Plus I doubt the new tax has anything to do with trying to convince people not to drink Vodka because of there health but everything to do with raising funds.

Well time to go. Later

As minister of economy I ought to answer to this Q of 40% on vodka.

Everybody will start drinking samagon or home made vodka only and the state will see oficial sales plunging along with alcohol tax revenues.

It's precedented,It will not work.

Gonz..exellent point on the taxation right(!) before the Elections. That might seem like a deadly mistake.....in America. However Russia is a very surcumstantional place. On top of everything, his analysts might've predicted an easy victory anyways, so Putin might just care less..but these are just my clueless guesses - this is too fresh of a news to give predictions.

Good night, my friends.

Good night, Suleyman,
I am out too.

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/p/ap/20000214/wl/pakistan_russia_chechnya.html

PAKISTAN JUST DON'T GET IT. I CAN'T WAIT TO HEAR THEIR EXCUSE THIS TIME.

FRED --- ONLY 17 "HOSTAGES" WANT TO GO BACK TO AFGHANISTAN. THE REST WERE FORCED BY BRITISH AUTHORITIES. NOBODY WANTS "MUJAHIDEEN" IN THEIR COUNTRIES.

http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/9938/object.html

SOMETHING I STUMBLED UPON. I GUESS IT'S FOR "TURK" AND "TURK FROM ANKORA".

The Times

February 14 2000

Putin lines up old KGB pals to run Kremlin

FROM GILES WHITTELL IN MOSCOW

WHEN the deadline for registration expired last night, Vladimir Putin
was one of 14 candidates to have announced their candidacy to be
Russia's President. So confident is Mr Putin of victory in next month's
election that he has already hired from his native St Petersburg a cadre
of advisers who could mould Russian politics for the next decade.

Meet the "Putinburgers" - or, as some are brave enough to call them, the
St Petersburg mafia. They include friends of the acting President,
though he has admitted he has few of them. Some of the Putinburgers are
national figures but most are virtual unknowns. They represent no single
ideology, but what they do have in common, one expert said yesterday, is
that "in a country where mutual mistrust is the norm, Mr Putin trusts
them".

Six weeks before the presidential election, 17 key posts in the Kremlin,
including two Deputy Prime Ministers and the head and deputy head of the
Federal Security Service (or FSB), are already filled by figures who
rose through the St Petersburg regional government when Mr Putin was the
city's deputy mayor in the early 1990s.

For some, the acquaintance goes back further. Nikolai Patrushev, like Mr
Putin, joined the KGB in what was then Leningrad in 1975. In August he
was put in charge of the KGB's successor, the FSB, apparently at Mr
Putin's insistence as he was leaving the job to become Prime Minister.

Another former Leningrad KGB officer, Viktor Cherkessov, is now the
FSB's second-in-command, while yet another, Viktor Ivanov, controls all
personnel matters in the Kremlin. Mr Patrushev and Mr Ivanov are
no friends of liberals in or outside Russia. In a chilly echo of Soviet
times, they have told FSB personnel that "foreign organisations and
missions" may be trying to influence the coming election. Mr Patrushev
is notorious for describing as a "police training exercise" a big bomb
scare in Ryazan last year, soon after the blasts in Moscow and elsewhere
that helped to trigger the Chechen war.

These and others in the Putin entourage are widely feared as possible
instruments of a return to authoritarianism after the election. However,
the Putinburgers also include well-known reformers. Foremost among these
is German Gref, a 36-year-old economist brought to the Kremlin by
Anatoli Chubais, the architect of Russia's early privatisations, and
kept on in two high-profile roles by Mr Putin.

Mr Gref had risen to become a Deputy Privatisation Minister when Mr
Putin took on the acting presidency. He is now also head of the Centre
for Strategic Research, a Putin think-tank which has the daunting task
of drawing up a plan for Russian economic revival within two months. Mr
Gref has so far offered hope for both Russia's poor and the West's
potential lenders. "Without doubt we will follow a liberal model of
development," he told journalists last month, "but that model will
preserve a wide sphere of state regulation." Hinting at a paternalistic
state on German or Swedish lines, Mr Gref promised "a wider social
safety net to make up for the shock that many felt when decades of state
care were swept away".

Whether Mr Putin will use such plans remains unclear. "He is using the
St Petersburg people first of all because he knows them," Fyodor
Gabrilov, a St Petersburg columnist, said yesterday. "But they are not
of one voice and they may not last long; he is likely to play them off
against each other as Yeltsin did. At best, he will use the
intelligentsia for ideas and the ex-KGB men to put them into practice."

St Petersburg languished for much of the 1990s as Russia's capital of
organised crime, its liberal elite largely corrupted or sidelined. Hopes
that it can inject new reformist zeal into the Kremlin seem unrealistic,
and Mr Putin has yet to declare war on corruption. But the new blood
could hardly be worse than the old. As he said last week, in Moscow
"everything has been in place for years . . . Sometimes it's useful to
break the chains".

Moscow's new leaders have historically brought with them waves of
appointees. Boris Yeltsin's rise was marked by an influx of former
colleagues from Yekaterinburg, and Stalin lavished his patronage on
fellow Georgians.

The results are not always malign. Mr Gavrilov noted yesterday that, as
a seat of learning and a forcing house for European-leaning
administrators, St Petersburg could provide Russia with a new generation
of able technocrats as the Baltic states did for Tsarist Russia in the
19th century.

The billionaire "oligarchs" blamed for Russia's stagnation are unlikely
to be affected. Mr Putin has promised not to investigate the
privatisations that enriched them.

Ibn 'Umar ( - 152.163.207.191)

Are you a atheist, jews or pagans?

SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE:
http://www.marblefalls.net/ferrari/index.htm

canadianbacon:
you really got nothing better to post than your moronic, misogynistic anti-semitism? how lame can you get? or, more to the point, how completely INCONSEQUENTIAL can you get?
====

konbanwa, k-san!
the greetings of the moon for you....HOO HAH!
lolololol

THE OTHERE SIDE OF NEWS: FOR ALL INVOLVED.
http://www.qoqaz.net/