LOCAL NEWS

GEORGIA ACTS ON RUSSIA 'REBELS' CLAIM

TBILISI, Georgia - Georgian troops patrolled a lawless region where Russia says Chechen rebels are based but came up empty-handed, while President Eduard Shevardnadze announced plans to visit the Pankisi Gorge and said that, before launching the sweep, his government warned militants they should leave.

"We had just one proposal for them: Leave the Pankisi Gorge as soon as possible, because we don't want bloodshed there," Shevardnadze said at a briefing. Later, his office said he would visit the region Tuesday to meet with residents and the Interior Ministry troops sent in Sunday to search for militants.

Georgian officials have not said how many Interior Ministry troops were sent into the Pankisi Gorge.

SHIPPING AWAY A GENERATION OF INTELLECTUALS

MOSCOW - On a quiet August day 80 years ago, Nikolai Berdyayev, perhaps Russia's best known philosopher, left his dacha in Barvikha where he had enjoyed his first comfortable summer since the Revolution five years earlier.

NATIONAL NEWS

IN BRIEF

Forest Fires and Fumes

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) More than 300 hectares of forest area and peat bog are currently on fire around St. Petersburg, Interfax reported on August 26.

As a result, many neighborhoods in St. Petersburg, including the center of the city, were covered in smoke on Monday.

There are 40 areas where the fire is concentrated, in the Tosno, Vyborg and Gatchina regions of the Leningrad Oblast.

LOCAL BUSINESS

VODKA-FUELED ROW ENDS IN BOMB THREAT

MOSCOW - A bomb threat at Kristall's headquarters in eastern Moscow on Friday temporarily ended a standoff between two rivals who both claim to be in charge of the country's largest vodka distillery.

An anonymous caller phoned in the threat about an hour after former Kristall director Alexander Romanov entered the grounds of the tsarist-era factory with several court marshals and a court order saying he is the rightful head of the company.

MOSCOW CAR SHOW IGNORED BY FOREIGNERS

MOSCOW - The country's biggest auto event became less of a global spectacle than a festival of all things Russian last week, as international carmakers shied away from the seventh annual Moscow International Motor Show.

Western Bank Consortium Grants Uralsib Loan of $33M

MOSCOW - A consortium of Western banks on Friday granted Bashkortostan-based Uralsib a one-year, $33-million loan - the largest unsecured, syndicated credit to a domestic bank since the 1998 crisis.

Interest on the loan is 3.5 percent above the London interbank offered rate, or LIBOR.

"Loans have been given on a very selective basis [since the crisis] to assure that funds are used in an appropriate way," said Martin Czhurda, head of the global financial institutions department at Austria's Raiffeisen Zentralbank, which led the consortium.

OPINION

CUTTING THROUGH THE RED TAPE

The process of state registration of legal entities in Russia underwent a major overhaul with the introduction of a new law which came into force on July 1, though questions concerning the registration of those with foreign participation were only really cleared up on July 25, when amendments, with the relevant provisions, were made to the aw "On Foreign Investments in the Russian Federation.

CORRUPTION CASUALTIES IN THE BATTLE FOR ILIM PULP

AT long last someone in this country has been uncovered trying to bribe a high-ranking bureaucrat. The person in question is Zakhar Smushkin, owner of pulp and paper conglomerate Ilim Pulp.

RUSSIAN CREATIVITY IN TALKING THE TALK TO MAKE THE MONEY

VOZDUSHKA: money not made through production, but through trading or other means, "money made out of air," "money made out of nothing."

ONE of the delights of the early post-Soviet period was the magical way some people made billions overnight.

THIS TIME, CHECHNYA IS NOT A WAR FOR WORDS

ON Aug. 16, Russian soldiers detained camera crews from ORT television and TV Center working in Chechnya and confiscated their cameras, microphones, personal belongings and press passes.

CONFESSION OF A RELIGIOUS TELEVISION VIEWER

"IT is in the lap of the gods." I am not a religious person, but watching television of late has disposed me toward fatalism and mysticism.

My contacts with the world of television are twofold.

First, I watch the news and, like everyone else, am shaken by the spectacle of technological disasters and cataclysms raining down on the world, from falling airplanes and train crashes to floods and hurricanes.

GLOBAL EYE

The Secret Sharers

This article is the second of two parts. The first part appeared in last Tuesday's The St. Petersburg Times.

Washington, 1975.

WORLD

Mbeki Opens UN Development Summit

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - The United Nations development and environmental summit opened Monday with a call for coordinated international action to fight poverty and protect the global environment.

"The peoples of the world expect that this world summit will live up to its promise of being a fitting culmination to a decade of hope," South African President Thabo Mbeki told delegates at the opening session of the World Summit on Sustainable Development.