Werner Muller, the Economics Minister, (pictured) called on the unions to temper wage claims.. PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON was not alone late last year when he first characterised the economic turmoil in Asia as “a few small glitches in the road”. “Exports will weaken dramatically,” Karl Heinrich Oppenlander, president of the Ifo institute, told the Hamburger Abendblatt. The institutes said this would be offset by significant growth in domestic demand.

Your body is cleansed of all stresses and, afterwards, it finds its own natural balance again.”So, Sons of Neptune, see you in Scarborough Bay next Boxing Day Jumping in the North Sea Piece of cake.. GERMANY’S DOLE queues are expected to reduce in 1999, but the outlook for Europe’s largest economy remains subdued, the country’s leading economic institutes forecast yesterday. Your whole body feels the way your mouth does when you have eaten a mint.”It is not recommended for people with weak hearts, of course,” said Irina, “but it’s brilliant for your blood circulation That’s the point of the extremes of temperature. “There’s nothing quite like the banya in nature,” said Irina “You can’t compare it to the jungle or the desert. Perhaps this is what it would be like inside the crater of a volcano.”You get so hot that you are dying for cold You plunge with abandon into the icy swimming pool Heat and cold feel the same You come out tingling.

The temperature in a Finnish sauna is even higher but tolerable, because the air is drier. Even the banya has become something of a luxury since the economic crisis and beggars stand outside the bath house, hoping for kopecks from the relatively rich Russians going in with their towels and birch branches.It is possible to endure the extreme heat for about five minutes. All thoughts of sex disappear at just 10 degrees below boiling point and Russians go in mixed groups to the banya for the sake of their health, not for orgies.In a cold country that barely sees the sun for six months of the year, the banya gives essential warmth to people who cannot afford to fly off to Florida. In minutes, I was sweating with Irina, a doctor who practises alternative medicine, and her heat-worshipping friends.”Whip me, whip me,” cried a naked man in the corner and Irina obliged by lashing his back with birch fronds.This is not what you might think it is. Luckily, my next appointment was with Irina at the banya, or Russian steam bath.”Come in quick, shut the door, don’t let the heat out,” she said, as I entered the wooden cabin at the Astrakhansky baths, where bath attendant Boris had worked up an air temperature of 90C by throwing water on to hot coals.

In warmer weather his workers toil inside a giant refrigerator, carving swans and bears to decorate banqueting tables in posh hotels.Palich continued to radiate his own inner heat but I was going blue, standing there talking to him. “Don’t you worry, I have my secrets for keeping the temperature down.”Indeed he does, for Palich runs a firm that makes ice sculptures all year round. Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and various private sponsors were paying for the ice park to help to launch those celebrations.”What will happen if there is a sudden thaw?” I asked “And what if war breaks out?” grinned Palich. Not only were we at the lower end of Pushkin Square, opposite the famous statue of the 19th-century poet, but also 1999 will be a year of celebrations marking the 200th anniversary of the birth of the “Russian Shakespeare”.