Russian Pres to address Europe and Asia Media Forum.

MOSCOW, December 9 (Itar-Tass) - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is expected to address a Europe and Asia Media Forum that opens in Moscow Wednesday.

The two-day conference will bring together editors-in-chief of more
than a hundred media units from across the former USSR.
Representatives of the media community will exchange their outlooks of
what the mass media on the post-Soviet space are going to be like over the
short term and medium term.
Medvedev told a group of Belarussian journalists in Moscow two weeks
ago that the situation with the freedom of the press has seen obvious
improvements in this country.
"I don't think there's any regress in field of our mass media," he
said. "We're changing and our media are different now from the ones we had
in the 1990's."
Medvedev indicated that the deficit of material affluence witnessed in
the last decade of the 20th century was made up for by lavish political
debates.
He admitted that the media poured out more acute hard-boiled topics
back then but said: "This is a technique of governing: when meals are
scanty, you can always find a pressing topic to discuss, but when you aim
to work fruitfully, you must work."
"All the opposition figures in Russia have quite a few opportunities
to make their viewpoints known to the public at large," Medvedev said.
"If you take Internet, we have 50 million users, or about a half of
the country's adult population," he recalled. "Internet bustles with
information resources, including the opposition ones."
"That's why things with the freedom of mass media have improved here,"
Medvedev said.

.Ukraine to set up independent anti-corruption bureau.

KIEV, December 9 (Itar-Tass) - Ukraine plans setting up an independent
Anti-Corruption Bureau, Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko told a session of
the cabinet of ministers Tuesday.
"We should test all the algorithms for organizing the Anti-Corruption
Bureau, which won't be subordinate to anyone, because any struggle with
corruption is brought to a halt once you get /executive/ subordination,"
she said.
The new agency will have the power to investigate the cases of
corruption.
The cabinet of ministers is supposed to consider the regulations for
selecting and publishing the information on legal entities brought to
responsibility for corruption-related offenses, as well as the setting up
of a specialized unit for prevention of corrupt practices in the
ministries and departments.
Ukraine's Main Auditing and Inspecting Department has issued more than
6,500 acts testifying to the plundering of the state budget, yet only 769
criminal cases have been instituted and the majority of them "hasn't
reached even the neighborhood of courts," Timoshenko said.
This disqueting statistis proves that the level of corruption still
remains high in Ukraine, she said.

.Azerbaijani President to discuss energy projects in France.

PARIS, December 9 (Itar-Tass) - Exports of natural gas from Azerbaijan
to Europe and the possible ways of settling the dragged-out conflict in
the enclave region of Nagorny Karabakh are bound to dominate Wednesday's
talks between Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Azerbaijani President
Nicolas Sarkozy.
Along with Russia and the U.S., France co-chairs the so-called Minsk
group of the European security organization OSCE that steers negotiations
on settling the Karabakh problem as a multilateral mediator.
The list of other issues to be discussed by the two Presidents
includes Azerbaijan's integration in European agencies and development of
bilateral cooperation.
Well-informed sources say Aliyev, who is making an official visit to
France, is going to meet with the French Foreign Minister, the speakers of
both houses of French parliament and top-rank business executives
Wednesday.
This is Aliyev's fifth visit to Paris over the six years since his
election to the presidential office.

.Forum of gas exporting countries in Qatar to discuss prices.

LONDON, December 9 (Itar-Tass) - Stabilization of world prices is
going to be the highlight of discussions at the 9th forum of natural gas
exporting countries that opens in Qatar Wednesday.
Representatives of all the eleven member-states, including Russia,
will be attending.
The forum was founded in Teheran in 2001 and was formalized legally at
a conference in Moscow in December 2008.
Qatari Energy and Industry Minister Abdallar bin Hamad al-Atiyah said
Tuesday it is important to tap the ways of stabilization of the
international prices of gas.
He said appropriate discussions of the problem will be held and the
sides will try and figure out the steps that might be taken for it.
The minister believes that the prices of natural gas should include a
special markup, since gas is a pure energy resource.
A fast growth of production of liquefied natural gas /LNG/ in the past
few years has changed radically the structure of the world market of gas
and has made it more fluid and less predictable.
This has led to an excessive international supply of the fuel and a
fall of prices for it.
Current assessments indicate the tendency will likely remain unabated
over the next two years.
Experts in London's City say stabilization would meet the interests of
both producers and consumers in the current situation.
Well-informed sources have told Itar-Tass one of the ideas the Qatar
forum will dwell on is the sides' mutual informing on investment projects
and the dates of commissioning of new facilities.
They say the conditions will be created this way for forestalling
excessive supply on the international market.
Other sources indicate, in the meantime, that some participating
countries - Iran in the first place - seek to turn the forum into an
international organization of gas exporting countries.
Reports indicate that the Iranian government held consultations
Tuesday on electing the Secretary General of the potential association.
London-based experts say on this that if this turn of events prevails,
the forum will send a clear signal then that it plans to transform into a
'natural gas OPEC' of some kind.
-0-kle