Ukraine

MOSCOW -- During a bitter political standoff, Ukraine's President Viktor A. Yushchenko issued a decree yesterday transferring control of Interior Ministry troops into his own hands and away from a minister loyal to his longtime rival, Prime Minister Viktor F. Yanukovich. The prime minister said the president's action was unconstitutional. Parliament, which is controlled by the prime minister's allies, passed a resolution declaring the decree legally void. It appeared, however, that Yushchenko had succeeded in firming up his authority over security forces, because the direct commander of the Interior Ministry troops, Gen. Oleksandr Kikhtenko, is considered his ally.

KIEV, Ukraine -- Ukrainian voters repudiated a return to the communist past yesterday, propelling pro-democratic President Leonid Kuchma toward a second five-year term over Communist challenger Petro Symonenko, according to exit polls.Voter surveys from Ukraine's third presidential election since the Soviet Union disintegrated eight years ago showed the 61-year-old president with more than 58 percent of the vote, compared with 36 percent for Symonenko, Ukraine's Communist Party leader. Final results weren't expected until today.

Arthur Raymond, whose aircraft designs ushered in an era of global air travel, died Monday in Santa Monica, Calif. He would have turned 100 Wednesday. He was largely responsible for the design of Douglas Aircraft's DC-3, which was the world's most popular plane for more than two decades.Viacheslav Chornovil, 61, one of Ukraine's most prominent politicians and a former Soviet political prisoner, died Thursday in an automobile accident near Kiev. He was the longtime leader of the opposition Popular Rukh movement and a key figure in Ukraine's fight for independence from the Soviet Union.

MOSCOW -- Russia started late, hasn't done enough, and won't get it done before New Year's Day, so it seems that the world's largest country is going to discover how serious a problem Y2K can be.Russia is so immense -- it has 11 time zones -- that the first anxiously awaited moments of 2000 will take almost a half-day to roll across the country.It probably won't mean planes falling out of the sky or trains running backward, and almost no one expects a glitch to cause the launching of nuclear missiles.

In the two decades since they fled anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union for a new life in metropolitan Baltimore, Semyon and Janna Friedman have prospered -- with a lot of help from their friends.Now, the Friedmans want to say thanks. Today, 20 years to the day after their plane touched down at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, they will throw a party for those who helped them adjust and thrive.It is their way of saying: We never could have done it without you."Twenty years pass, and we did what we wanted to do, with a lot of attention from our friends," said Janna (pronounced Zhanna)

WITH A MIXTURE of horror and fascination, several former Soviet republics have been watching as Western Europe's twin pushes toward closer integration: through today's adoption of the euro common currency and through the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.Cut off from those efforts, Russia has launched a concentrated drive toward ``reinforcing the brotherhood of Slav peoples,'' as Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov put it. Recently, this effort has produced two important symbolic results: Moscow concluded a union pact with Belarus, which is in even worse economic shape than Russia.

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KIEV, Ukraine -- This is how Ukrainians take a taxi: They stand on the side of the road, arm outstretched, and wait for a car -- any car -- to stop. The two parties negotiate a price, unofficial, cheap and untaxed.Licensed taxis are few and expensive, so Ukrainians respond as they do to so many aspects of their lives in this post-Communist nation: The system does not work, so ignore it. The result? A huge underground economy, widespread corruption and a cynical, exasperated electorate on the eve of parliamentary elections tomorrow.

The Scythians were an ancient nomadic people who occupied present-day Ukraine north of the Black Sea. They prospered from the fifth to the third century B.C., and they made magnificent objects of gold -- jewelry, weapons, horse trappings and ceremonial objects.The Walters Art Gallery will announce today that in the spring of 2000, it will present "Scythian Gold: Treasures from Ancient Ukraine," an exhibit of 165 Scythian works, most of which have been discovered in recent years and never before seen in this country.

The abrupt departure on Tuesday of Ashurst Technology Ltd. founder and Chairman Benton H. Wilcoxon will help the company focus on becoming profitable by next year, a senior manager said yesterday.Did Wilcoxon leave voluntarily? "I've got no comment," said Executive Vice President Stephen Meldrum, who then reconsidered and added, "It was voluntary, though. I would say voluntary."Meldrum and other executives did not comment Tuesday when the sudden resignation was announced, but said yesterday that they had simply been too busy dealing with the situation to return phone calls.

Politics drove hiring at Justice, report says WASHINGTON: Ideological considerations permeated the hiring process at the Justice Department's civil rights division, where a politically appointed official sought to hire "real Americans" and Republicans for career posts and prominent case assignments, according to a long-awaited report released yesterday by the department's inspector general. The extensive study of hiring practices between 2001 and 2007 concluded that a former department official improperly weeded out candidates based on their perceived ties to liberal organizations.

Burris caught in limbo between Senate, court 4 CHICAGO: Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois said yesterday that Roland Burris should not be seated in the U.S. Senate because he has failed to get the Illinois secretary of state's signature on his appointment to replace President-elect Barack Obama. "There has never in the history of the Senate been a waiver of the requirement that the secretary of state's signature be part of the appointment process - never," Durbin, a Democrat, said hours after Illinois' top court ruled that no law requires Secretary of State Jesse White to sign the appointment, made by Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich.

MOSCOW - Shipments of Russian natural gas to Europe came to an abrupt halt yesterday in the middle of a winter cold spell. Russia accused neighboring Ukraine of shutting down pipelines that supply a fifth of the continent's gas, while Ukraine charged that Russia had halted all deliveries. The situation marked a sharp escalation of a politically charged fuel-price dispute that has renewed concern about Europe's dependence on Russian gas and Ukrainian pipelines. It followed a precipitous fall in shipments Tuesday, when more than a dozen countries reported a complete stop or major drops in supplies.

MOSCOW - Russia's natural gas monopoly drastically cut flows to Europe through Ukraine yesterday, sharpening fears of winter fuel shortages. Despite warnings from the European Union, a pricing dispute between Gazprom and Ukraine showed no signs of letting up. As the two sides traded accusations and blame, negotiations remained frozen for the sixth day. Bulgarian authorities said two-thirds of their natural gas supply had been cut off and consumption would...

MOSCOW - Fuel delivery to four European countries fell below normal yesterday as Russia's state gas monopoly withheld natural gas from neighboring Ukraine for the third consecutive day. Ukraine warned that its gas pipeline system could experience "serious disruptions" if a worsening price dispute isn't settled in 10 to 15 days, threatening shortfalls across Europe in the heart of winter. Flows of gas to Poland, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria, all of which depend on pipelines that cross Ukraine, decreased yesterday, officials said.

Gift-wrapped bombs force evacuation ASPEN, Colo. : A onetime resident of this city who had been bitter over its transformation into a playground for the rich left four gift-wrapped bombs downtown in a bank-robbery attempt, turning New Year's Eve celebrations into a mass evacuation, police said yesterday. The bombs were made of gasoline and cell phone parts and came with notes warning of "mass death." The 72-year-old man suspected of placing them in two banks and an alleyway on Wednesday shot himself a short time later, police said.

Next Sunday, with Ukraine's once-hopeful Orange Revolution in disarray, that wonderful but beleaguered country will hold a national parliament election that is shaping up to be another political storm - one where an ill wind blows through to steal the vote. The Bush administration, so focused on forcing change in Iraq, has turned its back on the survival of Ukraine's fragile new democracy. The United States must join Europe's leading democracies and closely watch the parliament, or Rada, election.

MOSCOW -- During a bitter political standoff, Ukraine's President Viktor A. Yushchenko issued a decree yesterday transferring control of Interior Ministry troops into his own hands and away from a minister loyal to his longtime rival, Prime Minister Viktor F. Yanukovich. The prime minister said the president's action was unconstitutional. Parliament, which is controlled by the prime minister's allies, passed a resolution declaring the decree legally void. It appeared, however, that Yushchenko had succeeded in firming up his authority over security forces, because the direct commander of the Interior Ministry troops, Gen. Oleksandr Kikhtenko, is considered his ally.

BO YIBO, 98 Leader in Tiananmen protests The last of the "Eight Immortals" who led China through economic reforms and the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests has died, an official news agency reported Tuesday. Hong Kong's Phoenix Satellite Television, which has close ties to Beijing, said Mr. Bo died Monday at a hospital in the Chinese capital. The father of China's commerce minister, he was a veteran of the 1949 communist revolution and a former vice premier. He was the last of the "Eight Immortals," the group of revolutionary veterans who included supreme leader Deng Xiaoping, and led China through the launch of economic reforms in 1979 and the upheaval of 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests.

MOSCOW -- Russia and Belarus traded bitter words yesterday in a dispute over natural gas prices that threatened to damage relations between the longtime allies and disrupt supplies to other European countries. The Russian state-controlled gas monopoly Gazprom reiterated a threat to cut off natural gas for Belarus on Monday if no agreement on price is reached by then, and it accused Belarus of planning to steal gas intended for European Union states by tapping into pipelines carrying Russian gas west.