weeks for him to reject us," Scott-Clark said. 
 The answer from the museum reads, "it is beyond our physical powers to answer your questions or meet the scheme suggested by you."
 Confusingly though, Sautov's interview with Interfax suggests something different. 
 "We are frequently approached with such requests like 'give us texts, give us materials,'" the agency quoted Sautov as saying. "And when they don't get them, they take offense. But, naturally, if the information received from us is for publishing, we provide it on a commercial basis only. 
 "Our staff spends time and effort to search the archives for this information."
 Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the State Hermitage Museum, was very cautious in his comments. "Most importantly, the destruction of the Amber Room during the Second World War is fault of the people who started the war," Piotrovsky said. "Those who begin a war are responsible for all destructions happening during that war in both moral and legal terms. As for the Amber Room, it should be worth remembering that these were Germans who took it away from Tsarskoye Selo."

TITLE: Fan's Life Devoted to Beatlemania
AUTHOR: By Irina Titova 

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The most precious thing that Russia's "No. 1 Beatle fan" Kolya Vasin has in his life is a record and an autograph he received from John Lennon in 1970.
 
"This is the first thing I want to have with me when I die," Vasin said, kissing the record. "The Beatles are my life." 
 These days Vasin is in especially high spirits, just like thousands of other Russian Beatles fans, who are anxiously awaiting former Beatle Paul McCartney's first concert in St. Petersburg on Sunday.
 Up to 50,000 people are expected to attend the concert in the city's central Palace Square in front of the State Hermitage Museum during St. Petersburg's famous White Nights.
 McCartney will celebrate his 62nd birthday in the city on Friday.
 For Vasin, who has dedicated his life to the Beatles, it's a dream come true.
 Vasin, 59, has been a fan of The Beatles ever since he first heard them in 1964. 
 His friend secretly passed him a record and their freshness and freedom of their sound blew his mind.
 "It's magical. It's like talking to a God," he said. "The words have something for everybody, but the music is even more important."
 He found it hard to live in the regimented lifestyle of Soviet Russia and The Beatles let him escape its confines.
 His love of the Fab Four is so great that it has substituted for almost everything in his life, including family, work and even money.
 "I have almost never had long-term jobs and I never married because all my time and soul were dedicated to The Beatles," Vasin said, sitting in his richly decorated office at 10 Pushkinskaya Ulitsa in the center of St. Petersburg.
 The office, which is also Vasin's apartment, is located in a decaying two-story old building. He calls it the office of John Lennon's Temple, which is what Vasin dreams of turning the building into one day.
 The walls and ceilings of the tiny room are covered with posters and pictures of the four mop tops both in The Beatles era and afterward. 
 The shelves sag under the numerous records, tapes, books, and there are full-size cardboard figures of the boys from Liverpool standing on the floor.
 Several models of Lennon's temple-to-be, a Lennon T-shirt, handmade ceramic mugs with Beatle symbols, and self-made fan albums filled with newspaper clippings, pictures, comments and lyrics add to the decor.
 "Lennon's fan album is the biggest. It weighs 13 kilograms," Vasin says proudly as the sound of The Beatles hit "All My Loving" fills the air.
 Vasin says discovering The Beatles was "a revelation."
 "I'm sure it was God who sent them to us. They brought His message to the world - the message of peace, love and freedom," he said. "That message was aimed to unite all people on this planet."
 In early 1970s, when the Beatlemania was at its peak, Vasin was a legend in Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was then known, because he had every record the Beatles had made.
 In those days young people behind the Iron Curtain had to listen to The Beatles secretly.
 "Let It Be," "Yesterday," and "Imagine" were branded the demoralizing music of the West, and people listened to them hiding in stranger's apartments and passing records to each other because they couldn't buy them anywhere.
 However, in the U.S.S.R., Beatlemania was as strong as anywhere in the world, if not even stronger for being a forbidden fruit.
 In 1966, Vasin was one of the first to open his informal The Beatles Club in a communal apartment where he lived with his parents. People came to see the club and him from throughout the Soviet Union.
 "I was surprised and happy to have all that unexpected glory," he said.
 Vasin said The Beatles changed his character.
 "Like many of my compatriots, who lived in the oppressive Soviet atmosphere, I was kind of a scared person with many complexes," he said. "I never had friends. 
 "The Beatles knocked all that out of me.
 "Their music taught me to enjoy life. And they brought many friends into my life."
 Vasin said the happiest moment of his life was when he met and hugged his idol Paul McCartney, when the star visited St. Petersburg briefly last year.
 "I remember every moment and every word of that meeting, though I couldn't even see him well at that moment. I was so nervous.
 "His hug was like the touch of a god." Vasin said every year he and his friends, who are also devoted Beatles fans, celebrate the birthdays of all four Beatles.
 "Oct. 9, which is Lennon's birthday, is a holy day for me," he said. 
 Lennon is his favorite Beatle.
 "He is the smartest. He is the most magical one."
 And Vasin does not believe that Lennon was assassinated in 1980.
 "He lives in the north of Italy in a monastery," he says. 
 Tears fill his eyes and he refuses to say more.
 Vasin, who is a trained architect, said he has almost never worked at a steady job, but has had a series of casual jobs.
 "My main occupation was collecting Beatles records and listening to their music."
 When there was nothing to eat he went to the fields of state farms and harvested cabbages, or friends helped him out financially, he said.
 He never gets tired of listening to The Beatles, and today his passion for them is as strong as it was 40 years ago.
 Vasin has about 800 songs recorded by The Beatles and the members of the group after it split up. He also has about 100 books on The Beatles.
 Once he was about to bury his precious Lennon record in a forest for safekeeping. It was in Soviet times after the police arrested a friend in the band he played in for giving illegal concerts for money.
 "I was afraid they'd get me, too, and wanted to hide the record that way. But then I worried it would get spoiled and hid it at a friend's apartment," he said.
 In 1991 when hundreds lobbied for Leningrad's name to revert to St. Petersburg, Vasin put on his only suit and went to the city's toponymic commission and asked for a city street to be named after Lennon. But the authorities refused.
 Nowadays Vasin's main purpose is to construct a temple named after Lennon and dedicated to all The Beatles.
 The temple, which is to honor The Beatles and serve as a stage for other concerts, is to hold up to 3,000 people. Vasin wants it will be made of stone and have two big balls on the roof, which say "Love" and "Peace".
 Former St. Petersburg governor Vladimir Yakovlev gave permission for the construction of such a temple in Yuzhno-Primorsky Park, but Vasin does not have money for the construction.
 Vasin said he is not the only big-time fan of The Beatles in the world.
 "There are also people who write books about The Beatles all the time," he said.
 On the eve McCartney's concert in St. Petersburg, Vasin is preparing to re cieve his idol as a guest, because according to his sources there is a good chance that Sir Paul will visit him.
 "I already know what I will wear when he comes to visit me - it will be a T-shirt that says: 'Paul, Welcome Home!' And I already see the picture of how I will turn on a Beatles song and go to open the door of my temple to my dear guest," Vasin said with pride.

TITLE: Book: Moscow Lied About Amber Room
AUTHOR: By Robin Munro 

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Moscow has known since 1945 that the Amber Room was destroyed, possibly at the hands of the Red Army, but for years has lied that it survived, a new book says.
 
"The Amber Room: The Untold Story of the Greatest Hoax of the Twentieth Century," published this month, concludes that the panels of the Amber Room were either burned or looted just after Soviet troops captured Koenigsberg from the Germans in April 1945. 
 The original room was considered a masterpiece of craftsmanship, requiring delicate work to attach the brittle, golden, hardened resin, or amber, to panels and forming a mosaic that covered three sides of a room in the Catherine Palace outside St. Petersburg.
 The room was a gift from Prussian King Frederick William to Peter the Great, but not mounted in the palace until the mid-18th century. If it were found it could be worth up to $250 million, the authors say.
 After almost 60 years of fruitless searching, the Amber Room was recreated and opened with much ceremony during last year's celebrations of the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg.
 The authors of the new book, Catherine Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy, researched Russian archives, most of it them in St. Petersburg, and concluded that city museum curator Anatoly Kuchumov, working together with the KGB, spent his life feeding rumors that the panels had survived and had been stashed in an unidentified hiding place.
 
 n <i>In summary the book says:
 </i>In 1941, the German army took the panels to Koenigsberg, then the capital of the German province of East Prussia but which is today called Kaliningrad, from the Catherine Palace at Pushkin, which is also known by its pre-revolutionary name, Tsarskoye Selo.
 Alexander Brusov, a Moscow cultural official, who was sent to Koenigsberg two months after the capture of the city, concluded that the room had been destroyed.
 This was unwelcome news to the Soviet hierarchy, so they suppressed it and next year they sent Kuchumov, who, against the evidence before him, produced a report saying the room had survived.
 This resulted in numerous and expensive searches, some of them by the East German Stasi secret police and others by Soviet government teams, but searchers noticed that certain information was being withheld.
 After a West German got interested, the Stasi and KGB egged him on and were delighted to read that he had promulgated a theory that the Nazis had succeeded in evacuating the panels from Koenigsberg to parts of Germany that were later occupied by American troops who had taken them back to the United States.
 Kuchumov was motivated by sticks and carrots.
 After Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, curators in Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was then known, had scrambled to evacuate the most valuable items. Kuchumov's task was to remove the most important cultural relics from the Catherine Palace and he would spend much of the war with them in Novosibirsk until Pushkin was liberated.
 However, when he attempted to remove the amber panels damaged them, and he decided to cover them over and hope that the Germans might not find them. They did find them and removed them to Koenigsberg, where they were put on display.
 Ivan Mikryukov, director of the nearby Pavlovsk museum, who packed up cultural items to be shipped out from the Pavlovsk palace was condemned as &quot;defeatist.&quot;
 The authors suggest that Kuchumov's failure regarding the Amber Room and the punishment of Mikryukov, who was sent to Kazakhstan where he died, motivated Kuchumov to maintain the myth that the room had survived. 
 Moscow appreciated his efforts and in 1986 he would be rewarded with the Lenin Prize for &quot;outstanding achievements&quot; and &quot;the solution of tasks vital to the state.&quot;
 His researches ignored information that confirmed that the room was destroyed.
 The government was motivated to cover up the destruction of the Amber Room, by its wish to highlight Nazi cultural depredations and partly to obscure similar actions by the Soviets in Germany after the war, the authors say.
 The panels, about a dozen of which were 4 meters high, 10 1 meter high, and an amber skirting board were packed into crates after heavy bombing by the British in 1944. 
 Plans to evacuate were developed, but could not be realized before rail routes out of Koenigsberg were cut off and it would have been unsafe to evacuate them by road. 
 The large crates were in the Knights' Hall of the Koenigsberg Castle when the city fell and could not easily be moved.
 On April 2 1946, Kuchumov recorded the following statement by Paul Feyerabend, director of the Blutgericht restaurant that was located below the hall:
 &quot;At the beginning of April 1945 the packed Amber Room stood in the Knight's Hall. 
 &quot;Several days later the city's resistance began. I was located in the cloakroom and the Knight's Hall and during the attack Alfred Rohde [director of the Koenigsberg Castle Museum] was nowhere to be seen. 
 &quot;On the afternoon of April 9 ... I was in the wine cellar with several servants. Later, with their agreement, I hung from the north wing of the castle a white flag as a sign of surrender. At 11:30 p.m. that night a Russian colonel came. 
 &quot;When I told him everything and gave statements he ordered the evacuation of the castle. At 12:30 a.m., when I left, my restaurant was occupied by artillery regiments of the Red Army. The cellar and Knights' Hall were not damaged at all. 
 &quot;After I came back from Elbing, where I had been hospitalized, I heard from Alfred Rohde that the Knights' Hall and the restaurant beneath it had been burned down.&quot;
 Kuchumov never reported the statement to Moscow.
 The curator had also rejected Brusov's findings that the room had been burned. On June 5 1945, Brusov had entered the Knights' Hall and saw the remnants of the room.
 &quot;Found bronze hangings from the Tsarskoye Selo doors ... Cornice pieces that could have been in the Amber Room ... Iron strips with bolts with the help of which parts of the Amber Room were boxed into crates ... We should give up looking for the Amber Room,&quot; Brusov wrote that night.
 In March 1946, Kuchumov found the burnt remains of three stone and glass mosaics belonging to the Amber Room in the Knight's Hall, but no trace of amber, the book says.
 The authors note that Kuchumov, an amber expert, would have known that amber melts between 200 and 380 degrees Celsius. A blaze that was hot enough to melt glass used in the mosaics - requiring a temperature of 1,400 degrees - would have meant there was nothing left of the amber panels.
 They also say that months after the Red Army had occupied the city, a lot of looting had gone on and this could explain the absence of some metal objects, which might have survived the fire that were absent when Kuchumov made his visit.
 Brusov, for instance, described a speech by General Galitsky, head of the 11th Army, to a meeting in Koenigsberg of treasure hunters and people on official visits, calling everyone &quot;free marketeers.&quot;
 &quot;I will not allow anything else to be taken from the city,&quot; he was quoted saying. 
 Signs that things were out of control were that also several informants were hanged. 
 &quot;One man who claimed to have found a Nazi stash, including large crates of amber, had been sent away, only to be found the next day hanged from a tree, his hands tied behind his back. 
 &quot;Brusov discovered that two more German informers had died in the same manner,&quot; the authors write. 
 The book traces the development of an Amber Room industry that took off after 1958 when the Communist Party published in Russian and German newspapers account of the survival of the Amber Room.
 The articles denigrated Brusov's work and invited readers to share evidence and information. Many people responded, but the room was not found. The authors found a link between Kuchumov and these articles.
 In the 1970s, after consultations with the Executive Committee of the Council of Ministers, the Kaliningrad search went ahead, but with very little assistance, the book says.
 Scott-Clark and Levy report letters from G.S. Fors, the KGB chief at the Culture Ministry, to Kuchumov in 1971 and 1978 that say: &quot;We would like to scale down the digging,&quot; and &quot;I feel uncomfortable because we are wasting state funds.&quot; 
 The authors say these statements suggest that Fors and Kuchumov let the search go ahead in the full knowledge that the Amber Room would not be found.
 In 1989, Kuchumov would suggest in &quot;The Amber Room,&quot; a book he co-wrote with M. G. Voronov, that he was defensive.
 He wrote that the failure of the searches for the Amber Room should not be an embarrassment. &quot;The Amber Room did not die,&quot; he said although by then no one was suggesting it had died. &quot;This masterpiece could not have been deliberately destroyed.&quot;
 How the authors received the materials the book cites is a story in itself. Although confronted by unwelcoming officials, their network of friends and old women who helped them eventually delivered the goods.
 The authors adopted a Russian motto: &quot; Everything is forbidden, but all things are possible.&quot;
 &quot;For every official file, diary or briefing paper said by archives and librarians to be missing or inaccessible, we found draft or duplicate documents stashed away in living rooms and in hallways,&quot; they wrote in their introduction.
 But the administration of the Catherine Palace was unhelpful, appearing in the book more interested in money than scholarship or establishing the truth.
 &quot;Ours is not a charitable enterprise,&quot; director Ivan Sautov is quoted as saying. &quot;Why should you make money from what we know.&quot;
 &quot;Everyone has to sign a contract,&quot; head curator Larissa Bardovskaya says. &quot;Steven Spielberg signed and paid half a million to hire the mirrored ballroom. ... Elton John threw a party and he signed for $250,000.&quot;
 Avenir Ovsyanov, a former colonel who was part of a secret team searching for the Amber Room in the Kaliningrad region in the 1970s, a task that produced no significant results and was evidently hampered from above. He later became the director of the Kaliningrad Center for Coordinating the Search for Cultural Relics.
 He said in February 1945 special &quot;trophy brigades&quot; were formed whose task was to accompany the Red Army and gather 1,745 works of art selected from German museum catalogues. Trophy brigades attached to the 11th, 50th and 43rd armies of the Third Belarussian front were in Koenigsberg after its capture.
 Learning in June 1996 that files concerning those trophy brigades were in a closed section of the Central Archive of the Defense Ministry in Podolsk in the Moscow region, he applied for a permit to inspect them.
 &quot;On July 17 1996 I received a reply from Colonel Vimuchkin,&quot; Ovsyanov is quoted saying.
 The reply said: &quot; In your letter you petitioned to get various documents. After our analysis we have ascertained that the material that is interesting to you is not to be found anywhere in our archive. There is no reason for you to research this any further.&quot;
 Ovsyanov wrote again, but this time included the names and titles of the documents.
 The second reply said: &quot;At the moment in the Central Archive of the Defense Ministry we have special works that are connected to a new law about restoration [restitution] of art treasures and due to this reason the access to these documents in restricted.&quot;
 Ovsyanov applied again on Oct. 16 1997 after the law was passed in May.
 The third reply was: &quot;We have received your petition ... and we are trying to extract the following documents and will let you know in due course.&quot;
 Ovsyanov is still waiting.
 During the war, knowledge of the trophy brigades was withheld, even from the Allies.
 &quot;Secrecy was understandable at that time ... and during the Cold War. But now we are at peace, I cannot understand the behavior of our officials, who still block access to the trophy brigade archives,&quot; he said.
 &quot;Is the truth so powerful and strange that no one can be allowed to see it?&quot;

TITLE: Water Taxis May Boost Mobility in City
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The first water taxis began working in town this month in competition with tourist boats and to the relief of some locals, who spend hours in traffic jams on their way from Vasilyevsky Island to Nevsky Prospekt inhaling exhaust gases and cursing authorities.
 
Water <i>marshrutki</i> seem like an obvious means of transportation in cities like St. Petersburg, but it has taken a long time for them to come to the banks of local rivers and canals. In Venice, by comparison, water buses have been operating since 1881.
 Some 20 boats carrying from 25 to 70 passengers circulate once an hour on four different routes from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
 This is still a far cry from the developed waterways of Amsterdam or Venice. Venetian water buses (motoscafo) holding about 150 passengers circulate on the Grand Canal and within the city center every 10 to 15 minutes, while bigger boats (motonave) carrying up to 1,000 passengers travel between Venice's major islands.
 One stop on any route costs 30 rubles ($1), while the entire journey is a bargain at 150 rubles to 200 rubles depending on the distance. The routes operate right in the center, mainly between major museums, palaces, theaters and tourist attractions. Another option is an all-day, travel-as-you-please ticket for 350 rubles.
 These prices compare favorably to the private hire of boats which costs $50 to $70 per hour. River cruises are in the same price with water buses (150 rubles on workdays and 200 rubles on weekends) but departures are far less regular.
 Six local cruise operators, including Astra-Marin, Aqua-Excurs, Driver, Matisov Ostrov, Nord Soyuz and Samson have joined with the St. Petersburg Tourist Information Center to create the City Water Bus project.
 Route A starts and ends at the Peter and Paul Fortress, stopping near the Kunstkamera, the Admiralty (and Winter Palace), the cruiser Avrora, the Summer Garden, the Russian Museum's Mikhailovsky Castle and the Field of Mars, the Alexander Pushkin Apartment Museum at 12 Naberezhnaya Reki Moiki and Palace Square.
 Route B begins and ends by Kazan Cathedral, making stops near the Church on the Spilled Blood, the Russian Museum, the Summer Garden, the Field of Mars, Nevsky Prospekt (Anichkov Palace), the Alexandrinsky Theater, Nikolsky Cathedral, the Mariinsky Theater and Sennaya Ploshchad.
 Route C starts near the Russian Museum's Stroganov Palace on Nevsky Prospekt, navigating between Palace Square (Zimnyaya Kanavka), Konyushennaya Square, the Russian Museum (and the Field of Mars), the Alexandrinsky Theater, Nikolsky Cathedral and the Mariinsky Theater. The final stop is St. Isaac's Cathedral.
 Route D begins by the Admiralty and circulates between the Hermitage, Smolny Cathedral, the Okhtinskaya Hotel, the cruiser Avrora, the Peter and Paul Fortress and St. Isaac's Cathedral.
 Each route takes from 1 to 1 1/2 hours to complete.
 Valentin Zakharov, press secretary of the city's tourism committee, said a fifth route will be introduced soon to operate on weekends and go from the Admiralty to Yelagin Island's popular Central Park For Culture and Rest.
 If the water bus idea proves successful, more boats will be involved next year, with a general design developed to distinguish the buses from the other boats. It has already been proposed to paint the waterbuses in yellow, perhaps with a nod to New York taxis.
 Dmitry Belinsky, director of the City Water Bus project, said setting up an efficient floating buses system is a very time-consuming process.
 &quot;The project is going to take at least a year to take real shape,&quot; he said, adding the operators don't rule out financial losses during the initial period.&quot; We need to determine at least the approximate passenger flow to be able to make plans. It is now difficult to predict public interest in water buses and only time can tell.&quot;
 Water excursions are already a popular entertainment in St. Petersburg. 
 According to city statistics, in 2002 about 700,000 people took water trips, while in 2003 this service was used by some 900,000 people.

TITLE: Chief City Architect of 13 Years to Quit
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Kovalev 

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: St. Petersburg's chief architect Oleg Kharchenko, who has held the post since 1991, is vacating his position, Governor Valentina Matviyenko said Thursday.
 
&quot;Oleg Andreyevich [Kharchenko] is a worthy person, who took responsibility in times which were most difficult for the city,&quot; Itar-Tass quoted Matviyenko as saying.
 Kharchenko has accepted an offer by Zurab Tsereteli, president of the Russian Art Academy, to work as a rector of the St. Petersburg institute for painting, sculpture and architecture, Matviyenko said.
 City real estate agencies said Kharchenko was likely asked to leave because he has not fulfilled his obligation to come out with a plan to develop the city.
 &quot;As far as I remember the original order was to set up a plan for strategic city development by 2001. Now it is 2004 and as far as I know there are no moves in this direction by the committee,&quot; Alexander Sharapov, president of Bekar real estate agency, said Friday in a telephone interview.
 He said Kharchenko was an authority who was difficult to work with.
 &quot;It is not right when you have to meet 10 different officials before getting permission to start building something,&quot; Sharapov said. Kharchenko had been involved in the approval of every single construction project.&quot;
 In 1995 the City Prosecutor's Office initiated a criminal case against Kharchenko, charging him with exceeding his authority and bribery in relation to the former mayor Anatoly Sobchak giving the chief architect an apartment in a building on Ryleyeva Ulitsa. The case was later dropped.
 &quot;I think the job should be to form rules for construction, such as what the maximum number of stories is, the density of construction ... The head of the committee should not oversee all the projects, maybe only the construction of the new stage of the Mariinsky Theater, projects of federal significance,&quot; Sharapov said.
 No successor has yet been named.

TITLE: Private Eyes Do What Police Don't
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky 

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - After burglars slipped into a newly renovated top-floor apartment on Ulitsa Akademika Korolyova and made away with the family jewelry in 2002, the owners did what came naturally: they called the police.
 
But a month later, when a portion of the stolen jewelry was returned, the police couldn't take all the credit. Thanks went mostly to the private detective agency Poisk, which the victims had hired to track down the thieves.
 &quot;People come to us when they understand that the police can't do anything,&quot; said Ivan Chebotar, director of Poisk. &quot;We can be held responsible because the client pays us money.&quot;
 Private detective agencies, a relatively new workforce that emerged after the 1992 law on private detective and security activity, can help fill a gap in public service that opened when the Soviet Union collapsed and police efficiency sharply declined.
 It's not only the miserly pay that police officers receive - salaries range from 4,000 rubles to 6,000 rubles per month - but also a surge in crime that has contributed to the general impotence of the police.
 &quot;Even if you pay an officer well, he won't be able to do a quality and professional job,&quot; explained Chebotar, who until 1999 served as a captain in Moscow's criminal investigations department. &quot;They can't cope with the flow of crimes. They don't have time.&quot;
 This is where private detectives come in. Private eyes are often more effective than police, Chebotar said, because their pay depends on how skillfully they execute an assignment. They will spare no time interviewing all possible witnesses, show more creativity in getting them to talk and spot the minutest details on the scene, he said.
 Still, private detectives need police cooperation - to access official databases, to document evidence and to make arrests. Also, police have the authority to ask a court to allow eavesdropping on telephone conversations; they can then pass along the contents of these recordings to private eyes.
 Other cases when a sleuth may prove more effective than police include those of missing persons or kidnappings for ransom.
 Often, a client may turn to a private investigator to avoid police involvement altogether. Chebotar's firm worked on a 2002 case on behalf of a Gypsy woman whose daughter had been abducted in lieu of $200,000 worth of drugs.
 Police eventually got involved in the case, which took place outside Moscow. Chebotar secured assistance from the Interior Ministry's federal department for fighting organized crime, which ordered local police to cooperate. The daughter was freed after the payment of ransom at a local airport. Police arrested eight people connected to the case.
 Police aren't always so responsive, Chebotar said. In order to curry police favor, especially in a private investigation that's not part of a criminal case, detectives pay for gasoline for police cars, pick up officers' cellphone bills or buy them &quot;something for the office,&quot; Chebotar said.
 Such interaction isn't clearly spelled out in the law and is therefore kept under wraps. Alexei Vakhromeyev, spokesman for Moscow police's criminal investigations department, acknowledged that police might have helped sleuths in the past, but &quot;I don't know anything about it.&quot;
 It is this vagueness that many private investigators would like to see abolished. After more than a decade of experience, private detectives have been complaining that the law is flawed and that police are often less than eager to cooperate.
 According to the law, private detectives can interview people if they agree to talk, can study documents if their owners agree to show them or examine building, apartments and offices. But they cannot collect information &quot;related to an individual's private life, political or religious beliefs&quot; and make video or audio recordings of interiors without written consent of the appropriate individuals or officials. The law doesn't mention anything about cooperation between police and private eyes.
 &quot;The legislation doesn't give them any advantages. As a citizen or a reporter, one has much more rights than a private detective,&quot; said Igor Goloshchapov, secretary of Moscow police's council for coordination of interaction with private security and detective organizations.
 According to Gennady Gudkov, a member of the State Duma's Security Committee, many sleuths have deals with newspapers and obtain a reporter's identification for disguise.
 Chebotar said that his company doesn't carry out surveillance of a person because the law may consider it a violation of privacy.
 &quot;By law, we have to ask permission from an [alleged] criminal before we can shadow him,&quot; he said. &quot;It's absurd.&quot;
 To collect information about a person, Chebotar's detectives must resort to interviewing a subject's friends, relatives and neighbors.
 Unhappy with continually begging for assistance from police, private detectives want an addendum to the current law that would bind police to cooperate and respond to information requests within a certain timeframe. 
 Gudkov is sponsoring an updated bill that contains the provision, but he said that the draft hasn't been able to become law for six years due to stiff resistance from the government, which doesn't want to open the way for the development of a strong alternative to its police force. Insiders say the bill would allow private investigators access to information that some official bodies may prefer remained unreachable.
 Detectives now may only complain to prosecutors about police officers that keep them at a distance, and only if they are helping a client in an ongoing criminal case. &quot;Prosecutors can't ignore the complaints, because we represent the interests of a client,&quot; Chebotar said. &quot;Also, prosecutors see that private detectives are interested in solving the crime, so why not help?&quot;
 Even bread and butter private eye cases - such as genealogy, cheating spouses and backgrounds of brides and grooms - sometimes require police cooperation. As part of collecting information on a person, sleuths may contact the police to see that person's criminal file.
 At Beowulf, a company headed by Tyurin that specializes in services for foreign bride-seekers, one of the most memorable cases didn't involve the police. It was an investigation, completed last year, of a Russian woman that the client, an Italian citizen, wanted to marry after the two met in Italy.
 The woman turned out to be living &quot;a vigorous Russian life,&quot; Tyurin said. She was married to an &quot;oligarch,&quot; and had a gangster boyfriend with whom she spent time in places like Sri Lanka.
 But the client persisted and showered the woman with gifts and money, hoping to bring her to Italy. He cooled off only when Tyurin discovered that the woman spent $10,000 of his money not on education, as they had agreed, but on personal expenses.
 The number of detective agencies in Russia grew from 1992 to 1998 and then stabilized. There are now roughly 2,000 licensed detectives in Russia, the lion's share of them in Moscow and St. Petersburg, along with many unlicensed detectives who work on the sly, Gudkov said.
 Sleuths are either self-employed, like Pytov, grouped into small independent companies like Beowulf or operate as part of a large security firm such as Poisk.
 Companies must have at least two licensed detectives to be registered. Licenses are issued to former police officers who have served as investigators for at least three years, as well as graduates of law colleges or private detective schools.
 Prices vary from case to case. At Poisk, they have never exceeded $10,000, Chebotar said. Fees for theft cases may range from five to 50 percent of the value of recovered property. A client usually pays an advance of $1,000 for a preliminary investigation, and then makes a decision whether to have sleuths continue digging.
 With Pytov, a profile of a person starts at $300, while surveillance is $200 for eight hours. A search for a missing person can set a client back from $300 to $1,000, and a search for a swindler can cost up to $2,000.
 
 <i>See related article on opposite page. </i>

TITLE: Ethnic Russian Emigre Aged Gets His Passport
AUTHOR: By Oksana Yablokova

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - For 75 years, Andrei Schmemann was stateless, a man with no citizenship. 
 
An ethnic Russian brought to France at the age of 8, Schmemann lived his entire live in Paris with a refugee ID and stubbornly refused to ask for French citizenship.
 Last Sunday, the 83-year-old emigre, who dedicated most of his life to promoting the cadet movement and the revival of pre-revolutionary military schools outside Russia, got his first-ever passport from the hands of President Vladimir Putin - along with an invitation to drop by at the Kremlin whenever he is in Moscow.
 Putin had personally asked that Schmemann be invited to attend the 60th anniversary celebrations of D-Day in Normandy last Sunday, after which he gave him the passport.
 &quot;You are a very important person for me, dear Andrei Dmitrievich,&quot; Putin said in Caen, Normandy.
 &quot;This modest, symbolic gesture, I think, contains a profound meaning. I would like to present you with this passport of Russian citizenship and give you my most sincere and heartfelt gratitude for your service to the country all these years,&quot; the Kremlin's website quoted Putin as saying.
 Schmemann said that he was unprepared for the publicity he had received from the Russian media since his meeting with Putin.
 &quot;We chatted nicely and he even said, 'Drop by when you are in Moscow,'&quot; Schmemann said by telephone Wednesday from his Paris home.
 &quot;In person, [Putin] looked different from his television image, which is somewhat aloof,&quot; Schmemann said.
 He said that he had waited to become a Russian citizen all his adult life, although it was not an issue in Soviet times.
 &quot;We were part of the first wave of emigration,&quot; Schmemann said. &quot;My parents left Russia because they did not agree with the Soviet regime. But they raised us so we did not lose our Russian roots.&quot; 
 He sees no heroism in the fact that he wanted no other citizenship but Russian. 
 &quot;I thought it would be a betrayal of my country, and taking French citizenship would mean I had to make a conscious decision to become French,&quot; Schmemann said. 
 He first returned to Russia in 1995, and has visited twice since.
 &quot;In St. Petersburg I felt at home right away and that pushed me toward deciding to apply for Russian citizenship,&quot; he said.
 The documents he produced upon arrival in Russia - a permit to leave and enter France with a Russian visa stamp on it - startled border guards, he said.
 &quot;They said they had never seen a document like that before,&quot; he said, adding that he still jokes at how his daughter worried he would be detained for traveling without proper documents.
 Schmemann was born in 1921 in Revel, which is now Tallinn, the Estonian capital. His father had been an officer in the Imperial Army's elite Semyonov regiment. 
 His parents immigrated to France in 1929 and all his life Schmemann carried a so-called Nansen passport, an internationally recognized identity card introduced in 1922 and first issued by the League of Nations to stateless refugees.
 Schmemann attended a military school founded by Russian emigres in Paris, and he became the head of the association of Russian cadets. With his help, several such schools have been founded in Russia in recent years. 
 His wife, two daughters and son have French citizenship. Until his retirement Schmemann worked in an art gallery in Paris.
 His twin brother, Alexander, was a well-known dissident, Orthodox priest and theologian who became dean of the St. Vladimir Orthodox seminary in Westchester County, New York. He died in 1983.
 Schmemann applied for Russian citizenship four months ago. Last month, officials at the Russian Embassy in Paris handed him a copy of the presidential decree granting him a passport, and shortly after that the Russian ambassador told him that Putin wanted to meet with him.
 The passport Schmemann received is the one that Russian citizens carry when traveling abroad. He will no longer be required to obtain a visa next time he travels to Russia.
 Schmemann's nephew, the noted editor and writer Serge Schmemann, wrote of his uncle in Wednesday's New York Times: &quot;In short, he remained a Russian. At 83, with an ailing wife, he may not use that new passport a lot. But he is no longer an emigre.&quot;

TITLE: Kadyrov's Backers Tap Alkhanov as Candidate
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: MOSCOW - Allies of slain Chechen President Akhmad Kayrov, including his son, informally chose Chechen Interior Minister Alu Alkhanov last week as their candidate for the Aug. 29 presidential election. 
 
Meanwhile, Deputy Prosecutor General Sergei Fridinsky said two suspects have been detained in Kadyrov's killing last month.
 &quot;Kadyrov always had hope in Alkhanov, that he would establish order in Chechnya, and he always declared that everything should be put in the hands of the Chechen police,&quot; Kadyrov's son First Deputy Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov said on NTV television. &quot;And since he's the head of the police, we think he will establish order.&quot; 
 Chechnya's acting president, Sergei Abramov, seemed to signal Kremlin support for Alkhanov's nomination, telling NTV he is &quot;a worthy person, a true Chechen and a professional leader.&quot;
 Chechen State Council head Taus Dzhabrailov said Akhmad Kadyrov's allies would support Alkhanov if he agreed to run, Interfax reported. 
 Alkhanov, 47, opposed Chechnya's fight for independence in the mid-1990s and has countered the rebels in the war that broke out after federal forces entered Chechnya in 1999, Itar-Tass reported. He had been chief of the transport police in Grozny since 2000 before being named interior minister in April 2003, it said.
 Several candidates have thrown their hats into the election ring, including Malik Saidullayev, a wealthy Moscow-based lotteries tycoon.
 Akhmad Kadyrov, elected president last October in a widely criticized vote, was attending a celebration commemorating the Nazi World War II defeat when he was killed by the bomb blast.
 Fridinsky said the two detainees &quot;participated in preparing and carrying out the explosion,&quot; Interfax reported. 
 Fridinsky said the suspects, residents of Chechnya aged 28 and 22, had admitted involvement in the bombing.


TITLE: Court Orders Retrial of Danilov
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned the acquittal of physicist Valentin Danilov on charges of spying for China and ordered a re-trial.
 
Prominent human right activist Lev Ponomaryov said the ruling discredits Russia at a time when President Vladimir Putin was taking part in the Group of Eight summit in the United States.
 The Federal Security Service accuses Danilov, a former professor at Krasnoyarsk State Technical University, of selling classified information about space technology to China while working on a contract between the university and China's Export and Import Company of Precise Machine Building. Danilov says he only used public information.
 After a four-year investigation and trial, a jury acquitted Danilov in December in a rare slap in the face of the FSB, whose pursuance of a number of espionage cases against researchers in recent years has been likened to the old KGB's efforts to keep tight control over scientists' contacts with foreigners.
 Prosecutors filed an appeal, and the Supreme Court on Wednesday agreed with two counts: that defense lawyers had unfairly put pressure on the jury - by referring to documents that the judge had ruled could not be submitted as evidence - and that there were mistakes in the minutes of the trial and on a questionnaire given to the jury to fill out during deliberations, said Danilov, who flew to Moscow for the hearing.
 The court dismissed two other counts: that jurors had violated the rules during their deliberations by walking out of their room to use the bathroom and that the defense had colluded with one of the jurors, Danilov said by telephone.
 The court ordered a retrial under a new judge in the Krasnoyarsk regional court.
 The trail may begin in August or September and will again be by jury, although with new jurors, said Danilov's lawyer, Yelena Yevemenova, who also attending Wednesday's hearing.
 But Danilov said that as &quot;an experiment&quot; he will ask for a panel of three judges instead of a jury, if the law allows. He did not elaborate.
 Danilov and Yevemenova said they were not surprised by Wednesday's ruling.
 &quot;I had expected it. I just smiled,&quot; Danilov said, chuckling.
 &quot;I'm going to go to see a movie,&quot; Yevmenova said.
 Prosecutor Yevgeny Naidyonov praised the ruling. &quot;I consider the court's decision to be legitimate and substantiated. The Supreme Court has upheld the appeal's argument that the verdict was handed down with considerable procedural violations,&quot; he said, Interfax reported.
 Danilov acknowledged that Yevmenova had referred to documents not in evidence during his trial but said they could not have influenced the jury. When instructing jurors before their deliberations, &quot;the judge told them to ignore that,&quot; he said.
 The documents in question contained the conclusions of experts from four Russian research institutions that the information Danilov passed to China was not sensitive, Danilov said.
 Danilov and Yevmenova said they had anticipated Wednesday's ruling because the Supreme Court had been unusually quick in its handling of the prosecutors' appeal and also because the FSB's Krasnoyarsk branch had sent a cameraman and representatives to cover the hearing.
 &quot;They knew the result,&quot; Danilov said of the FSB.
 Expressing his irony at what might have been FSB pressure on the court, he said the three women judges &quot;perhaps didn't have a choice&quot; but at least he had a good time during the hourlong session because they &quot;looked good.&quot;
 Ponomaryov, head of the For Human Rights organization, said the Supreme Court appeared to have been under &quot;colossal pressure&quot; to overturn the acquittal. 
 &quot;We will speak out in defense&quot; of Danilov in the retrial, he said.
 He said the reversal of a jury verdict sends out a signal of &quot;Don't be so brave&quot; to prospective jurors.
 Nobel Prize winner Vitaly Ginzburg, who with other leading physicists signed a statement last year confirming that the information Danilov passed to the Chinese was not secret, condemned the decision. 
 &quot;What I know shows he is absolutely innocent,&quot; he said, Interfax reported.

TITLE: Detectives Make Business Seem Less Like a Lottery
AUTHOR: By Anatoly Medetsky

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A nationwide lottery company grew worried earlier this year when its prizes were repeatedly won by residents of the same village in the Russian Far East. It seemed implausible that someone could counterfeit the tickets, which were designed with more than 30 security features.
 
Despite a thorough police investigation, the company learned very little, and arrests have yet to be made. To find out how the fix was being perpetrated, the company turned to a private detective agency, which found that two young lottery-ticket vendors in the village were not counterfeiting tickets, but instead routinely hacking into the company's computers.
 &quot;The company first wanted me to bug their phone conversations, which is illegal,&quot; said Moscow detective Alexander Upatov. &quot;But I wouldn't be a private investigator if I didn't know ways to get the same information another way.&quot;
 Upatov's detective agency, Alex, is one of those benefiting from a growth in commercial investigations. For a long time, businesses considered the services of private detective agencies more exotic than practical. But attitudes are changing. 
 Although private detective agencies became legal in the early '90s, many businesses initially preferred to rely on the retaliatory services of hired thugs, said Sergei Stepnov, president of the security and investigation association Lions, established in 1992. 
 Detectives have since been persuading businesses to employ different, less violent tactics, and that more can be accomplished by allowing a private firm to clean up the mess, he said. 
 &quot;We watered them, we fertilized and cherished them,&quot; Stepnov said. &quot;And now the clients are ripe.&quot;
 Companies specializing in commercial investigations say demand has been rising since 2000 and could expand much further. &quot;The market is growing rapidly, but is still small compared to its potential,&quot; said Sergei Minayev, general director of Special Information Service, a company that researches and analyzes business information. 
 Experts have estimated the private investigations market to be worth from $30 million to $70 million annually. 
 Russia's 2,000 licensed private detectives either work alone, or as part of about 200 companies, but these information gathering companies do not conduct surveillance and thus do not have to obtain a license. If necessary, they hire private eyes for the legwork. 
 Private investigators and information gathering companies commonly gather commercial intelligence, execute due diligence reports and search for people and property in liability cases.
 Upatov recalled how a former Russian citizen was charged in 2001 with defrauding a foreign investor. The defendant claimed in court that he had no property to pay back the failed investment, but some digging revealed an oil storage facility the man owned. 
 &quot;No one else would have found it,&quot; Upatov, a former military pilot, said proudly.
 In another case, the design for a shopping mall was put out to tender by a company linked to one of the prospective bidders, Upatov recalled. Receiving this information, his client decided against making a bid.
 Helping companies foil hostile takeovers is one of the latest growth areas for investigators.
 Other popular services include pre-employment checks, supplying banks with information on loan applicants and investigations of internal fraud, such as instances of employees stealing company property.
 Tracking down producers of counterfeit goods was fairly prominent in the '90s, Minayev said, but this type of work has decreased because police have become more efficient in this area.
 In one case, a counterfeit tea producer in a city in southern Russia was easy to track down, as its bogus labels were spotted strewn all over the streets. 
 In contrast with the West, Russian insurance companies do not tend to use private detective agencies much, preferring to rely on their own in-house security services. 
 Many Russian detective agencies are able to conduct investigations worldwide, or through partners. Being a member of an international organization, such as the World Association of Detectives, is helpful for this. But for now, some war-ravaged states are off-limits. 
 &quot;I don't take orders only for Iraq now,&quot; said Stepnov, who is a member of WAD. Citing confidentiality, he declined to answer whether Russian oil companies had inquired about Iraq.
 In a reciprocal development, some western investigation agencies have established offices in Russia. One such firm is London-based Kroll Worldwide, which then-premier Yegor Gaidar hired in 1993 to locate the Communist Party's foreign bank accounts. Kroll opened a Moscow office in 1997, and currently employs seven Russian staff. 
 Tactics for obtaining information vary widely between private detective agencies. 
 Stepnov relies on his own, sizable database, collated during his 15 years in the business. Minayev says he accesses databases of some state agencies, such as the State Customs Committee and the State Statistics Committee, as well as the Moscow Bureau of Information Technologies and international databanks such as Lexis Nexis and Data-Star. 
 He warned against using pirated databases that sell on Moscow's flea markets with information about individuals and businesses, as being largely incorrect and infected with computer viruses.
 A more reliable method of gathering information, Stepnov said, is simply to purchase as little as a single share in a company.
 In business-related investigations, private eyes seem to be less reliant on police than in personal cases, almost to the point of scoffing at such cooperation. &quot;Not a single state agency - let alone police, prosecutors or especially the FSB - has ever given a reply to any of my inquiries,&quot; Upatov said. 
 For pre-employment checks on a person's criminal record, Upatov sometimes approaches the individual's parents for information. He misrepresents himself as, for example, an employee of a center for assistance to former prisoners. &quot;Your son is eligible for a monetary allowance because he served a prison term,&quot; Upatov might tell the parents, he said, and their reaction shows what he needs to know.
 A brief memo on a bank costs around $300 and is compiled within three days, Stepnov said, while searching for a defendant's property or tracking down a business partner to deliver a court subpoena can cost anywhere from $50 to $800 with Upatov's agency.
 Minayev's company charges $600 to $1,500 for a regular company background check, or $5,000 to $50,000 if underworld connections need to be traced.


TITLE: Lyudmila Alexeyeva Speaks Her Mind
AUTHOR: By Maria Danilova 

PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: When human rights investigators visiting Ingushetia heard reports of troops shelling a civilian house in neighboring Chechnya, most members froze. Lyudmila Alexeyeva left the police-escorted delegation, found a car and sped to the scene. 
 
The 77-year-old Alexeyeva, one of the few veterans of the Soviet dissident movement still active, is renowned for her energy and bravery. She received an award in Washington on Wednesday from the National Endowment for Democracy. 
 &quot;This brave woman doesn't think twice of getting into a car and going there to see the situation with her own eyes and talk to the people there in person,&quot; said Alexeyeva's colleague, Alexander Petrov, of Human Rights Watch's Moscow office, recalling her impromptu visit to Chechnya. 
 The doyenne of Russia's human rights community, Alexeyeva was outspoken even during the repression of the Stalin years. An archaeology graduate, she spent her first years out of Moscow State University teaching history at a trade school that trained metalworkers and turners.
 That was the university's punishment for speaking out against the expulsion of a Jewish student, which she alleged was motivated by anti-Semitism. 
 After Nikita Khrushchev became Soviet leader and triggered a period of relative openness known as the &quot;thaw,&quot; Alexeyeva was energized. 
 &quot;We started feeling somewhat more free, and would spend hours and hours at each other's flats discussing everything we knew, experienced, and felt,&quot; she said in an interview. 
 But by 1965, the thaw was over. Khrushchev had been shoved out of power and the small dissident community was shaken by a series of arrests of intellectuals who wrote and spoke out against the regime. 
 Alexeyeva campaigned for fairer trials and their objective coverage in the media. She collected signatures for a petition in support of the arrested - a venture that cost her Communist Party membership and her job editing scientific magazines. 
 Together with friends, Alexeyeva also set up an informal Red Cross that collected money and other aid for families of the repressed. 
 &quot;I couldn't live my life differently - I had to speak out if I wanted to be true to myself and my children to respect me,&quot; she said. 
 In 1977 Alexeyeva and her family were allowed to emigrate to the United States, after the KGB hinted that she would likely be arrested otherwise. 
 While her husband, Nikolai Williams, taught mathematics in U.S. universities, Alexeyeva continued her human rights activity and wrote histories of the Soviet dissident movement. 
 &quot;Even in my sweetest dreams, I could not dare to hope to return home one day,&quot; she recounted. 
 Then the Soviet Union collapsed, and Alexeyeva returned. 
 Since 1996 Alexeyeva has headed the Moscow Helsinki Group, Russia's oldest human rights organization. She also has been president of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights since 1998. 
 Four years later, Alexeyeva joined a commission intended to advise President Vladimir Putin on human rights issues, a move that brought her criticism from rights activists who see themselves as permanently opposed to power. 
 &quot;My job is to see to it that authorities observe human rights,&quot; she said. &quot;Unless you come out and talk to them, you cannot make that happen.&quot;

TITLE: City Announces Plans for Western Express Diameter
AUTHOR: By Sophia Kornienko

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Governor Valentina Matviyenko has given the Western Express Diameter project a green light. The long awaited decision on the exact tracks of the Diameter - a perimeter set to link the ring road in its Western section - was made by the administration on Friday at a specialized meeting. 
 
The cost of the project was announced at 52 billion rubles or roughly $1.8 billion. 
 It was also decided that the part of the diameter connecting the city to tVasiliyevsky Island - previously forecasted to be a tunnel - should be constructed as an elevated road.
 The Western Express Diameter project is over five times as expensive as the Konstantinovsky palace rennovation in Strelna - the largest project the city has implemented so far. The diameter, to be constructed within a decade, should provide easy access to the city's marine terminal boosting foreign trade and tourism. 
 The Diameter is also expected to relieve the city's worn bridges of the increasing traffic load: the number of cars crossing the Palace Bridge alone should go down from 50,000 per day to 39,000, Fontanka.ru information agency reported Friday. 
 The load on the Tuchkov Bridge will be cut down from 55,000 to 16,000 cars per day.
 The 10.8-kilometer Southern segment of the Western Express Diameter will stretch from the marine terminal on Kanonersky Island to the automobile ring road near the Predportovaya station. 
 The Central segment, 12 kilometers long, will connect the marine terminal with the Primorsky district, starting at Savushkina street and ending at the Primorskoye Shosse. 
 The 26-kilometer Northern segment will go from the Primorskoye Shosse to Beloostrov. The Central segment, to be constructed alongside the Neva River and the Gulf of Finland, is the most difficult one in terms of technological and environmental challenges. 
 The Central segment's estimated to cost is over 25 billion rubles or approximately $0.9 billion, which is to be covered by private investments. 
 Matviyenko plans to approach Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, requesting the financing of the Southern segment from the federal budget. The construction of this segment will cost 19.4 billion rubles or approximately $0.7 billion. 
 The Western Express Diameter company that has already spent 9 million rubles or $0.31 million on the purpose will fund the Southern segment's engineering, Delovoy Peterburg quoted the company's director Igor Lukyanov as saying Monday. The company, founded in 1997, has been renting out land to Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, BMW and other car service centers since 2001, and it was supposed to spend the revenues obtained on the segment's engineering. So far, however, only the feasibility study has been completed.
 It remains a mystery how Lukyanov managed to talk Matviyenko into allowing his company to stay part of the project, Delovoy Peterburg reported. The company has 40 million rubles or $1.4 million accumulated in its accounts ready to be spent on the engineering, Lukyanov said. Engineering usually costs 3 to 5 percent of the construction costs or up to 950 million rubles in this case, Delovoy Peterburg said.
 &quot;The ring road would be illogical and inefficient without the Western Express Diameter. I expect the construction of the Diameter to start in two years,&quot; Matviyenko said during her visit to the Agency for Journalist Investigations on Thursday. Connecting Vasiliyevsky Island to the city via a tunnel was a romantic idea, but it is twice as expensive as building an elevated road, Matviyenko said. A tunnel is also more expensive in maintenance, she added.
 A tunnel that could be designed beneath the Nalichnaya street would have a lower impact on the environment, knowledgeable sources said earlier. 
 According to the city investment committee, many Western companies have proposed to take part in the lucrative Western Express Diameter project. The investment plan is expected to be ready by the fall.
 Together with the Diameter project, another transportation project in the works is the construction of the new passenger marine terminal to be erected on 56.4 hectares of recovered land between the Pribaltiyskaya Hotel and the entry to the Smolenka river. 
 The area of the terminal is estimated at 25.2 hectares. The project will cost 6,820 million rubles or $235 million, out of which private investments are expected to account for 4,030 million rubles or $139 million and federal funding will cover 2,790 million rubles or $96 million.
 Another decision at Friday's meeting concerned the construction of a new bridge across the Neva to substitute the Lieutenant Schmidt Bridge while the latter will be under repairs. The new bridge, worth 3 <br> billion rubles or $0.1 billion, will connect the Admiralteiskie Verfi shipyard with lines 22 and 23 of Vasilievsky Island.

TITLE: Pekar's Plans Surprise Competitors
AUTHOR: By Renat Sagdiev

PUBLISHER: Vedomosti
TEXT: Minor confectionery maker Pekar last week announced it will increase its advertising spending in an effort to compete with national players, a move competitors say will hit six-monthly profits of the St. Peterburg company. 
 
Pekar, a company originally founded in St. Peterburg in 1914, specializes in the manufacturing of cakes, Swiss rolls, Middle-Eastern sweets and marshmallows. Its largest shareholder is European Bank for Growth &amp; Development with 28 percent. Other shareholders are Pekar-service with 20.5 percent, Admiral with 16.6 percent and Pekar-plus with 10.5 percent. The company's turnover in 2003 was around $40 million. 
 The Biznes-Analytica analytic agency has valued the Russian pastry market, which includes cookies, crackers, biscuits, wafers, Swiss rolls and pound cakes at over $1.8 billion. In this market Pekar was at the bottom of the top 40 list and third in the wafers segment. 
 This year Pekar has aspired to become a company with nation-wide distribution and plans to spend $6 million on advertising, said Pekar's Commercial Director Walter Bario at a press conference. Yuri Seleznyov , Pekar's director general confirmed the budget in an interview with Vedomosti. Alongside of the advertisement spending the company plans to roll-out new brands and gain access to national markets, starting with small cities where the population is under 500,000 people. 
 EBGD analysts have confirmed Pekar's planned strategy, but said that the bank is not participating in financing the advertising. &quot;We use our own funds,&quot; Seleznyov said. 
 A manager of one of the Russian confectionery companies has found the $6 million Pekar plans to spend on advertising a very large sum for the confectionery market. In an interview with Vedomosti the manager said that large competitor Nestle's total advertising budget in Russia is around $13 to $15 million a year. 
 The president of Odinzov confectionery factory, Andrei Korkunov thinks that Pekar's advertising strategy can be &quot;a hard hit&quot; for the market. &quot;They can definitely increase sales for that money, but it's questionable if the company can get access to small towns,&quot; he said. It is also necessary to allow large funds for logistics and regional distributors' development, Korkunov reminded. 
 Korkunov also pointed out the strange relationship between Pekar's advertising budget and its financial position - the company plans to spend $6 million with a yearly turnover of $40 million and a profit of $2.4 million. &quot;With such a ratio advertising, distribution and other expenses can reach up to 50 percent of Pekar's yearly turnover,&quot; he said. Usually companies in this segment spend from 3 to 10 percent of the yearly turnover, depending on a company's strategy for product development, said Yekaterina Kopayeva, marketing director of SladKo. 
 Aside from confectionery specialists, United Financial Group analyst Aleksei Krivoshapko has provided an optimistic outlook for Pekar. &quot;The company has some unique products that are not largely manufactured in Russia. If Pekar, which is a large local manufacturer now, can occupy at least a half of its St. Petersburg share in the regions, the sales can increase manifold,&quot; Krivoshanko said.

TITLE: Kyoto Financial Rewards: Who Will Benefit?
AUTHOR: By Greg Walters 

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - When the Dutch government expressed interest in funding the modernization of a power plant in Amursk, Khabarovsk region last year, the Russian government stopped the deal dead in its tracks.
 
The Dutch wanted Russia to give up a few of its greenhouse gas emissions credits, which could be portioned out, should the Kyoto Protocol on global warming take effect.
 The Dutch were prepared to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the emissions credits - on top of the renovation costs. But the Russian authorities didn't give their approval, leaving Unified Energy Systems out of a 10 million euro deal and with an antiquated power plant.
 &quot;We think [UES] has now lost a total of approximately 20 million euros because the government won't grant letters of approval,&quot; said Mikhail Rogankov, CEO of the Carbon Energy Fund, a non-profit organization established by UES to handle Kyoto implementation. &quot;But it may be as high as 60 million.&quot;
 UES is not alone. While President Vladimir Putin keeps the world guessing on whether he will endorse Kyoto, some Russian businesses, like energy behemoths UES and Gazprom, are lining up to take advantage of it.
 Some observers claim that Kyoto's potential benefits to the Russian energy sector will be so large - more than $6 billion just for emissions reductions, by one estimate - that the government is stalling on the treaty until it determines who should reap the hefty financial rewards.
 UES, the country's power monopoly, is undergoing a massive reorganization.
 &quot;The main reason Moscow is delaying is the unclear situation with regard to the privatization of electricity,&quot; said Igor Leshukov, director of the Institute for International Affairs in St. Petersburg.
 &quot;When it's clear who will get what out of electricity privatization, then we'll see ratification of Kyoto [by Russia].&quot; The treaty would use complex market mechanisms to reduce worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases, which many experts claim are the cause of global warming.
 After Washington dumped the treaty in 2001, arguing it would hurt the U.S. economy, the future of Kyoto now hinges entirely on ratification by Moscow.
 Putin ended months of silence when he voiced support for Kyoto during a summit with European Union leaders in May. A final decision is still pending.
 Should the treaty be ratified, UES alone - which produces 2 percent of the world's greenhouse gases and 70 percent of Russia's electricity - could expect to bring between 500 million and 800 million euros in modernization deals over the next eight years, Rogankov said.
 That's because under Kyoto, countries or companies that are unable to meet their own emissions reduction targets can invest in joint implementation projects to cut greenhouse gases in other countries and count the reductions as their own.
 That was the idea behind the scuttled renovation of the Amursk power station.
 A number of climate change experts, as well as EU officials, maintain that Russia could make billions of dollars through so-called joint implementation projects. The price tag for such projects would depend not only on refurbishing costs, but on the amount of greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, reduced.
 Beyond just making joint implementation projects possible, Kyoto would also allow countries that stay below emissions limits to sell quotas to over-polluting countries.
 Kyoto limits Russia's greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels. As a result of post-communist economic decline, Russia produces about 30 percent less than it did 14 years ago.
 Much of the debate surrounding the treaty in Russia has focused on whether or not the country will retain enough &quot;headroom&quot; to sell emissions credits.
 Kyoto supporters predict that Russia stands to make millions, if not billions of dollars through direct sales of quotas.
 Joint implementation projects would neither diminish the country's emissions ceiling nor affect the amount of quotas Russia could sell. Furthermore, supporters argue, the joint projects would help modernize aging factories while turning a tidy profit in the process.
 The total amount Russia could make from emissions reductions through joint implementation projects would equal $22.4 billion in so-called carbon dollars, according to a study released in March by Benito Muller, senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies in England.
 The energy sector alone could make $6 billion, Muller found.
 Furthermore, every &quot;carbon dollar&quot; would bring an additional $3 to $4 in foreign direct investment to improve aging infrastructure, Muller estimates.
 The ripple effect could be enormous for a country that attracted $6.8 billion in foreign direct investment last year.
 But Muller cautioned that his calculations depend on several variables.
 &quot;The problem is that these models presuppose that there's an effective market,&quot; Muller said. &quot;The Russian government has to designate someone who's actually in charge. People are willing to invest, but they don't know whom to approach.&quot;
 In Russia some of Kyoto's staunchest supporters are companies most likely to benefit from joint projects.
 &quot;This is an urgent issue for Gazprom,&quot; said Leonid Maslov, an adviser at Gazprombank. &quot;Total modernization costs would be $8 billion. A [joint implementation] project is the best possibility for Gazprom to minimize its costs,&quot; he told a recent conference in Moscow, Reuters reported.
 Gazprom's leaky gas pipeline network would be a preferred target for joint projects, said Dirk Forrister, managing director of the emissions trading brokerage Natsource in London.
 Capping methane leaks would be a relatively easy way to reduce emissions, as well as improve Gazprom's efficiency, Forrister said.
 &quot;Places that are some of the big hitters are large coal-fired power plants, district heating plants, steel plants, cement plants, aluminum plants and gas pipelines,&quot; he said.
 Russian opponents of Kyoto argue that capping Russia's greenhouse gases at their 1990 levels would strangle economic growth and eventually make Russia a net buyer of emissions quotas.
 High economic growth will increase carbon dioxide emissions at a rate of 2 percent increase in emissions to 1 percent growth in GDP, according to presidential economic adviser Andrei Illarionov.
 Illarionov's rejection of Kyoto on economic grounds is unequivocal. But in his public comments he has largely skirted the question of joint implementation projects.
 Neither Illarionov nor Peter Kaznacheyev, another Kremlin adviser opposed to Kyoto, replied to requests for an interview.
 &quot;I've been working on this issue for ten years, and every reputable energy expert or economist that I've talked to says it's all upside for Russia in terms of raising money,&quot; Forrister said.
 &quot;There are people who think that Russia has such large volumes of excess emissions that it could swamp the market with supply over demand. But I don't think that's in the government's interest.&quot;
 At last month's EU summit Putin appeared to agree to support Kyoto in exchange for European backing in Russia's bid to join the World Trade Organization.
 But Putin stopped short of an outright endorsement and gave no timeline for ratification, which he noted is parliament's responsibility and not the president's.
 To observers like Leshukov, Putin is simply biding his time before the reorganization of the power sector is complete.
 Much of the opposition to the treaty, Leshukov said, can be traced to disputes between Illarionov and UES chief executive Anatoly Chubais.


TITLE: State's Immaturity Comes at High Price for Big Business
AUTHOR: By Mikhail Delyagin

TEXT: Until mid-April, the Russian stock market had enjoyed more than a year of steady growth. The benchmark RTS index more than doubled during this period to a high of 781.55 on April 12. Then the market's fortunes changed dramatically. In two weeks, the dollar-denominated RTS fell by 20 percent. The decline accelerated around the time of the presidential inauguration, and hit 26.2 percent following the May 9 assassination of Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov. 
 
The modest market rebound now underway does not reduce the need to identify the factors that caused this sharp decline.
 The scale of the decline becomes clear when you consider that the beginning of the so-called Yukos affair - the arrest of former Group Menatep head Platon Lebedev and former Yukos security chief Alexander Pichugin - caused a 10-percent decline in the RTS. The arrest of former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky - not taking into account the effect of subsequent official pronouncements - sent the RTS tumbling by 20 percent.
 No one was arrested in the second half of April, however, and the decline began long before the May holidays, the prosecutors' sudden interest in Vladimir Potanin and Audit Chamber chief Sergei Stepashin's campaign to &quot;get Abramovich.&quot; 
 The price of raw material exports remained sky-high, and the resultant influx of hard currency ensured that investors had some fun money to throw around. Given the continued weakness of property rights, most of this cash was funneled into the stock market and into real estate in a few major cities. The real estate market showed no ill effects, so what happened to the stock market?
 The drop in share prices could have been caused by the simple overheating of a still narrow market. The state has made little effort to float shares in new companies on the market. Successful corporations have access to cheap loans and little motivation to go public.
 As a result only a limited number of corporations are listed on the exchange, and the perception of the under-evaluation has diminished as the market has grown. 
 This could have produced a market correction or even burst the speculative bubble, a risk that Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref warned about. 
 Instead we saw a gradual, steady decline in share prices. With the favorable situation in Russia's export markets, the only way to explain this development is to assume a change in the mood of big business.
 The immediate cause for the decline could have been the removal of capital from the financial sector that began in the first quarter. This movement also requires explanation, however, and with the influx of hard currency remaining stable, it points once more to a change of mood in the business community. Even the liberalization of hard currency regulations, which has made it much easier to take money out of Russia, proves significant only in conjunction with a change of mood. Otherwise business would not have taken advantage of this opportunity with such alacrity.
 Following the presidential election in March, there was a general perception that the government would go through a one-month settling-in period. When this month came to an end in mid-April, business - along with the rest of society - realized that the settling-in period was still in full swing and no end was in sight. The sheer scale of chaos within the government made even day-to-day business activity difficult. 
 The spectacle of public squabbling among top officials and the airing of the regime's dirty laundry did little to inspire confidence. Russian business has reached the point where it is poised to expand. It now requires cooperation from the government in the form of a clear-cut economic development strategy, the identification and stimulation of priorities, intelligent protectionism and the building of essential infrastructure. 
 Instead, big business saw clearly that the government was behind the times. It got stuck in the late 1990s, and can no longer meet the real needs of business today. The immaturity of the state left business with no clear perspectives for further growth.
 In addition, the business community regarded with skepticism an array of questionable social initiatives: simplifying the rules for evicting deadbeats while simultaneously raising housing and utilities payments; raising the Unified Social Tax rate from 20 to 26 percent for the lower middle class; and kicking &quot;middle-aged&quot; people out of the new pension system. When you think about it, the idea of replacing pensioners' discounts with cash payments sounds like the start of &quot;social genocide.&quot;
 The mere discussion of such initiatives by government officials creates a certain tension in society, and now that the election is over, the business community no longer regards them with its former equability. 
 As the implementation of liberal fundamentalist ideas exacerbates social problems, talk will inevitably turn to the business community's social responsibility. But since business will have no control over how its tax money is spent, the result will likely be just more embezzlement and waste.
 When its poorly thought out social programs lead to popular discontent, the ruling bureaucracy will shift the blame on to business. The government's show of strength in attacking individual oligarchs has been taken by siloviki (power elite) and bureaucrats in the regions as a signal to launch an all-out attack on business and as permission to step up extortion. 
 All of this has produced a great deal of uncertainty regarding the future of Russian business. It was hoped that Mikhail Fradkov's government of would be an improvement on that of his predecessor, Mikhail Kasyanov. But it has proven to be an alarming nonentity. In response the stock market has tripped over its own feet.
 One thing seems clear: The war against the oligarchs - entrepreneurs whose income depend on their control of the state - should not be allowed to turn into a war against business as such. This should be a war aimed at improving the health of business, or transforming the old oligarchs into honest businessmen and removing the new oligarchs among the siloviki and bureaucrats from public service.
 Otherwise the war against the oligarchs will develop into a war against Russian society as a whole. And as the stock market taught us in the second half of April, wars like that cannot be won. 
 
 <i>
Mikhail Delyagin, head of the Modernization Institute and chairman of the Rodina party's platform committee, contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times. </i>

TITLE: Northwest's Exports Demand Strategic Decisions
AUTHOR: By Sophia Kornienko

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Raw materials remain the Northwest region's main exports. State authorities speak of putting their best efforts into boosting the exporting potential of the local economy, but no solid economic policy to assist the local manufacturers has yet been created, analysts say. 
 
Even the more developed areas of the region, St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast, largely engage in purely administrative reforms instead of addressing the needs of the local industries.
 &quot;The difficulties of the remaining local industries are not being addressed. The government is preoccupied with simple administrative measures and distribution of land plots for the construction of leisure, trade and office estate,&quot; said Igor Yegorov, a representative of the United States Ministry of Trade division, the BISNIS Information service in Northwestern Russia. 
 Meanwhile, Yegorov said in a recent article, it is clear that without the growth of the manufacturing sector, it will be very difficult to achieve the forecasted GDP growth figures, which Russian leaders have proclaimed as their nearest goal, instead of competitiveness and efficiency. 
 &quot;In line with the President's directive, St. Petersburg Governor Matviyenko vowed to double the city budget by the end of her term in office. In reality, the goal to double the budget will mean squeezing revenues from all possible sources, including private businesses and the federal budget, instead of giving private initiative a real stimulus,&quot; Yegorov said. 
 The nominal growth figures used in the city government's forecast are based on a low inflation estimate, Yegorov said, allowing growth to be reported even if real economic growth is jeopardized. It is difficult to get a clear picture of the real situation in the region's economy, as the official statistical reports are still based on Soviet accounting principles, Yegorov said.
 According to the press service of the Northwestern Customs Division, the turnover of goods across customs in the Northwest region increased by 30 percent in 2003, Regnum information agency reported earlier this year. 
 Exports from the Northwest went up by 36 percent and amounted to $15,787 million. However, the major part of the region's exports is still formed by raw materials, mainly ferrous and non-ferrous metals, the agency reported.
 As much as 96 percent of the region's foreign trade is concentrated outside of the NIS, with most of the region's exports going to the Netherlands, Finland and Switzerland. 
 
 <strong>
THE OBLAST'S EXPORTS 
 </strong>The Leningrad Oblast became the leader in the Northwest region in the amount of exports in 2003, reported the Business News Agency. The Oblast's turnover grew by 33 percent, with exports amounting to $2,918 million. Out of these, raw materials for the fuel and power sector accounted for 72 percent. 
 
Wood and wood products made up 10 percent, as compared to 11.5 percent in 2000. &quot;Significant amounts of logging in the region - up to 50 percent - is done illegally. Thus, the country is annually losing about $1 billion,&quot; Regnum quoted the World Wildlife Fund expert Olga Lopina as saying on May 29. The Fund had held a press tour for western journalists called &quot;Illegal Logging in Russia's Northwest and Exports to Sweden.&quot;.
 After the European Union takes part in the Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade plan or FLEGT in 2005-2006, no illegally logged wood will enter the EU, Regnum reported.
 
 <strong>
THE CITY'S PRIORITIES 
 </strong>In late May, St. Petersburg's committee on economic development, industrial policy and trade named increasing the city's exporting capacity as its main priority. The main areas of attention were named to be the production sector, transport and logistics, science and education, and international tourism. However, real action is planned within a much narrower spectrum of economic problems. 
 
The administration limited their efforts to just a few areas - mainly real estate, public utilities, transport, tourism and personnel training - leaving strategic matters aside, Yegorov said. 
 The list does not include any proactive research and development or incentives for high-tech industries, Yegorov said. &quot;Financial instruments are prioritized because of their perceived omnipotence, whereas measures to give an impulse to the manufacturing and service sectors are overlooked,&quot; he added.
 
 <strong>
ONGOING PROJECTS
 </strong>St. Petersburg's government wants to vacate nearly 1,000 hectares of the land currently occupied by industrial enterprises. These companies are expected to promptly sell the land to investors and move production sites further into the countryside due to the growing land prices, Yegorov said. However, a range of factors, mainly the scarcity of developed industrial parks and infrastructure around the city hamper the process. One area in which the city government has become active is transportation. Its ambitious transportation projects may become a powerful factor in helping to develop foreign trade. 
 
Increased access for passenger and cargo vessels and trains to the city can be provided via the construction of a ring road, the new marine terminal and possibly a bridge to connect it with the ring road, as well as a new express railway road to Finland. 
 Besides a developed transportation infrastructure, the local industries have another pressing need -- a developed utility services system.
 &quot;If the government's plan for annual economic growth of 6 to 7 percent materializes, the city will soon start experiencing a shortage of basic resources. Consumption of gas is likely to increase from 8.6 billion cubic meters to 9.6 billion, and electricity use will go from 10.6 kWh to 12.6 kWh. This will require the construction of new power generating facilities and utility networks,&quot; Yegorov said. 
 Of the estimated total of 200 billion rubles the city's utility companies will need by 2010, the government reported 60 billion rubles should be allocated from the city budget, and the rest should be financed thourgh capital investments.
 It is unclear what economic or technical criteria will be used to obtain the above &quot;capital investments,&quot; Yegorov said. 
 Only when &quot;the tariffs, rules and regulations are adjusted to fit the requirements of private capital, will the sector experience an influx of investment,&quot; Yegorov said. At present, more than half of St. Petersburg's boiler houses need replacing, he added.

TITLE: English Chef Tingles Local Taste Buds
AUTHOR: By Galina Stolyarova

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: For Ryan Smith, the innovative and outgoing chef at the Davidov restaurant in the Astoria Hotel, his choice of career was obvious since early childhood. 
 
Born to the family of a chef, Smith spent much time in the kitchen, both watching and practicing. &quot;It was an obvious choice, really, I used to help my father during holidays in the kitchen,&quot; Smith said.
 Smith, now a 29-year old graduate of Ayr Catering College in Scotland, has quite a varied experience under his belt. 
 He has worked at London's La Tante Clair and Chez Nico (Grosvenor House Hotel), which were both awarded three Michelin stars, on cruise ships with companies Princess Cruises and Crystal Cruises and at the ultra-deluxe hotel Al Faisaliah in Saudi Arabia, as well as Royal Marriott Aurora Hotel in Moscow. 
 He came to Russia almost by accident. &quot;I wasn't quite comfortable in Saudi Arabia, so when the offer came from Marriott I agreed almost without thinking,&quot; he recalls.
 Smith finds working in Russia a challenging experience. &quot;Moscow and London are like two different planets, they just don't compare,&quot; he said. &quot;In London, everything is available to you. You just snap your fingers.&quot;
 The Astoria is a five-star hotel, which orders from where it is necessary to cater to the most refined tastes. Just three years ago nearly everything was imported. &quot;We couldn't even find proper eggs here, and I had to send people to search the local markets to get them,&quot; said the Astoria's owner Sir Rocco Forte in a recent interview.
 &quot;The eggs were too yellow, almost red, which meant they came from chickens that were not running around, but kept up in boxes instead.&quot; Now, the situation has improved, but St. Petersburg is still miles away from the culinary mainstream. 
 Smith's globetrotting experiences reflect in the chef's passion for a creative approach. 
 Smith's signature dish is Pave de Crab et Avocado - grilled avocado and kamchatka crab served with red peppers and tomato, flavored with curry and fresh coriander. 
 The juxtaposition of contrasting ingredients and flavors accent each other to reveal the chef's professional approach.
 &quot;Modern French with occasional worldly influences,&quot; is how Smith himself calls it. 
 The chef most enjoys cooking dishes that require refined techniques, where he can demonstrate his skills and innovative approach. &quot;Even traditional food has to be presented very appealingly, and this requires skills, attention and dedication,&quot; he said. 
 Smith is not a homebody, and he doesn't find it very exciting to cook for himself. Thus his kitchen at home remains deserted for most of the time. &quot;As a chef I enjoy cooking contemporary French cuisine, but when I go out myself I prefer Thai or Italian dishes,&quot; he said. &quot;When dining out I like an informal atmosphere, a place where you can just relax, chat with friends and enjoy your meal.&quot; 
 Smith tends to plunge himself in the local culinary world. The idea in the new Davidov menu is to reflect the chef's desire to slightly lighten Russian cuisine, which is traditionally rich in calories. 
 Such dishes, dictated by frost and snow and designed to warm you up during the long winters, have been reworked to keep their essence and yet to acquire the sophisticated light touch of the French cuisine. 
 For the restaurant's international menu Smith experiments with European culinary traditions, purposely juxtaposing crispy and creamy ingredients with various meats in a demonstration of his talent for fusion.
 Colin Brown, restaurant manager at the Astoria, believes that Smith adds a new depth to the restaurant with his innovative approach to cuisine.
 &quot;It adds a wonderful balance to our Russian menu, providing our guests with a wide range of tastes and sensations,&quot; Brown said. Michael Walsh, the general manager of the Angleterre Hotel, which is co-managed by the Rocco Forte Hotels, concurs.
 &quot;It's been very refreshing to have Ryan here, he brings successful new ideas to the team,&quot; he said. 
 In Smith's opinion, Russian guests are more traditional and conservative in their preferences than western Europeans, although this trend has begun to change. 
 &quot;Russians are typically more reluctant to try a new thing,&quot; he said. &quot;Rather, they stick to the good old dishes they know well. But they are slowly becoming more willing to experiment.&quot;<br> &quot;Ryan is above all a professional, never hesitating to adjust his style to the tastes of our guests,&quot; Brown said. &quot;No mater the request, Ryan always has a creative and flavorful response to fit the mood of a guest.&quot;

TITLE: Kingfisher Eyes Russia For Retail
AUTHOR: By Denis Maternovsky 

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - London-based home-improvement giant Kingfisher plans to open the first of what may be dozens of stores in Russia within two years and has poached a top IKEA executive to spearhead the expansion. 
 
The British company, which operates the B&amp;Q and Castorama do-it-yourself retail chains, said Thursday that it had hired Peter Partma, formerly the head of development for IKEA in Russia, to oversee Castorama's entry into the Russian market. 
 With 568 stores worldwide and sales last year of nearly $13 billion, Kingfisher is the largest home-improvement retailer in Europe and No. 3 in the world, after Home Depot and Lowe's of the United States. 
 A Kingfisher official said the company is already looking at locations for the first of what may eventually be 50 stores in Russia. &quot;This is not a target, just the number of stores we believe might be possible in Russia,&quot; said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. 
 The company will officially open an office in Moscow in &quot;two or three weeks,&quot; and plans to open &quot;four or five stores&quot; initially, with the first one scheduled to open its doors &quot;in a year or two,&quot; Partma said. 
 Russia's do-it-yourself, or DIY, market is estimated to be worth more than $5 billion per year. Traditional open-air markets continue to account for the majority of DIY sales, but Western chains are starting to gain ground. 
 Another large European DIY chain, Germany's OBI, opened its first two stores in Russia last year, both of which are located next to IKEAs. OBI has said that it would like to have 30 stores nationwide within four to five years. France's Leroy Merlin, which operates 165 home improvement stores in eight countries, is on track to open its first two stores in Moscow by the end of the year. Russia's Staryk Khottabych, which operates 18 finishing materials stores in Moscow, is the only major domestic DIY retailer.

TITLE: Battered Yukos Finds Unlikely Offers
AUTHOR: By Alex Fak and Catherine Belton

PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The Lithuanian prime minister blasted the Russian government over the Yukos affair Thursday, when a notorious corporate raider proposed purging the company's management as a means to stave off bankruptcy.
 
&quot;It would be a huge act of nonsense by Russia's government to drive such a company to bankruptcy,&quot; Lithuanian Prime Minister Algirdas Brazauskas said at a news conference in Vilnius, Bloomberg reported. 
 Brazauskas' comments came after Yukos CEO Simon Kukes made his first public statement on the possibility of bankruptcy. He warned the situation could sharply deteriorate as early as this week, when a Moscow court is due to hear Yukos' appeal against a $3.4 billion tax bill.
 &quot;If on the 18th we lose in the worst possible fashion ... it will generate difficulties and things will accelerate,&quot; Kukes told The Wall Street Journal. &quot;If the government wants to make Yukos bankrupt, they could make Yukos bankrupt. Period.&quot;
 Yukos shares plunged 6.4 percent, bringing down the RTS index by more than 3 percent Thursday following Kukes' comments.
 The company has had its assets frozen while the tax claim is being fought out in court, and two of its major shareholders are on trial on tax evasion and fraud charges.
 &quot;We are closely following these events, we have contact with Yukos' managers and, if it comes to that, we will take action at the level of the government and the president,&quot; Brazauskas said.
 Yukos controls Mazeikiu Nafta, Lithuania's largest company and the only oil refinery in the Baltics. 
 Russian observers viewed Brazauskas' comment as a diplomatic gaffe, especially at a time when the European Union is striving to create a common foreign policy.
 &quot;Member states in the union do speak individually, not only as part of the union,&quot; Emma Udwin, a European Commission spokeswoman on external relations said by telephone from Brussels. 
 In the past, however, the EU has often voiced concern about the legal case against Yukos, insisting it be handled in a &quot;fair, proportioned and non-discriminating way.&quot;
 In the newspaper interview, Kukes seemed to indicate that there was no possibility for an out-of-court settlement.
 &quot;We've tried to meet and discuss [with the government], but there's just silence, there's just pressure from everywhere,&quot; he said.
 A loss in court could lead Yukos to abandon its $1.9 billion capital expenditure program, Kukes said, which means the company would not be able to boost output by 10 percent this year as planned.
 The company is already showing signs of cutting capital expenditures, with first quarter output up just 9.3 percent vis-a-vis the same quarter last year, said Anton Zatolokin, oil and gas analyst at MDM Bank. By comparison, first quarter output last year was 22.6 percent higher than in 2002.
 &quot;Capex is a discretionary item. It is a cash flow item, and if Yukos is telling the truth about its recent financial state - given pending tax liabilities - capex is one of the items that will be cut first,&quot; said Alex Kantarovich, chief strategist at Aton Capital. 
 Kantarovich warned that the imbroglio is affecting the way Yukos operates. 
 &quot;All the decisions of a strategic nature are now paralyzed because the top management is incapable of doing its work. The company is on auto-pilot.&quot; 
 Analysts are raising red flags about Yukos' cash flows, saying that with world oil prices at a record high, the company should have more money than it says it does. Some observes suspect that large shareholders, connected to Group Menatep, have begun redirecting the cash flow. 
 &quot;I think this is why the government is accelerating the tax [claims] - they want to get the [assets] before someone strips them out,&quot; said Eric Kraus, chief strategist at Sovlink brokerage. 
 Late on Wednesday Boris Jordan, the president of Sputnik Group, sent a letter to large minority shareholders calling for separate talks with the government that would bypass Yukos management and major shareholders.
 Jordan presided over oil firm Sidanco's bankruptcy in 1999 and acted on the state's behalf to take over NTV in 2001.
 In the letter, obtained by The St. Peterburg Times, Jordan says that his Sputnik Group &quot;carried out ... the recovery of Sidanco [oil firm] from bankruptcy,&quot; a remark that sent some investors into apoplexy. 
 &quot;This is amazing. He's talking about recovering Sidanco from the bankruptcy that he put it into,&quot; said an official at one major investment fund that holds Yukos shares. 
 &quot;Jordan's the last person to represent minority shareholders. He has a history of being involved in situations where he uses conflicts of interest for his own benefit,&quot; he said, referring to Sidanco and NTV. 
 Though he would not say how the management purge could be carried out, Peter Clateman, general counsel at Sputnik, said that there has been a &quot;tremendous positive response&quot; from Yukos minority shareholders.
 Yukos rejected Jordan's role as a middleman.
 &quot;We don't need his services,&quot; said Hugo Erikssen, a Yukos spokesman.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Zakayev Arrest Request
 </b>

OSLO, Norway (AP) - Moscow has demanded that Norway arrest and extradite Chechen rebel envoy Akhmad Zakayev to face charges in Russia, Oslo police said Friday. 
 London-based Zakayev, an aide to Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov, visited Oslo last week at the invitation of a parliament member from the opposition Socialist Left party. 
 Hans Halvorsen, head of the Oslo police crime unit, said police had received a request for Zakayev's arrest and extradition via Interpol. 
 "We will handle this in keeping with normal Norwegian rules," Halvorsen said. He declined to say what evidence of crimes, if any, the Russians had presented. 
 Russia has previously unsuccessfully asked that Denmark and Britain extradite Zakayev. 
 Zakayev left Norway on Saturday. 
 On Thursday, the Russian Foreign Ministry lashed out at Norway in a statement for letting the visit take place. 
 
 
<b>Putin Backs Bush 
 </b>

SEA ISLAND, Georgia (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin stepped into the U.S. political campaign, saying the Democrats had "no moral right" to criticize President George W. Bush over Iraq. 
 Putin, answering a reporter's question in Sea Island, Georgia, on Thursday, suggested that the Democrats were two-faced in criticizing Bush on Iraq since it had been the Clinton administration that authorized the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia by U.S. and NATO forces. 
 The reporter had asked Putin to respond to U.S. press reports questioning Russia's place at the G8 feast of leading industrial countries. 
 Putin brushed these off, saying such articles were part of an internal U.S. political debate. 
 He went on: "I am deeply convinced that President Bush's political adversaries have no moral right to attack him over Iraq because they did exactly the same. 
 "It suffices to recall Yugoslavia. Now look at them. They don't like what President Bush is doing in Iraq." 
 Russia was adamantly opposed to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, as it has been to the U.S.-led military operation Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein.
 <b>Free-Trade Zone
 </b>

BEIJING (SPT) - Russia and China have agreed to create a 10-square-kilometer free-trade zone along their border near the port city of Vladivostok, China Business Weekly reported Sunday. 
 The free-trade zone, located in Suifenhe in China's Heilongjiang province in the country's northeast, and Pogranichny in Russia's Far East region, will be created with an initial investment of $1 billion, the report said. 
 Hong Kong-funded developer Shimao Group is carrying out construction of the first phase of the project on the China side of the trade zone after paying 125.6 million yuan or $15 million to win the bid, the report said. 
 No information was immediately available regarding the Russian part of the project. 
 The project is expected to take 10 years to complete and provide a platform for commodity trading, tourism and entertainment while encouraging manufacturing within a high-technology park. 
 Trade between the two countries rose by nearly a third last year to $15.5 billion, "but this is not enough," Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref told a Russian-Chinese investment forum in Khabarovsk last week. 



TITLE: RTS Plunges in Reaction To Low Market Liquidity
PUBLISHER: Interfax
TEXT: MOSCOW - The stream of bad news about Yukos continues to push the Russian stock market down and by mid-session on Friday the benchmark RTS index had dropped to 560 points, its level at the start of June. Friday on the RTS blue chips were down 0.8% to 3.1%. Yukos was down 4% to $7.2 after news about problems with company creditors and after the Tax Ministry announced the dismissal of the judge hearing the Yukos case against the ministry. 
 The RTS index fell 1.22% to 564.70 points. 
 
No serious investment ideas had hit the market and even gains on Western stock indexes for Russian ADR were not able to rustle up demand before the long weekend. 
 U.S. markets were closed Friday because of the burial of former president Ronald Reagan, so the Russian market lost liquidity and movement guidelines. 
 Two major western banks (UBS of Switzerland and Societe Generale of France) announced they were no longer Yukos creditors and the Tax Ministry announced the dismissal of the judge, which had a negative impact on Yukos and the rest of the market, said Alexei Khmelenko of Uniastrum bank. 
 &quot;Problems with cash liquidity before the long weekend are not helping matters - few want to hold on to shares. There is money on the market, but the mood is nervous because banks are closing limits on each other. The gap between loan costs for large and small banks did narrow somewhat toward the end of the week,&quot; he said. 
 External factors such as the withdrawal of funds from all emerging markets is also having some impact on the market, said Alexander Baranov, an asset manager at the Prospekt brokerage. &quot;There are sales on all emerging markets, including in Russia, where the most popular shares in nonresident portfolios are being sold first of all: Lukoil, Yukos, Sberbank, Surgutneftegas, and Rostelecom,&quot; he said. 
 The expected rise in U.S. interest rates is another reason for the drop in prices, said Ivan Dorefeev of Olimpiyskiy bank. &quot;Share and bond prices already reflect a 0.25 percentage point hike, but with the increased likelihood of a 0.5 point rise, sales began to grow on emerging markets,&quot; he said. 
 &quot;Low liquidity on the market and a lack of trust among banks is only intensifying this process, especially as anything could happen over the upcoming long weekend,&quot; Dorofeev told Interfax. 
 Foreign investors do not have a large amount of Gazprom shares in their portfolios and there is not much selling in this sector so the shares are remaining afloat for now, Baranov said. 
 On the RTS, prices were down 1.1% for Lukoil, 1.9% for Mosenergo, 3% for Sberbank, 3.1% for Sibneft, 1.4% for Surgutneftegas, and 0.8% for Tatneft, but up 0.4% for Unified Energy System, and 1.9% for Norilsk Nickel. 
 Trading volume was at $7.391 million on the RTS (including $3.295 million in direct deals).
 Gazprom shares in St. Petersburg were down 0.7% at 56.2 rubles in volume of over 9.862 million shares.

TITLE: YOUR LETTERS - Roma, Crooked Cops, Taxis and Tourism
TEXT: <i>In response to &quot;Police Checking Roma to Protect Tourists,&quot; an article on May 25, and &quot;Crooked Cops Are Not a Joking Matter,&quot; a comment on June 4, both by Vladimir Kovalev.</i>
 
<i>Editor, </i>
 I visit St. Petersburg to assist in some work for very deprived children. Last October, I too was mugged by the police. They played the distraction game extremely professionally and removed my wallet and camera. Fortunately, because I had not realized what was happening, and cooperated in what was apparently a normal security check, the non-English speaking partnership returned my passport.
 
I have now reduced my number of visits, and thus the money I bring to support the work helping street children, and no longer feel able to walk around on my own. I feel very, very sad and obliged to advise other potential visitors of the situation.
 I also suggest that police be given a proper briefing about which visas are used for those staying in hotels, and those that are issued for people staying with friends.
 <i>Roy Stenning, 
 Bridgwater, Somerset
 United Kingdom
 </i>
 <i>
Editor,</i>
 I have had my wallet lifted by gypsies and I have been shaken down by the police.
 
Putting extra patrols in high-risk areas will produce double trouble. Tourists would then have to worry about which swindlers get to them first. The only way to recognize this will be judging by their clothing. If they are in uniform they are &quot;official swindlers.&quot; If not, then they are &quot;unofficial swindlers.&quot;
 Either way it won't take long before someone tries to rip you off.
 If a tourist uses the new map [being prepared by the British Consulate General] to avoid &quot;high-risk&quot; areas they sure won't see much of Piter! They could always call a taxi to take them away from their Nevsky Prospekt hotel to a safer area.
 The best way to solve the crime problem is to solve the police problem.
 <i>Robert Venhuizen
 Holland, Michigan
 
 
Editor,
 </i>I left St. Petersburg last week after a four-day visit with the feeling the city is not safe or welcoming to tourists. 
 
On our second night in the city my Russian friend and I were returning home late from a bar along Nevsky Prospekt when we were approached by two cops who demanded to see our documents and search us for drugs. I insisted on holding my money in my hand while the cops searched us, as I knew stealing money was the real purpose behind their stopping us. The cops insisted there were problems with my registration and only let me go on my way when I presented my train ticket proving I had only arrived in St. Petersburg the day before. 
 On our way to the train station two nights later another person in our group had his digital camera stolen (along with all his photos of his Russian vacation) when four Russian men jostled him as we were entering the metro car at the Gostiny Dvor metro station. What will it take for city authorities to finally pay attention to crimes against tourists?
 <i>Ben Gardent, 
 Hanover, New Hampshire
 </i>
 <i>
Editor,</i>
 Russia is probably the only country where tourists are warned of two kinds of thugs - those without a uniform and those in it. The image of Russian cops essentially boils down to crooks in uniform. 
 
I personally have been the victim of a document check when, in spite of having all the necessary documents, I found myself lighter by $400. I guess I would have been better off with a mugger, who at least would not have had the time or patience to rummage through all my pockets and definitely would not have been brandishing automatic weapons. Getting mugged by the police is quite a discomfiting thought for most tourists. Though most of the locals justify these actions by referring to the meager salaries of policemen, low salaries are by no means a license for daylight robberies. 
 While bribing the cops to get off the hook for a crime may be common in many parts of the world, harassing innocent tourists is something unique to Russia and definitely not what one expects from a country that sees itself on the global tourism map a few years from now.
 <i>Madhwaraj Ballal, 
 Sacramento, California
 </i>
 <strong>
<b>Plaque for Adams
 </strong></b>

 <i>
In response to &quot;Plaque Marks Link Between City, U.S.,&quot; an article by Simone Kozuharov on June 4.</i>
 <i>Editor,</i>
 I am glad to see that through the city of St. Petersburg's efforts to recognize and honor a past U.S. ambassador and president, better relationships and understanding of our two great countries can be forged. Upon my next trip to St. Petersburg I will be sure to view this monument with pride, knowing that a piece of my history, my country is now represented in what I consider the most beautiful city in all the world. 
 <i>
Daniel Wright
 Reading, Pennsylvania
 </i>
 <strong>
<b>Cultural Vandalism
 </strong></b>

 <i>
In response to &quot;Moscow Sent Findings on Original Room,&quot; an article on June 1. 
 
 Editor,</i>
 I am a descendant of East Prussians and interested in the history, culture, literature and art of the area.
 
I think the Germans from East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia suffered much after the war under Stalin's brutal rule and his murderous Red Army. Hundreds of thousands of German civilians lost their lives from 1945 to 1949 through the forced expulsion and revenge. German inhabitants were driven from their homeland and had their lands confiscated by Stalin and were only allowed to return to visit in recent years. 
 East Prussia was subdivided between the Soviet Union and Poland without any input from the former German inhabitants and its art treasures were carted off to the Soviet Union. There is very little left of East Prussian culture and art in Kaliningrad, formerly Koenigsberg, as much of it was destroyed by anti-German zealots at the end of the war and thereafter. 
 I think it is only proper that modern-day Russia return any German cultural art (whatever remains) to its rightful heirs given the abuses in the past. It is high time for forgiveness and insight into abuses carried out by both sides in the name of fanatical beliefs and to learn from the terrible atrocities committed by our ancestors. Through art we can learn what was good from both civilizations and use it to heal wounds brought about by World War II. Germans and Russians can use this issue to move on to a higher level of cooperation and friendship and set an example to other nations and future generations. If only there was the political goodwill to resolve this, the world would be a less grim and more enlightened place for future generations. 
 <i>Klaus Knierim
 Canada</i>
 
 <strong>
<b>Tourism Potential
 </strong></b>

 <i>
In response to &quot;Roma Women Rounded Up,&quot; an article by Vladimir Kovalev on May 28.
 
 Editor,</i>
 Two cousins visited Moscow and St. Petersburg last summer. They had nothing but compliments about the Russian people and the places they visited. 
 
My cousin, Jeanette, said, &quot;They can easily rebuild their country with the momentum tourism gives them.&quot; If the Russian authorities, especially the police, are going to throw away tourist's positive feelings about Russia, the rest of the populace demand their removal.
 <i>David Holloway 
 Santa Clara, California
 </i>
 <strong>
<b>Chilly Living
 </strong></b>

 <i>
In response to &quot;Cold Citizens Not Warm To Price Reform,&quot; a comment by Vladimir Kovalev on May 28.
 
 Editor,
 </i>It's warm and cozy here!
 
There's only one solution to the heating problem - privatize. Living in a democracy that is still governed by obsolete communist methods is absurd, since I'm sure all elected officials aren't in the same boat as the average citizen. 
 As for cleaning, if the people that live there don't help themselves, their apartments will depreciate quickly in value. They need to form a citizen's cleaning committee per apartment unit and take turns cleaning or collecting a form of tax so they themselves are responsible instead of paying more taxes to the city without their just rewards.
 <i>Al
 Reno, Nevada
 </i>
 <strong>
<b>Red Army Recognition
 </strong></b>

 <i>
Editor,
 </i>Sometimes historians in the West overlook the important part the Soviet Red Army made with regards to winning World War II. Like it or not the Red Army was responsible for sapping the strength of the Wehrmacht. 
 
It was the diversion of German troops, armor and supplies that permitted the Allies to make the Normandy invasion possible. 
 We hear so much of sacrifices made by the Allies in Normandy, that the great Soviet contribution to World War II has been overlooked and completely forgotten. 
 If not for the Soviet defeat of the Nazis at Stalingrad, Normandy would never have been possible. A great tribute must be paid to the Red Army, which made sacrifices so that the Normandy invasion would succeed. Let those of the Soviet Red Army who sacrificed their lives for freedom also be remembered on June 6. 
 <i>Kenneth T. Tellis
 Mississauga, Ontario
 Canada
 </i>
 <strong>
<b>Taxi Blues</strong><i>
 </i></b>

 <i>
In response to &quot;Citizens Fear Taxi Reform,&quot; an article by Irina Titova, and &quot;Reform Must Not Kill Private Taxis,&quot; an editorial on June 8.
 Editor,
 </i>As a world traveler and frequent visitor to St. Petersburg, I have found gypsy cab drivers are a very viable means of transportation. In St. Petersburg as in every other country I visit it is just common sense for a visitor to act like a resident and be selective, make a visual inspection of the cab and driver and ask how much it will cost before they engage the cab's services.
 
From years of experience in St. Petersburg, I have found gypsy cab drivers to be helpful, courteous, very knowledgeable, and as equally honest as regulated services. 
 Now at Pulkovo Airport there is an official taxi kiosk inside for travelers needing more safer, higher priced &quot;official cabs,&quot; while outside the lobby doors the taxi mafia seems to have weakened their stranglehold and there are legitimate independent drivers who offer fair, lower rates. 
 If City Hall is interested in helping tourists they should try to set standards and regulate the police industry. On the street, it seems to me that to tourists or residents, the gypsy cabs are a rather innocuous problem compared to the police. If City Hall is interested in helping tourists they should set standards and regulate the police industry. Needing help as a tourist on Nevsky Prospekt at night, I consider running to a gypsy cab safer, more helpful and more financially reasonable than having to deal with the police.
 <i>Anonymous
 </i>
 <i>
Editor,
 </i>While visiting St. Petersburg in 1999 I used the private taxi service just about everyday, but then I had a Russian citizen help me out. I don't speak Russian so without someone helping, especially at the airport, it could have been a problem whether financially expensive or otherwise.
 
As for these &quot;gypsy taxis,&quot; for the average person, there are risks involved and I agree about safety, our driver didn't have seat belts in the back seat nor insurance and it was winter with slippery roads.
 Change is inevitable and most of us know it, but fight it regardless. Taxes need to be paid to support the local government and its highways and roads, but most of all to protect its citizens. 
 There are options like bicycles, mopeds, scooters - some can be folded up for easy transport if someone doesn't want to pay the higher taxi prices. But as I see it, more legal taxis will emerge and competition will reduce fares in the long run and then it'll be the taxi drivers complaining just like here in the United States, or more people will have to use the public transportation system. People complained about fare hikes there as well. 
 We all want more but don't want to pay more, it doesn't work that way - that's democracy, the price for freedom. Ronald Reagan deregulated gas, banking, agriculture and everyone complained about higher rates.
 <i>Al
 Reno, Nevada
 </i>
 <i>
Editor, 
 </i>In 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev's government initiated the infamous fight against non-labor revenues, targeting all those who were trying to earn some extra money in breach of Soviet laws. Private drivers were among them. 
 
This fight, like Gorbachev's other early initiatives including a notorious anti-alcohol campaign, turned up zilch, as we all know. Now, City Hall is going to step on the same rake again, as Russians like to say. I wonder how Governor Valentina Matviyenko's bureaucrats will force gypsy cabs off the streets. 
 Just imagine how they will do it? Will they tell the police to watch out to prevent people from hitching and drivers from giving rides? Absurd? Not really. This is the style of the current city government: public relations is what matters most for them. &quot;We will turn this city into a European one, we will bring the capital here or at least the Supreme Court,&quot; and so on. What exactly will be done does not matter. 
 It is indeed a scandal when people arrive a the airport of a city of 5 million people and a would-be capital of European culture and lifestyle and find themselves face-to-face with rude and cheeky mafia drivers who gladly charge five times as much as it really costs to get to town. 
 But the authorities are reluctant to change this. Guess why: It is surely easier to dress all taxi drivers in uniforms or just announce it and then say &quot;we've put everything in order.&quot; Once I helped a friend to shift apartments. We called a regular taxi and it charged us 300 rubles ($10) for a 7-minute drive: five times as much as it would cost with a <i>chastnik. 
 </i>Another side of the problem is the private drivers themselves. I know some of them who make their living this way because this wonderful city has no other employment opportunities or offers low-paid jobs. 
 What the authorities are saying is just ridiculous: with an official taxi you will know the price in advance. Nonsense! Exactly the opposite. You negotiate it with the private driver before getting into his car, while when calling a taxi you never know the final price until they take you where you need. 
 Fortunately, cheap gypsy cabs will always be there. I am pretty sure Matviyenko's move is just another brick in her PR wall. And after all, using a regular taxi would you ever meet an Azeri whose rattletrap car was used by him in the Karabakh war or an Uzbek not speaking a word of Russian but driving a right-hand drive Lada reimported from Britain? 
 <i>Max Sher 
 St. Petersburg </i>

TITLE: Putin's Definition of Democracy?
AUTHOR: By Lyudmila Alexeyeva

TEXT: In his recent State of the Nation address, President Vladimir Putin said that it is the country's goal to achieve &quot;a mature democracy and a developed civil society.&quot; Putin also proclaimed his support for a &quot;free society of free people in Russia.&quot; Such remarks were quite fitting for a world leader who was soon to travel to Sea Island, Georgia, for last week's G-8 summit.
 
But that tone was not maintained throughout. The speech also contained clearly threatening language accusing some nongovernmental groups of &quot;obtaining funding from influential foreign or domestic foundations&quot; or of &quot;servicing dubious group and commercial interests.&quot; These groups, Putin contended, were ineffective when it came to resolving &quot;the most acute problems of the country . . . violations of fundamental and basic human rights,&quot; and the &quot;encroachment on people's real interests&quot; because &quot;they cannot bite the hand that feeds them.&quot;
 Does this speech herald a crackdown on nongovernmental organizations in Russia? There are currently more than 350,000 registered NGOs in the country. Many of them are &quot;hobby groups&quot; - amateur bands, sports associations, collectors' societies and so on. Some are charitable and social assistance associations that work with the disabled, veterans, families and orphans. These are the organizations that I believe Putin had in mind when he said that &quot;without a mature civil society, there can be no effective solution to people's pressing problems,&quot; and that gradually the non-state sector should take over &quot;functions which the state should not carry out, or is incapable of carrying out efficiently.&quot;
 So what are the organizations he claims are somehow ineffective and beholden to others? There can be no doubt he was referring to NGOs that seek not merely to provide social and humanitarian assistance but also to protect the rights and interests of certain population groups and to work for democracy and human rights. These include human rights groups; associations of independent journalists; educational organizations that seek to preserve historical memory and foster a knowledge of rights and responsibilities; environmental organizations; groups that act as watchdogs to promote transparency and accountability; centers and think tanks that collect, analyze and disseminate information not to be found in the controlled press; organizations that monitor elections; the Committees of Soldiers' Mothers; and organizations that provide independent information about Chechnya.
 The authorities would like to bring such groups under their control. The attempt to control NGOs is nothing new. In November 2001 a huge meeting of more than 5,000 of Russia's NGOs was convened. Fortunately, Russia's leading independent NGOs - the Moscow Helsinki Group, Memorial, the Consumers' Association, the Glasnost Defense Foundation, the major environmental organizations and others prevented the event from being dominated by the Kremlin's agenda. The attempt to establish a state-controlled foundation or umbrella institution that would fund and control Russia's burgeoning third sector failed. Perhaps Putin's latest speech is meant to signal a return to the issue.
 The implication appears to be that if the truly independent NGOs cannot be controlled, then they will be outlawed. And the first step - as always in this type of campaign - is to cast aspersions on their patriotism, to suggest that they are not working for the good of Russia and ordinary Russian citizens but are &quot;deviating from Russia's historical path,&quot; as Putin put it in the speech. An atmosphere of mistrust is opening many benign and independent NGOs to attack either from officials of the tax inspectorate or from thugs and criminals (such as those who ransacked the offices of a human rights group in Kazan the day after the speech).
 Putin has also used the NGO issue to criticize his opponents, among them &quot;oligarchs&quot; such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who have provided funds for NGOs. Russia's fledgling indigenous philanthropic sector has been launched and supported by these funds. Now Putin has suggested a &quot;moral equivalence&quot; between them and the &quot;foreign funders&quot; - the public and private foundations of the countries of his fellow G-8 colleagues. It is hard to know how Putin can square his enthusiasm for wanting Russia to be part of the G-8 club, with the threats to NGOs receiving grants from countries that are members of that club.
 Putin should be assured that we share his ideal of increasing prosperity and defending the democratic achievements of the Russian people. But in the end, increasing economic prosperity can best be achieved if the rights of Russia's citizens are guaranteed, as they are in all other G-8 countries - not only by the government but also by a vigorous independent third sector of NGOs and journalists.
 
 <i>Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a founding member of the Moscow Helsinki Group, is president of the International Helsinki Foundation. This comment was first printed in The Washington Post. </i>

TITLE: Historical Facts Needed, Not Emotion
TEXT: <i>There are different truths ... foolish truths and wise truths ... There is also justice</i> - Irina Antonova, Pushkin Museum director, cited in &quot;The Amber Room: The Untold Story of the Greatest Hoax of the 20th Century.&quot;
 

 What should one believe about the fate of the Amber Room, the amber panels removed from the Catherine Palace at Pushkin by German soldiers in 1941 and last seen, packed in crates, just before the Red Army captured Koenigsberg in 1945? 
 We should know the truth; but Russia's cultural elite still seem to want to have their own truth, a foolish truth that relies on knowledge being the privilege of the elite.
 Despite what Antonova says, no justice can be based on lies.
 For years Soviet and then Russian officials have maintained that the Amber Room was hidden somewhere by the Nazis just before the fall of Koenigsberg, today the capital of Russia's Kaliningrad region.
 Now, two British investigative journalists have produced a persuasive case, based on archive material in Russia, that it was destroyed or looted by the Red Army. 
 This is their explanation for why searches in Russia and West and East Germany over the last 60 years have drawn a blank.
 The highest authorities have known this for years, but kept quiet about it to preserve the postwar one-dimensional, heroic image of the Soviet soldier and as a trump card whenever discussion comes up of the return to Germany of so-called trophy art removed by the Soviets after the war, the authors say. 
 The reaction from a variety of Russian cultural figures and witnesses, who have not read the book, has been to admit that the panels might have been burned, but to blame that on other nationals.
 Witness Leonid Arinshtein's response, after 59 years of silence, to say that the room might have been destroyed, but to blame the fire on the Allies, appears to concede the room was burnt, but blames it on allies.
 Another response has been to dismiss the journalists' findings as one of many competing versions. 
 This is unreasonable. Not all versions are equal. Many of them are downright wacky. Some reports on the Amber Room follow the falsifier's maxim that &quot;if the facts don't fit the legend, print the legend.&quot; 
 The journalists' conclusions provide a straightforward explanation that should be favored over others that involve a more complicated turn of events.
 In addition, they have made a strong case that fulfills a requirement of scientific truth that most of the other versions do not; their hypothesis can be disproved.
 Instead of complaining that the journalists are rude or that their motives are suspect, the way to find the truth about the Amber Room is to provide all the evidence. 
 Provide the documents, and don't say that they have been eaten by mice.

TITLE: Matviyenko's Address Takes on Concrete Obligations
AUTHOR: By Vladimir Gryaznevich

TEXT: Although the law on an annual address on the state of St. Petersburg was passed back in 1998, the previous governor Vladimir Yakovlev didn't once fulfill it. So the address by Governor Valentina Matviyenko on Wednesday was the first one in St. Petersburg's recent history.
 
The general point of the address is the same as that of the message from the country's president to the Federal Assembly: it lists the main problems and the ways planned to solve them. However unlike the presidential address, that of St. Petersburg is far more concrete. This is required by the law, which obliges the governor to formulate concrete policy aims. The law was devised in such a way by deputy Nikita Ananov in his time and passed by the Legislative Commission.
 Valentina Matviyenko must be given her due - in my opinion she quite accurately fulfilled the requirements of the law. And furthermore, she took on several concrete obligations, which President Vladimir Putin does not do in his addresses. For example, she announced that, &quot;by the end of this year there will not be one public sector worker in the city being paid less than the minimum wage (this is now about 3,000 rubles [$103]). In total, the wage of 242,000 people - teachers, health workers, workers in the culture sector - will increase on average by 1,800 rubles. Simultaneously, additional city payments will bring the incomes of non-working pensioners and invalids receiving pensions worth less than the minimum wage up to this amount. The following year we will include all age groups.&quot;
 The basic motif of the address was the intention to turn St. Petersburg into a city with European living standards. The administration intends to achieve this goal by the methods formulated in its program of social and economic development until 2008 devised by the economic committee headed by Vladimir Blank. 
 By 2008, the St. Petersburg government has undertaken the obligation of doubling the budget (without increasing the tax load on the economy), of increasing the amount of housing built to up to 3 million square meters a year (in 2003 1.8 million square meters was built) and of tripling capital investment into engineering infrastructure objectives. 
 Judging from all this, the conservative section of the St. Petersburg government was not able to seriously influence the content of the address. It was performed in a strongly liberal spirit, fully corresponding however with the views of Blank, whose side in the debate over ways to develop St. Petersburg and the methods used, judging by all this, Valentina Matviyenko has taken. 
 To the uninitiated these statements could seem like irrelevant details in a strategical document such as the address. However they are very important, for they concern key problems. 
 For example, Matviyenko said, &quot;Before the end of the year we will reform the housing agencies.&quot; In this short phrase hangs the fate of all the communal housing services reforms. Without the reorganization of the agencies, reform of the communal housing services will simply not be possible. Realizing this, the whole 'communal housing services clan' speaks out against the reorganization. In uttering this phrase Matviyenko has made a choice in favor of the concept of reform promoted by Oleg Vikhtyuk - the only genuine liberal in the whole of this system.
 In Matviyenko's address there are other similarly key declarations - on state orders, the reform of land issues, and city transport. For example, on the subject of communal housing Matviyenko announced that the reforms would be effected by means of &quot;drawing the population into directing housing foundation objectives by the creation of unions of private accommodation owners and general unions of citizens (house committees).&quot; This is another key factor in the reform - that it can only be fully achieved by the residents of the houses themselves.
 Matviyenko made a series of key statements on St.Petersburg's main problem - land reform. She has already promised this year to complete the formulating of a General Plan. She announced that first up will be a guarantee of equal access to land plots for all construction companies, by means of holding full-price auctions, for which documents will be prepared by specially hired private firms. This is an extremely important moment - officials, as experience has shown, are given to use the preparation of documents to sabotage tenders, so as to give the land in exchange for bribes.
 In coming out with a schedule document that contains so many complicated but set formulated tasks with exact deadlines for their accomplishment, the governor is taking a big risk. Now any inhabitant of the city with figures in his hands can follow without difficulty how the gubernatorial program is being carried out. This will force the administration to put a stop to the practice of dragging out reforms under specious pretexts, and to clearly fulfill the plans. And Matviyenko herself will have to firmly and efficiently put an end to the sabotaging of reforms by conservatives in her team. However, fulfilling her promises accurately and on time is something she will not be able to do.
 
 <i>Vladimir Gryaznevich is a political analyst with Expert Severo-Zapad magazine. His comment was first.broadcast.on Ekho Moskvy in St. Petersburg on Friday. </i>

TITLE: Chris Floyd's Global Eye
AUTHOR: By Chris Floyd

TEXT: <b>Funeral Games</b> 
Some cynics say that Heaven's newest sunbeam, Ronald Reagan, was called &quot;The Great Communicator&quot; because he delivered his innumerable lies in words of one syllable. But this is just a typically vicious liberal canard.
 
For Reagan truly was a great communicator, though not with words - or with facts, which he once called &quot;stupid things.&quot; No, his genius lay in the manipulation of symbols to convey powerful messages that could no longer be voiced openly in polite society - messages of hate, envy, fear and violence.
 Reagan officially launched his successful 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia - not the Quaker &quot;city of brotherly love&quot; in Pennsylvania, but a small town in the piney swamps of Mississippi, where three young civil rights workers had been brutally murdered by local officials in 1964 for the heinous crime of registering black people to vote. This was the famous &quot;Mississippi Burning&quot; case, a stark symbol of the era of violent race-hatred and government-sanctioned oppression. The decades-long struggle to bring full constitutional liberty into this system was fiercely resisted under the rubric of &quot;states' rights&quot; - a codeword for the preservation of white privilege and black subjugation. Every Southerner raised in that system (including your correspondent) understood this secret language.
 To win in the South - and counterbalance the heavy black vote for Democrats elsewhere - Republican elitists adopted this ugly, divisive code. Their deliberate stirring of base emotions was also aimed at preventing working-class whites from making common cause with blacks and other minorities against the elite's systematic destruction of Franklin Roosevelt's &quot;New Deal&quot; social contract, which had placed a few mild restraints on the worst excesses of corporate greed.
 Reagan, a long-time shill for corporate sugar-daddies, was a master at playing the race-card game on their behalf. Of course, he couldn't actually come out and say, &quot;We're gonna put these darkies back in their place.&quot; But he didn't have to. Instead, he chose to stage the symbolic kick-off of his campaign in the symbolic city of Philadelphia, where - to make his intent unmistakably clear - he declared in the symbolic language of race-hatred: &quot;I believe in states' rights.&quot; This was a great communication indeed: Reagan carried every Southern state but one - against a Southerner, the tepid New Dealer, Jimmy Carter.
 Once in power, Reagan slashed civil rights protections and supported the use of public money for private &quot;religious&quot; colleges that discriminated against blacks. He decimated housing, health, education and economic development programs for the poor. He helped flood the nation's ghettos with cheap cocaine through his criminal Iran-Contra scam, where the CIA countenanced - and sometimes facilitated - drug-running by the Central American ganglords that Reagan employed to funnel illegal arms to his terrorist Contra army in Nicaragua - as the CIA itself admitted in 1998, Consortiumnews.com reports.
 Reagan then championed draconian drug laws and &quot;mandatory sentencing&quot; rules that transformed the American justice system into a vast gulag-state that imprisons more people than any nation on earth. When Reagan took office, there were approximately 300,000 people in prison; when he left, the figure was 800,000. Now, under his ideological soulmate, George W. Bush, the number has topped 2 million, Reuters reports. Incredibly, one in every 75 American men is now incarcerated; 68 percent of these are racial minorities. 
 But we don't mean to imply that Reagan was personally a racist. No, his toxic legacy shadows every race, creed, color and nationality. His crimeful enterprises at home and abroad set the stage for today's lawless, murderous Bush-bin Laden world.
 In Afghanistan, Reagan armed and trained hordes of Islamic extremists in terror tactics, and schooled their children in unrelenting hatred of infidels. In fact, the Taliban adopted the U.S.-written jihadi textbooks as their own; al Qaida's supporters in Pakistan are still using them today. Osama bin Laden was a prime beneficiary of Reagan's unholy Afghan alliance with the sinister intelligence services of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Communist China, MSNBC reports. Reagan also coddled Saddam Hussein, helped him coordinate chemical weapon attacks on Iran - even approved the sale of anthrax and other poisons to Iraq, the Buffalo News reports.
 Reagan willingly abetted the murder of countless thousands of innocent people throughout Central America, killed at the hands of U.S.-trained death squads and military units - more than 200,000 civilians were murdered in Guatemala alone, Consortiumnews.com reports. Many more were tortured and raped by U.S. proxies - all this with the connivance of Reagan officials, who lied to Congress about the atrocities. One of these liars, Elliot Abrams, was convicted of perjury; but pardoned by George Bush I, he now directs the Middle East policy for George Bush II.
 In 1980, candidate Reagan and his running mate Bush I committed treason by bargaining with Iran's extremist mullahs to prevent the release of American hostages before the election: a dirty deal confirmed by ex-Russian Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin's probe of Kremlin intelligence files (at the request of the U.S. Congress), and by several direct participants in the covert op - but ultimately whitewashed by timorous Congressional investigators, Consortiumnews.com reports.
 Finally, Reagan brought the ruthless Bush family into the center of world power. For generations, this ambitious clan has used war, weapons, oil and espionage to advance its senseless quest for more loot, more leverage, more privilege - just <i>more.</i> Reagan armed them with the full might and authority of the U.S. government to work their greedy will on the entire planet.
 Yes, as the laudatory headlines noted incessantly last week, Reagan indeed changed the world. It's a harsher, uglier, more unjust, more violent, more ignorant and fear-ridden place because of his leadership. God save us from any more communicators this &quot;great.&quot;
 
 <i>
For annotational references, see the Opinion section at www.sptimesrussia.com </i>

TITLE: Bomb Rocks Baghdad Center
AUTHOR: By Robert H. Reid

PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAGHDAD - A car bomb exploded at rush hour Monday along one of central Baghdad's most heavily trafficked streets, killing at least 12 people. Witnesses said three civilian sport utility vehicles - the kind favored by Western contractors - passed by as the blast occurred.
 
The attack came a day after another car bomb killed a dozen people near a U.S. garrison in Baghdad and gunmen assassinated a senior Education Ministry official
 All three of the SUVs were damaged, and one could be seen burning. Also, a two-story house was heavily damaged. At least one charred body was removed from the rubble.
 Terrified bystanders dragged bloodied bodies and crammed them on the back of pickup trucks to rush them to hospitals.
 Much of their anger was directed at Americans. Crowds shouted &quot;Allahu Akbar,&quot; or &quot;God is Great,&quot; and &quot;Down with the U.S.A.&quot;
 After trying in vain to restrain the crowd, American troops and police began leaving the area. The crowd, meanwhile, poured kerosene into a car and set it on fire.
 A second member of the new Iraqi government was assassinated Sunday. Kamal al-Jarah, 63, the education ministry official in charge of contacts with foreign governments and the United Nations, was fatally shot outside his home in the city's Ghazaliya district, a predominantly Sunni Muslim neighborhood where support for Saddam Hussein had been strong.
 Al-Jarah's death occurred one day after Iraq's deputy foreign minister, Bassam Salih Kubba, was mortally wounded in another Sunni neighborhood while driving to work. The foreign ministry blamed Saddam loyalists for the killing.
 Two other top Iraqi officials narrowly escaped death over the weekend in what appears to be a campaign to target key figures in the new Iraqi administration as it prepares to take power June 30.
 &quot;These assassinations are an attempt to stop the march of Iraq toward complete sovereignty,&quot; industry minister Hakim al-Hasni told Al-Arabiya television. &quot;They are not a resistance because they are resisting their own people. They are killing the highly qualified people. What kind of a resistance is this?&quot;
 Rather than going after top government figures who are well protected, the insurgents appear to be targeting middle and upper level officials who lack adequate security.
 In Washington, Secretary of State Colin Powell said U.S. forces would do &quot;everything we can to try to defeat these murderers.&quot; However, Powell told Fox News that &quot;it's hard to protect an entire government.&quot;

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Civil War Widow Dies
 </b>

ELBA, Alabama (AP) - The last widow of a Civil War veteran was buried Sunday in an 1860s-style ceremony complete with war re-enactors.
 Alberta Martin, 97, died May 31, nearly 140 years after the Civil War ended. She was a 21-year-old widow with a young child when she met and married 81-year-old Confederate veteran William Jasper Martin in 1927.
 William Martin died in 1932 after having one child with his wife. Two months later, Alberta Martin married her late husband's grandson, Charlie Martin, who died in 1983.
 She lived in obscurity and poverty most of her life until members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans learned about her past in 1996. They started taking her to conventions and turned her into the belle of Civil War history buffs.
 
 
<b>Iraq To Impose Visas
 </b>

BAGHDAD (AP) - Iraq will impose visa restrictions as part of its campaign to bolster internal security after the country regains its sovereignty at the end of this month, the interior minister said Sunday.
 Falah Hassan al-Naqib said foreigners will be admitted on 15-day tourist visas that can be extended to one month.
 Long-term foreign residents can obtain permits to stay here for up to five years, and diplomats and official delegations will get special visas.
 Iraq maintained a strict visa policy during the rule of Saddam Hussein. After Saddam's ouster, most nationalities could enter the country indefinitely after presenting a passport at the border.
 
 
<b>Sharon Charges Dropped
 </b>

JERUSALEM (AP) - Israel's attorney-general has decided not to indict Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on bribery charges, Israeli television said on Sunday, signaling the end of a scandal overshadowing his landmark Gaza pullback plan.
 The bribery case centers on payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars that an Israeli land developer was said to have made to Sharon's son Gilad, hired in the late 1990s as an adviser on a never-completed project to build a Greek resort.
 The developer, David Appel, was indicted in January on charges of trying to bribe Sharon. Israel's chief prosecutor has officially recommended indicting the prime minister as well.
 Sharon also faces probes in two other corruption scandals.
 
 
<b>Suicide Over Dumplings
 </b>

SEOUL (AP) - The head of a South Korean food company jumped to his death after a government investigation found that his company sold dumplings made with rotten ingredients, police said Monday.
 A witness said he saw the man jump from a bridge in Seoul's Han River on Sunday, a police official said. Police have yet to find the body but found his identification card and a recently written will.
 Last week, South Korea's Food and Drug Administration announced that at least 12 companies had been using rotten radishes in their frozen dumplings and ordered the dumplings pulled off the shelves.
 The government has confiscated 20 tons of what the local press dubbed "garbage dumplings."
 In his will, Shin said that he faced economic difficulties with creditors following the dumpling scandal, the Yonhap news agency said. He wrote his dumplings were harmless to people. 



TITLE: EU Voters Signal Disconent With Status Quo
AUTHOR: By Robert Barr

PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: LONDON - European voters punished leaders in Britain, Italy and the Netherlands for getting involved in Iraq and turned their ire on the war's chief opponents in Germany and France over economic and social issues, projections showed Sunday.
 
The 25-nation vote, spread out over four days, also revealed anxieties about the newly expanded European Union itself with a surprisingly dismal turnout.
 Among the few that did well were Spain's Socialists, who recently withdrew troops from Iraq after a backlash over a March 11 terrorist attack. The Socialists - surprise victors in elections after the bombings - won new legitimacy by emerging on top in the European parliamentary vote as well.
 The continent-wide democratic exercise, which ended with 19 countries voting on Sunday, came at a crucial time in the development of the European Union. The bloc added 10 members in May, largely from Eastern Europe, and leaders hope to agree on a new constitution later this month.
 But turnout was a record low of 44.2 percent and the eight new members from the former Soviet bloc showed particularly little appetite for the vote.
 Preliminary results showed turnout among the newcomers was a mere 28.7 percent, despite enthusiastic showings of 82 percent and 71 percent respectively in new members Malta and Cyprus.
 Across Europe, the outcome highlighted anxieties about the expanding union, with anti-EU parties projected to do well in Britain, Sweden, and even the Czech Republic and Poland, former communist nations participating in their first EU-wide vote.
 &quot;Europe looks distant to us here,&quot; 24-year-old streetsweeper Gorka Esparza said in downtown Madrid.
 Overall, center-right parties won, taking between 247 and 277 seats in the 732-member European Parliament, according to preliminary projections. The center-left group, which includes lawmakers from British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour Party and Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats, finished second - with an expected 189 to 209 seats.
 Blair's Labour Party also came in third in local elections held simultaneously Thursday in England and Wales. The results were widely perceived in Britain as a rebuke for Blair's increasingly unpopular support for President Bush over Iraq. Some party officials said they feared they might lose the next national election, expected next year.
 The European Parliament cannot introduce legislation, but its powers have strengthened dramatically since its first elections in 1979. It has EU budget approval and influence over legislation on trade, environment and consumer affairs. Legislators shuttle between sessions in Strasbourg, France, and Brussels, Belgium.
 New Socialist Prime Minister of Spain Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero sought a strong result to dispel the impression that he won power on more than a protest vote. He got a narrow win - 43.3 percent compared to 41.3 percent for the opposition Popular Party.
 Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, the country's largest, was projected to get 20.5 percent of the vote, down from 25.2 percent in the previous European election in 1999, according to a poll for RAI state TV. However, three government coalition parties confirmed or improved their performance.
 Berlusconi sent 3,000 Italian troops to help in rebuilding Iraq, though most Italians had opposed the war.
 But in Germany and France, leaders who opposed the war nevertheless took a beating over local issues.
 Schroeder's Social Democrats saw their share of the German vote fall to 21.5 percent compared to 30.7 percent five years ago, their worst performance since World War II. The opposition Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, took 44.5 percent the vote.
 Schroeder's popularity has waned over unemployment that has passed 10 percent and his drive to trim social programs.
 In France, Chirac's conservative Union for a Popular Movement, with about 16.5 percent of the vote, finished far behind the Socialist Party, which garnered 30 percent, according to the Sofres polling firm.
 Polls indicated many voters were angry about Chirac's reforms of pensions and other social programs.

TITLE: Officials Want to Oust Bush
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - Angered by Bush administration policies they contend endanger national security, 26 retired U.S. diplomats and military officers are urging Americans to vote President Bush out of office in November.
 
The group, which calls itself Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, does not explicitly endorse Democrat John Kerry for president in its campaign, which will start officially Wednesday at a Washington news conference.
 Among the group are 20 ambassadors, appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents, other former State Department officials and military leaders whose careers span three decades.
 &quot;We agreed that we had just lost confidence in the ability of the Bush administration to advocate for American interests or to provide the kind of leadership that we think is essential,&quot; said William C. Harrop, the first President Bush's ambassador to Israel, and earlier to four African countries.
 &quot;The group does not endorse Kerry, although it more or less goes without saying in the statement,&quot; Harrop said Sunday in a telephone interview.
 The former ambassador said diplomats and military officials normally avoid making political statements, especially in an election year.
 &quot;Some of us are not that comfortable with it, but we just feel very strongly that the country needs new leadership,&quot; Harrop said.
 He said the group was disillusioned by Bush's handling of the war in Iraq and a list of other subjects, including the Middle East, environmental conservation, AIDS policy, ethnic and religious conflict and weapons proliferation.

TITLE: Pakistan Arrests Terror Suspects Over Weekend
AUTHOR: By Sadaqat Jan

PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistani authorities have arrested 10 suspected al-Qaida members, including a nephew of detained terror mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who has been in U.S. custody the past year, the interior minister said Sunday.
 
The men were arrested over the weekend in separate raids in the southern port city of Karachi, Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat said.
 Among them was Masrab Arochi, a nephew of former al-Qaida No. 3 Mohammed, who was captured in March 2003 in a city near the Pakistani capital. Arochi had a $1 million bounty on his head, Hayat said, and is believed to have been behind several attacks in Pakistan.
 &quot;It is a major breakthrough,&quot; Hayat said. &quot;We have made a big dent in the al-Qaida network.&quot;
 The interior minister said among those taken in were eight Central Asians who confessed to a Thursday attempt to assassinate Lietenant General Ahsan Saleem Hayat, the corps commander of Karachi. The general was unharmed, but 10 others died in the attack.
 &quot;They have confessed to a key role in the attack,&quot; said the interior minister, Hayat. &quot;They have a direct link to al-Qaida.&quot;
 A tenth suspect arrested in the past 24 hours was identified as the mastermind of two sectarian attacks in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta in the past few months that left scores dead. Hayat did not reveal his name.
 Hayat said the eight Central Asian men had all trained at al-Qaida camps in South Waziristan, a tribal region near the Afghan border that is believed to be a possible hideout for top al-Qaida figures Osama bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri and others.
 Hayat also said the group had been involved in two recent bombings at Shiite mosques in Karachi, and that their leader, identified by the single name Attaullah, was among the eight detained.
 The Pakistani military has been engaged in four days of fierce fighting in the area that has left more than 50 suspected militants and 17 security forces dead.
 Major General Shaukat Sultan, the chief army spokesman, said earlier Sunday that operations were winding down and that the army and paramilitary troops &quot;successfully dismantled and destroyed&quot; militant hideouts in the offensive.
 Pakistan is a key Washington ally in the war on terror, and has handed over more than 500 al-Qaida suspects to the Americans since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States. The decision to side with Washington has led to anger among many of Pakistan's own Islamic militant leader, but Hayat vowed more of the same.
 &quot;Our campaign against terrorism will go on with the same conviction and intensity until they are completely eliminated,&quot; he said.
 Mohammed, who is being held in U.S. custody at an undisclosed location outside Pakistan, has family ties to at least one other major terrorist, convicted 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef. Yousef is serving a life sentence in the United States. 


TITLE: Bush Sr. Marks B-Day with Sky Dive
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: COLLEGE STATION, Texas - Former President George H.W. Bush celebrated his 80th birthday with a 13,000-foot parachute jump over his presidential library Sunday, and said he felt the same thrill of prior jumps even though his hopes of skydiving solo were dashed.
 
He made a tandem jump - harnessed to a member of an Army's Golden Knights parachute team - after officials decided the wind conditions and low clouds made it too dangerous for the 41st president to jump alone, which he did when he turned 75.
 &quot;This was a real thrill for me,&quot; said Bush, wearing a black-and-gold jumpsuit. &quot;I felt no fear... for me to get a chance to jump with the Golden Knights is a dream.&quot;
 With Staff Sergeant Bryan Schnell on his back and a black-and-gold parachute ballooning above them, the former president waved his arms to some 4,000 spectators as he neared the drop zone - a painted logo of &quot;41 at 80&quot; in the center of a football-field-sized area on the grounds of his presidential library at Texas A&amp;M University.
 The crowd included his wife, Barbara, his son Florida Governor Jeb Bush and former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev - whom the former president had invited to jump with him.
 &quot;Afraid,&quot; Gorbachev said through an interpreter, explaining why he didn't accept the offer. &quot;Maybe on his 90th birthday.... For me, it would be a first. At my age, that may kill me.&quot;
 Gorbachev gave Bush flowers and a bottle of vodka.
 The jump, Bush's fifth, earned him parachutist's wings that were pinned on him after he landed. The wings include a small bronze star, indicating he'd made a combat jump in a hostile area.
 Bush made his first parachute jump as a 20-year-old Navy pilot shot down over the Pacific during World War II. In 1992, he bailed out over Yuma, Arizona, fulfilling a wartime promise he made to himself that some day he'd jump from a plane for fun.

TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: <b>Pistons Lead Lakers
 </b>

AUBURN HILLS, United States (AFP) - Rasheed Wallace had 26 points and 13 rebounds as Detroit beat Los Angeles 88-80 despite an enormous effort from Lakers giant centre Shaquille O'Neal, who scored 36 points.
 The win gives Detroit a 3-1 series lead and puts them on the verge of their first NBA title in 15 years. 
 "I was just making shots tonight. Simple basketball," said Wallace who also stayed out of foul trouble which has plagued him this series.
 The Pistons couldn't afford to squander their series lead as they played with a special sense of urgency in the fourth quarter, outscoring the Lakers 32-24.
 Detroit could wrap up the series with a win in game five on Tuesday at home.
 
 
<b>All Blacks Beat England
 </b>

DUNEDIN, New Zealand (Reuters) - New Zealand, their forwards rampant and their three-quarters in overdrive, have crushed England's world champions 36-3 in the first test. 
 They produced a stunning first-half performance on Saturday, running their opponents ragged from the opening exchanges and scoring three tries without reply. 
 The contest was over by the break at 30-3, with scintillating wingers Joe Rokocoko and Doug Howlett touching down as well as flyhalf Carlos Spencer after expansive, high-speed back moves. 
 Centre Daniel Carter kicked five penalties and three conversions in an immaculate display for 21 points. 
 "We found it hard to stop them and we fell off so many one-on-one tackles," said England coach Clive Woodward. "But it's happened and we get another game next week to get it right." 
 
 
<b>Shumi's Seventh Heaven
 </b>

MONTREAL (Reuters) - Ferrari's Michael Schumacher won the Canadian Grand Prix to write yet another page in the Formula One record book as the first driver to win the same race seven times. 
 While the world champion punched back from his lowest starting position of the year to win for the seventh time in eight races on Sunday, Ferrari were handed a one-two when Ralf Schumacher's Williams was disqualified. 
 Brazilian Rubens Barrichello, Schumacher's Ferrari team mate, moved up to second place with Briton Jenson Button inheriting third for BAR. It was the German's 77th career victory and third in a row at the Gilles Villeneuve circuit. 
 Both Williams and Toyota failed a post race technical inspection for using oversized brake ducts on their cars. 
 
 
<b>Navratilova Rethinks
 </b>

LONDON (AFP) - Nine-times Wimbledon champion Martina Nav-ratilova may not take part in the singles at the All England Club next week after failing to qualify for a warm-up tournament at Eastbourne .
 "The body is not working as well as it used to," admitted the 47-year-old who was given a wildcard into the main draw of the singles, ten years after her last appearance at Wimbledon.
 "I need to decide whether I'll take that wild card at Wimbledon or not. I've asked for it but I'll have to see," said Navratilova who has won the title 11 times since making her debut in 1974.
 On Sunday, she lost in the second qualifying round 6-4, 6-2 to Russian 29-year-old Yelena Likhovtseva.