|
|
|
|
The Federal Forestry Agency has begun inspecting whether Leningrad Oblast land that forms a green belt around St. Petersburg is being used legally, the Natural Resources Ministry said last week. The land, which is protected, is highly attractive as a location for Russian country houses or dachas. Checks in the analogous area around Moscow revealed extensive construction in that area and officials talked of the necessity of bulldozing some of the buildings. The forestry agency is to check landowners in several oblast districts, including the Sosnovsky, Kirovasky and Lomonosovsky forests, to ensure that land use complies with the law. No state or regional body has monitored the land use in those areas for some years, the ministry said in a statement. Inspectors have already found that several companies have built storage facilities and transport bases without having any permission from the responsible authorities, such as Rostekhnokompleks or Service Plus. |
|
CLASSIC CAR
Natasha Danchenkova / The St. Petersburg Times
A shiny Cadillac in Palace Square on Monday before an vintage rally to Konstantinovsky Palace. The impressive automobile matched the mood of the imperial square (see further photo, page 3). |
|
In an unprecedented charm offensive, President Vladimir Putin met over the weekend with groups of top business leaders from the United States and Germany in an effort to reassure them of Russia’s commitment to free market economics. At both meetings — the first time in his presidency Putin has given an audience to such high-profile groups of foreign business leaders — Putin called for increased foreign investment into Russia, promised to safeguard investors’ rights and held out the possibility of more energy exports to Europe and the United States.
|
|
The city prosecutor’s office has completed the investigation of the apparently racially motivated murder of Tajik girl Khursheda Sultanova, nine, early last year, online newspaper Fontanka.ru reported Monday. The report cited Alexei Mayakov, head of the serious investigations department at the prosecutor’s office, but the office had no comment Monday. |
|
Relations between Russian and the United States continue to develop positively, Alexander Vershbow, the retiring U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, said Friday at a farewell news conference in St. |
All photos from issue.
|
|
|
|
|
A year after the mysterious disappearance of Maxim Maximov, an investigative journalist with St. Petersburg weekly magazine Gorod, a news report on Monday implicated three police officers in his murder. The city police press office confirmed that the report was true, but declined to make any further comment. The journalist was killed in an assassination allegedly organized by three employees of the city criminal police department, Interfax reported Monday, quoting an anonymous source in the Northwest Prosecutor’s Office. The city prosecutor’s office had no comment on the report. |
|
SPORTING LINES
Natasha Danchenkova / The St. Petersburg Times
Car enthusiasts gather around the oldtimer sports cars before they drove to the Konstantinovsky Palace on Monday as part of a festival race of cars built up until the 1960s. |
|
St. Petersburg tap water is clean enough to drink, but residents are still advised to filter it, experts said Thursday at a roundtable meeting. “The water meets all sanitary and epidemic standards,” Kirill Fridman, chief doctor of the city’s Hygiene and Epidemic Center, said at the round table on water purity at the Agency for Business News. Tap water is good for using in different equipment because it is soft, but “it has low amounts of dissolved calcium, magnesium and fluoride and has a range of health consequences,” Fridman said.
|
|
Memorial to Prisoners PETROZAVODSK (SPT) — A memorial plaque dedicated to prisoners of Finnish concentration camps during World War II has been unveiled on the territory of the former camp No. 6 in the Perevalka district of Petrozavodsk, Interfax reported Friday. |
|
MOSCOW — The State Duma will vote this week on a United Russia-sponsored amendment to the electoral law that might allow President Vladimir Putin to serve a third term. |
|
MOSCOW — State media holding VGTRK reiterated Thursday that the launch of a 24-hour Russian-language news channel was a priority and said it hoped to win a tender to operate a new youth-oriented channel. VGTRK head Oleg Dobrodeyev told a Federation Council committee meeting that the news channel would be launched under the auspices of the “Vesti” news program on Rossia television, Interfax reported. |
|
KIZLYAR, Dagestan — On a clearing the size of a soccer field, more than 1,000 former residents of Borozdinovskaya, a largely ethnic Dagestani village just across the border in Chechnya, are camped out in tents amid a jumble of furniture and other belongings. |
|
MOSCOW — A journalist has been sentenced to seven months in prison on charges of slandering a Saratov official in an article that was never published. Eduard Abrosimov, a onetime adviser to former Saratov Governor Dmitry Ayatskov, was also found guilty of slandering State Duma Deputy Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, a deputy chairman of the United Russia party, in a separate article, a spokeswoman for the Saratov region prosecutor’s office said Thursday. |
|
MOSCOW — The opposition should not entertain illusions that an Orange Revolution is possible in Russia, senior Kremlin official Vladislav Surkov said in a wide-ranging interview published in Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine. |
|
MOSCOW — Vladislav Borodulin, editor of the online news portal Gazeta.ru, was named on Wednesday as the new supervising editor of the Kommersant business daily. Analysts disagreed on whether Borodulin’s appointment would make the newspaper more critical of the Kremlin or was intended to improve its business coverage, as its owner, Boris Berezovsky, has claimed. |
|
Kaliningrad Summit MOSCOW (AP) — The leaders of Russia, France and Germany will hold a trilateral meeting on July 3 in Kaliningrad, the Kremlin announced Thursday. |
|
|
|
|
P&O Nedlloyd’s merger with rival and world’s largest container shipper Maersk will mean a total amalgamation of the two companies’ offices, but no significant job losses, Philip Green, the CEO of P&O Nedlloyd, said last week. After the finalization of the $3 billion deal, expected by Green to be in August, British-Dutch shipper P&O Nedlloyd will lose its name and operate fully under the Maersk Sealand banner, a brand of Danish shipping giant A. |
|
Johnson Controls, a leading supplier of automobile interiors, electronics and batteries, started assembly operations in Russia last week. The American company has opened a 2,000 square meter plant with 60 staff in St. |
|
MOSCOW — U.S. fast-food giant Yum! Brands is throwing the weight of its KFC brand behind local fried chicken chain Rostik’s in a deal aimed at opening 300 joint outlets in Russia and the CIS over the next five years, the companies said Friday. Rostik Restaurants, which owns all of the 80 Rostik’s restaurants currently in operation, will invest up to $100 million in the expansion over the next five years, Rostik CEO Rostislav Ordovsky-Tanayevsky Blanco said. |
|
Eastern parts of Estonia are highly interested in investment from Russian business, as well as in mutual understanding with Moscow in order to develop pre-border transport infrastructure, Estonian of¸cials and businessmen said earlier this month. |
|
With the number of mobile subscribers already exceeding the size of the population in the world’s largest cities, including Moscow and St. Petersburg, a question arises: What will happen to the humble payphone? To survive the mobile boom, the friendly local payphone has undergone a few changes. |
|
SPECIAL TO THE ST. PETERSBURG TIMES Developers swear that Russia is soon to be engulfed by a boom in commercial real estate, but say they are growing impatient for financial input from Russian or foreign pension funds and insurers. |
|
|
|
|
There are few sure ways to make a million dollars. But registering a domain name like Wallstreet.com, before the financial elite had even an inkling of an idea to create its own web site, was certainly one of them. When it came to the buy-out of rights to the domain name, the price tag on Wallstreet. |
|
Last week, the government agreed to acquire an additional 10.7 percent equity stake in Gazprom for $7.1 billion. This transaction, once completed, will see the state’s direct holding in the world’s biggest energy company increase to just over the 50 percent level required to formalize control. |
|
In the past year or so, we have increasingly heard the argument that a growing clash between “values” and “interests” is leading to policy dilemmas for Europeans and Americans when dealing with Russia. According to this argument, the erosion of democratic institutions and re-assertion of state control over strategic economic sectors raises questions about Russia’s commitment to becoming a market democracy closely aligned with Western interests. |
|
Not long ago the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion, or VTsIOM, conducted a survey with the aim of finding out what the opinion of Russians was of the moral climate of the community, what actions citizens consider immoral and to what degree. |
|
|
|
|
KHABAROVSK, Far East — The young Chinese man in a dirty black jacket had a lonely, mournful air about him, but he spoke softly of big dreams. Zheng Chao was drawn to Siberia’s vast expanse of black earth four years ago, part of a growing wave of Chinese peasants using their greenhouse skills to grow vegetables for Russians in a land where winter lasts half the year. |
|
|
|
|
Shuttle Risk ‘Small’ CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) — Officials believe the risk of potentially lethal pieces of ice flying off the external fuel tank and striking the space shuttle is low enough to proceed with plans for a mid-July launch of Discovery. The conclusion came after a Friday meeting of NASA managers and engineers. |
|
|
|
|
A U.S. newspaper called him “the pride of Northern California tennis” but unseeded sensation Dmitry Tursunov, who was due to play No. 9 seed Sebastian Grosjean at Wimbledon on Monday for a place in the quarterfinals, has “no idea” if he’ll ever become an American citizen. Moscow-born Tursunov was also hailed by Russian newspapers last weekend after beating No. |
Temp: -2°C overcast 
Issues Archive