LOCAL NEWS

PUTIN LIKELY TO PITCH FOR RE-ELECTION

MOSCOW - With 10 months to go before he stands for re-election, President Vladimir Putin has a chance to plead his case, tout his achievements and convince the country that the stability it has enjoyed for the past three years will not deteriorate into stagnation.

POWELL'S VISIT EASES TENSIONS OVER IRAQ

MOSCOW - U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell rounded off a Moscow visit that appeared to help smooth over ruffled relations between Russia and the United States with a hint that the new Iraqi government that Washington will help appoint would pay off up to $8 billion in debts to Russia after all.

KONSTANTINOVSKY FENCE KEEPS RESIDENTS HIDDEN

One day at the end of April, Alexandra Laar, a 62-year old resident of Strelna, a town located 10 kilometers southwest of St. Petersburg, saw workers installing a tall wooden fence in front of her house, blocking the view to her neighbors on the other side of Volkhonskoye Shosse.

ATTACKS IN CHECHNYA SHOWING NEW TRENDS

MOSCOW - Chechen suicide bombings killing at least 75 people this week highlight a new pattern in rebel warfare that will be next to impossible for Moscow to prevent, terrorism and Chechnya analysts said Thursday.

NATIONAL NEWS

AUDIT CHAMBER SLAMS ELECTIONS

The St. Petersburg Audit Chamber on Monday completed its investigation of December's Legislative Assembly elections, finding widespread election-law violations, the most serious a 10-million-ruble (about $322,500) embezzlement involving local television channel TRK Peterburg and three city vice governors.

DHL TO HELP WITH U.S. VISA PROCEDURE

The United States Consulate in St. Petersburg announced changes in its visa policy on Thursday, putting international courier-services company DHL in charge of much of the application process.

COURT LIFTS BAN ON SCARVES FOR MUSLIM WOMEN ON ID CARDS

MOSCOW - The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that Muslim women can wear headscarves in ID photographs, overturning a police ban that hundreds of women in predominately Muslim regions have refused to comply with.

The court's appeal board upheld a suit filed in January by 10 Muslim women from the town of Nizhnekamsk, Tatarstan, challenging a 1997 Interior Ministry directive prohibiting head coverings in ID photos.

IN BRIEF

Amber Room Ready

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The restoration of the legendary Amber Room in the Catherine Palace in the St. Petersburg suburb of Pushkin was officially pronounced completed on Tuesday, after 25 years of work.

LOCAL BUSINESS

MOSCOW TO CUT INTO CITY'S BREAD BUSINESS

Recent weeks have seen the St. Petersburg bread business going through a process of drastic change. Two major bakeries, Petrokhleb and the Kirov Leningrad Bakery, were recently acquired by Moscow-based agricultural holdings, Agros and OGO, respectively, while the Finnish company Fazer plans to increase its stake in the Khlebny Dom bakery to as much as 90 percent in the near future.

IKEA TO STEP UP LOCAL PRODUCTION

Swedish furniture giant IKEA has announced that it will build three wood-processing plants in Karelia, at a total cost of $25 million.

The projects include a timber plant in Kalevala district, a furniture-component plant in the town of Kostomuksha and a furniture plant in Petrozavodsk.

OPINION

EU EXPANSION HIGHLIGHTS TENSIONS WITH U.S.

SLOWLY but surely, the peoples of 10 new member states are voting to join the European Union. On the weekend, Lithuania became the fourth to hold a referendum. An overwhelming majority - 91 percent of those who turned out - said yes to membership.

Some might say that is perfectly predictable.

SACRIFICING HARES TO KEEP ECONOMIC ENVIRONMENT GREEN

FOR the first time in my life, on April 30, I paid a bribe to an official. The background to this momentous occasion was a short trip I was taking to visit a friend in Poland during the annual May string of holidays.

CULTURE

CARRYING THE ELECTRONICA CAN

German experimental musican Holgar Czukay, a founding member of seminal Krautrock band Can, returns to St. Petersburg to play a solo concert this weekend.

The musical innovator is portrayed on his Web site as a medieval alchemist and, speaking by telephone from his home in Cologne, Germany, Czukay readily provided an explanation.

"An alchemist is someone who makes gold out of rubbish," he said.

CURTAIN TO RISE ON CHAMBER OPERA

After sixteen years of a wandering lifestyle, local chamber-opera company St. Petersburg Opera is finally ready to settle down.

The company's new home is an enviable 19th-century mansion at 33 Galernaya Ulitsa that boasts gorgeous interiors and a rich theatrical history.

CHERNOV'S CHOICE

Despite conflicting news from different sources, including the BBC, Paul McCartney will not play in St. Petersburg, according to Anthea Eno and Seva Gakkel, officially appointed by McCartney's management to look after a charity event during the former Beatle's visit to the city next week.

SOMETHING NEW FROM DEJA VU

I admit that I've seen the movie "The Matrix" more times than your average former engineer (which is saying a lot). But a reappearing black cat, indicating a case of deja vu in the movie, yesterday's U.

ACCORDING TO A DOSTOYEVSKY FAN

St. Petersburg, Russia's literary capital, has inspired or been the setting for an enormous number of novels by Russian writers. With the release this week of "Metro Stop Dostoevsky," by long-term St. Petersburg resident Ingrid Bengis, the literary canon now has a contemporary novel exploring the city from the perspective of an "outsider" - although this label may not be entirely accurate.

THE WORD'S WORTH

Pervomai: May Day, Labor Day.

Dvoyeveriye (dual beliefs, dual belief system) is a particularly apt concept in times of change like now: Old rituals and beliefs get mated with the new, and you have a lovely hybrid that satisfies everyone and no one.

EXAMINING A CITY'S ANATOMY

Nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich Heine's line that "Zu fragmentarisch ist Welt und Leben" ("The world and life are too fragmentary") could be taken as a motto for the photography. Some of Heine's "fragmentation" appears in the form of a paraphrase of Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in the title of the photographic exhibition "Streets. Faces. Years. Houses.

PLAYING WITH PERSONAL HISTORY

Roman Polanski's new movie, "The Pianist," is based on the memoirs of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a star of Polish radio and cafe society in the 1930's and a member of Warsaw's assimilated Jewish middle class, who lived through the Nazi occupation and the Warsaw ghetto.