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BESLAN, North Ossetia — With the air thick with grief and anger, thousands of people gathered at Beslan’s School No. 1 on Thursday to commemorate the 331 hostages, half of them children, who died in last year’s attack. Mourners passed through two metal detectors at the entrance to the schoolyard, and police officers searched them for weapons, a grim irony that angered some victims’ families. “My daughter and her two children were in this damn school,” screamed Zoya Gadiyeva, who was holding portraits of her daughter and 6-year-old granddaughter, both of whom died. “I want to know the truth. Where should we go to find out the truth? The police were unable to protect our children, but today they are even checking the bag of an old woman,” she said. |
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Sergei Karpukhin / Reuters
Women grieve inside the gym at Beslan school No.1 during a commemoration for the victims of the school siege on Thursday. Wailing from bereaved relatives filled the air. |
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BESLAN, North Ossetia — Former child hostages are wetting their beds at night. Some are overeating to cope with painful memories. Many are obsessed with water. The Ossetian spirit of joy and hospitality in this small town of 30,000 has turned into fear and anger a year after the school seizure — fear of another attack and anger that half of the town received cash and other gifts while the rest got nothing.
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St. Petersburg’s green areas have shrunk by almost 30 percent over the last five years, say local environmentalists who this week staged protests outside City Hall. Greenpeace activitists on Tuesday dressed up as trees and wore slogans imploring authorities not to kill them on their chests. Most destruction of parks, gardens and lawns in St. |
All photos from issue.
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A year after the Beslan hostage tragedy, the festive atmosphere of Sept. 1 in St. Petersburg schools — like virtually all other schools across Russia — has become tightly linked with security concerns. The city police announced heightened security measures for the day, when 32,000 city children entered their first grade at school. More than 1,000 patrolmen were allocated to monitor street safety, and their routes were specifically tailored to stay as close to schools as possible. And city schools, both public and private, are installing their own security systems, in addition to putting guards on the gates at practically every local school. When the city government isn’t able to help, local companies and even political parties provide funding for security systems. |
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 U.S. singer and musician Patti Smith attacked business and President George W. Bush at a press event in St. Petersburg on Thursday, where she received an excited response from the local journalists and fans. |
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MOSCOW — Mikhail Khodorkovsky said Wednesday that he would run for the State Duma in a Moscow by-election expected to be held in December. Ivan Starikov, a senior member of the liberal Union of Right Forces party, or SPS, said he and several politically diverse politicians on Wednesday created an initiative group to back Khodorkovsky’s bid. |
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MOSCOW — Prosecutors in St. Petersburg have opened a criminal case alleging that the muckraking Kompromat.ru web site published an article that slandered IT and Communications Minister Leonid Reiman. The article claimed that Reiman took a $1 million fee in 1992 when he was the deputy director of a major St. |
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MOSCOW — An internal UN investigation has uncovered a case of long-running fraud in the Moscow office of the United Nations Development Program that may have cost the organization $1. |
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Economy Storms Thru MOSCOW (Reuters) — The economy has weathered a tough first half, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Wednesday, stressing that the government must keep saving windfall oil revenues to combat inflation. Although record crude prices have allowed Russia to amass a great deal of money in the stabilization fund, as well as repay $15 billion in debts to the Paris Club ahead of schedule, the real economy’s performance has been less than sparkling. |
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One of Finland’s largest uniform producers, Image Wear Oy, has considerably raised its presence on Russia’s fast-growing work-clothes market. The company’s St. |
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Europe’s largest household appliances producer BSH Bosch und Siemens Hausgerate looks set to flood the Russian market with its own brand refrigerators as soon as from 2007. With little serious competition on the market, analysts said the manufacturer’s main concern will be finding local components suppliers for BSH’s $62 million venture in St. |
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Vena Goes Pear-Shaped ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — City-based Vena forecasts 20 percent brand sales growth this year after the launch of new pear-flavored beverage, the company said in a statement on Thursday. |
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With the curtain falling on summer and the political season at hand, the news and analysis web site Forum.msk.ru last week posted the curious results of an opinion poll. The poll revealed a catastrophic decline in the approval ratings of the political parties that are currently represented in the State Duma. |
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I want to use today’s column to say thank you to all its readers over the five years since I started writing it, taking over from Brian Whitmore, who is today the Boston Globe’s journalist in Prague. |
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 TOKYO — I’ve always had a lot of sympathy for Japanese TV presenters. With most programs in Japan related to food, if not food-centered, day in and day out hosts face the challenge of sampling every food known to man and dog. Each time, there is only one word that a TV host utters after partaking in gourmand’s hell: oishii! (“delicious!”). |
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Patti Smith, who performed in Helsinki on Wednesday, arrived in the city to meet local journalists and fans at a record shop on Thursday afternoon. Playing an accoustic guitar, Smith performed “In My Blakean Year” from “Trampin’,” her most recent album. |
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The Fourth International Yelena Obraztsova Competition for Young Opera Singers — a prestigious biannual vocal contest that once drew attention to the stellar talents of bass Ildar Abdrazakov and tenor Daniil Shtoda — is running at the Shostakovich Philharmonic Grand Hall through Sept. |
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An emigre Russian violinist is reviving rarely-performed works by an undeservedly forgotten 18th-century Russian composer and violinist, who has been referred to as the “Russian Paganini. |
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Starting Thursday, visitors to washingtonpost.com have been able to follow an extraordinary online project: “The Russian Chronicles — Ten Years Later.” Freelance writer Lisa Dickey is traveling the length of Russia from Vladivostok to St. Petersburg and posting daily web logs, or blogs, to the newspaper site in a reprise of a journey she undertook in 1995. |
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Giuliani Mulls Bid SYDNEY, Australia (AP) — Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani told an international business forum Wednesday he would probably decide next year whether to run for the presidency of the United States. Giuliani, the two-term Republican mayor who became Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2001 for his leadership following the Sept. |
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NEW YORK — Top seed Maria Sharapova overcame blustery winds on Wednesday to record a sweet second-round victory at the U.S. Open. The 18-year-old Russian rushed into the third round with a 6-1 6-0 win over Dally Randriantefy of Madagascar. “It’s a good thing I had that piece of chocolate cake last night otherwise I might have been blown off the court,” Sharapova said after the 49-minute match. |
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LONDON — Michael Owen says his former England strike partner Alan Shearer played a major role in his decision to leave Real Madrid for Newcastle United. |
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MOSCOW — Lokomotiv goalkeeper and Russian international Sergei Ovchinnikov says Liechtenstein does not stand a chance of causing an upset against his team in Saturday’s World Cup qualifier. “They don’t have a chance, not even one, of beating us,” Ovchinnikov told reporters at the national team’s training camp ahead of the European Group Three match in Moscow. |
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