RUSSIANS DUCK RESPONSIBILITY FOR MASSIVE OIL SPILL

An oil spill seven times the size of the Valdez disaster has sent as many as 80 million gallons of crude gushing into rivers and permafrost in northern Russia -- and some of that may be flowing toward the Arctic Ocean. While Russian bureaucrats bicker over the scale of the disaster and say there haven't been ecological assessments, they're also postponing cleaning it up until the warmer spring. The spill occurred 1000 miles northeast of Moscow after a dam containing oil from a broken pipeline collapsed in heavy rains earlier this month. While the crisis was dismissed because few people live in the remote region, Russian officials are struggling to get their stories straight, according to TIME Moscow correspondent Yuri Zarakhovich. "The Ministry of Ecology says there is damage; the Minister of Fuel and Energy says there is no damage," he says. "It depends on the vested interest of the ministry ... Still there's no question that there has to be ecological damage -- given the size of the