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MOSCOW —With little of the hype that characterized the run-up to his 50th birthday, President Vladimir Putin was set to celebrate his birthday Friday with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in what could well be Schroeder’s final foreign visit as his country’s leader. Schroeder arrived in St. Petersburg on Thursday evening on a private visit as a guest of Putin, who turns 53 on Friday. Spokesmen for the Kremlin and the German Embassy in Moscow said Thursday that they did not know what celebratory events were planned, but Friday is the second and final day of a Central Asian Cooperation Organization summit, which has brought leaders from Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to the city. German Embassy spokesman Wolfgang Bindseil said that while Schroeder’s visit was a private one, Putin and the chancellor might address Russian-German relations at a news conference scheduled for Friday evening. |
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BELLY UP
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
The Oasis Festival of belly dancing and other unusual forms of keeping fit began Wednesday at the Rossiya Hotel. The lively event, featuring masterclasses, competitions and special guests, runs through Sunday. |
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MOSCOW — The Kremlin has moved in for the kill at fallen oil firm Yukos with a new money-laundering probe aimed at its imprisoned founder, while an international scramble intensifies for what is left of the company’s assets. Raids this week at the Amsterdam and Moscow offices of Yukos as part of an investigation into an alleged scheme to launder $7 billion signaled an escalation in Russia’s attack against Yukos, which it has already crushed with a $27 billion back-tax claim, legal experts said.
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Russia’s “most playable living composer” was appointed honorary professor to St. Petersburg’s prestigious Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory on Thursday in a move he hopes will inspire a new generation of young musicians after years of post-Soviet drift in the classical music scene. |
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MOSCOW — A delegation from the U.S. Attorney’s Office was in Moscow on Thursday for confidential talks about the case of former Nuclear Power Minister Yevgeny Adamov, a U. |
All photos from issue.
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LONDON — President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Tony Blair pledged Wednesday to increase their joint efforts to combat terrorism during talks held at a high-security underground command center. The two leaders were briefed by top British police and security officials in the underground meeting room of the civil contingencies committee, known as COBRA — an acronym for Cabinet Office Briefing Room A. |
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The Afghan War epic “9 Rota,” or “Company 9,” earned $9 million in its first six days, shattering Russia’s opening-week box office records for both domestic and foreign films, the film’s distributor said Wednesday. |
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The Russian market for women’s underwear is to undergo a technological revolution, as foreign producers scramble to pitch their wares a price and a cut above low-cost Asian imports. Top European underwear manufacturers Laume and New Rosme said they will set store by innovative technology so as to maintain the company’s Russian sales, which this year are expected to be between 10 percent and 20 percent higher than in 2004, the companies said Tuesday. |
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The city’s spending on state health insurance will increase by 1.5 billion rubles ($52.5 million) next year. Market insiders, however, say the extra money will hardly solve many of the problems in the city’s medical sphere. |
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MOSCOW — Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev on Wednesday called for more state assistance for the agriculture industry, which is being hit hard by skyrocketing fuel prices. High fuel costs have cost the industry 20 billion rubles ($700 million) so far this year and will make it almost impossible for it to make a profit despite increased production, Gordeyev said. |
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CIT Collects on Fund ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Investment fund manager CIT Finance has collected 21.8 million rubles ($780,000) for its Russian Metallurgy and Auto industry mutual fund, which closed on Sept. |
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MOSCOW — As Russia is set to become Finland’s No. 1 trade partner this year, the Finnish business elite is calling for both countries to intensify their cooperation in everything from forestry to high-tech. But if Finns are to latch on to Russia’s growth, they need to dispel some nagging stereotypes about their giant neighbor, according to Finland’s first economic strategy paper on Russia. |
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MOSCOW — French oil major Total has offered gas monopoly Gazprom stakes in three projects in return for 25 percent of the huge Shtokman gas project, a company official said in an interview. |
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Financial Times U.S. President George W. Bush’s choice of Harriet Miers, White House legal counsel, for the vacancy on the Supreme Court left by the recently retired Sandra Day O’Connor is perplexing — not least for his conservative sup-porters. After the successful installation of John Roberts as chief justice there was no more eagerly antici-pated decision. |
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On March 8, 2002, business reporter Natalya Skryl, 29, was assaulted outside the apartment building where she lived in the southwestern city of Taganrog. |
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It’s like hearing an inferior cover of a favorite song: the words and notes are there, but somehow, it still doesn’t sound like the real thing. So it was when Nashi, the pro-Kremlin youth movement, issued a demand for a renewed investigation of the events of October 1993. In the last 12 years, Nashi noted, “there has appeared a generation that barely remembers the fire from the tanks and the faces of those who staged a pogrom at the Ostankino television center and the mayor’s office. |
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 With ambitions to start musical movement, a new festival brings together international composers and performers from the edge of the avant-garde. A selection of well-known improvisational and experimental artists from the U.S., France, Uzbekistan and Russia will perform at the APosition Musical Forum that opens Friday in St. Petersburg. The Petersburg event is an extension of the Dlinniye Ruki, or Long Arms, festival held in Moscow. |
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 NAGOYA, Japan — Mariinsky dancers are very popular with Japanese audiences. So perhaps Nagoya, Japan’s fourth largest city, is not such an unlikely venue as it may seem to meet one of the finest male dancers of the Mariinsky Ballet — first soloist Andrei Merkuriyev, who was guesting in late September with the Michiko Matsumoto Ballet, a 50-strong ballet company with a 47-year-old history in the city. |
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APosition Musical Forum, a festival of experimental music featuring such artists as Terry Riley, David Moss and Shelley Hirsch opens at GEZ-21 on Friday. Further events will take place at the Cappella on Tuesday and Wednesday. Composer and musician Riley is highly reputed as the founder of the minimalist movement. |
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Classical music fans this weekend will have the chance to ease the plight of the city’s ailing poverty-stricken hospices by attending a special choral concert that is just one event in a worldwide series of fundraisers. |
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The fifth annual International Conservatoire Week festival, running through Wednesday at the Rimsky-Korsakov State Conservatory, is this year dedicated to the 140th anniversary of the birth of Alexei Glazunov, a distinguished Russian composer who was a director of the Conservatory from 1905 to 1928. During the week-long festival, musicians from Germany, Poland, the U. |
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BAGHDAD — Iraqi insurgents killed at least 16 people in two strikes on Thursday, sending a suicide bomber to blow up a bus near near the oil ministry in Baghdad and shooting oil ministry security guards in the north. Police said a suicide bomber strapped with explosives boarded the bus carrying mostly students from a nearby police academy and blew himself up, killing at least 11 people and wounding another 11. |
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DUBAI — Al Qaeda has put job advertisements on the Internet asking for supporters to help put together its Web statements and video montages, an Arabic newspaper reported. |
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ROME — More than two decades after Roberto Calvi was found hanging under London’s Blackfriars Bridge, five people went on trial in Italy on Thursday accused of murdering the man known as “God’s banker” for his close Vatican ties. A Sicilian mobster, a Sardinian financier and three others are accused of killing Calvi, whose death in June 1982 was initially ruled a suicide. |
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