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Court proceedings in the notorious case of the murder of a nine-year old Tajik girl in February 2004 began Monday. Eight defendants have been accused of the murder of Khursheda Sultonova, the Criminal Office at the City Court said in a telephone interview Monday. The hearings are closed to the public as four of the defendants are minors. The Criminal Office refused to give further comment on the case. In February 2004 a group of youths attacked a Tajik family in a courtyard in the city center. During the attack the girl was killed and her father and cousin were injured. According to the preliminary investigation, as yet unidentified individuals incited the defendants to carry out attacks on people of non-Slavic ethnicity. |
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HORSES FOR COURSES
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A historically accurate full-scale model of a horse-driven tram was unveiled on Vasilievsky Island on Monday. The design is based on blueprints from the Putilovsky Factory dating back to 1872-1878, recreating a mode of transport from yesteryear. |
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In the early hours of Friday morning, a lawyer fired a shot at staff from City Hall’s Center For Advertisement Monitoring as they were dismantling an illegally placed advertising console on Zagorodny Prospekt. The gunman, Grigory Solominsky, who has lost one court case against the center and is currently pursuing another, argued that the officials were acting in bad will and the city policy must be reversed as unfair and discriminating, Fontanka.
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MARINO, Moscow Region — The dozens of gray pigeons perched on a roof at Denis Adamsky’s poultry farm may be about to unwittingly pay the ultimate price to prevent the spread of the deadly bird flu. “We have been scattering poisoned seeds about the farm,” Adamsky, director of Marinskaya Ptitsefabrika, said Sunday morning in the office at his egg-producing farm about 10 kilometers southwest of Moscow. |
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Celebrity Chat ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) The culture of celebrity in the U.S. and the complexities of slang are the subjects of two lectures in English this week at the American Corner cultural center. |
All photos from issue.
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Typical Russians are hardworking, long-suffering and resigned to their fates — at least if the participants in a recent sociological survey carried out both in St. Petersburg and the small provincial town of Krasnoturinsk in the Urals are to be believed. Experts from St. Petersburg’s Institute For Comprehensive Sociology Research recently polled 200 locals and 200 residents of Krasnoturinsk asking a series of questions about Russian history, politics, identity and national character. |
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Campanella, a St. Petersburg-based chain of optics salons, plans to spend $10 million on a nationwide expansion, launching at least 40 new stores in 2006, the company’s owner Alexander Slobozhan said Monday. The retailer will invest in shops in the mid-range price sector, with financial support from the Moscow-based Delta Private Equity Partners, Russia’s largest venture fund manager with two funds worth over $500 million in total. |
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Supermarket chain Perekryostok said it will build a logistics center in every major Russian city, with possible investment estimated at over $100 million, the company said Monday. |
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Talosto buys Metelitsa ST.PETERSBURG (SPT) — Talosto, the largest producer of frozen food in the Russian Northwest, will buy a Moscow-based frozen producer, Metelitsa, Interfax reported Monday. Talosto’s share in the Russian ice-cream market, forecast to reach 6. |
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MOSCOW (Reuters) — Russia’s Sistema is in acquisition talks with Greek IT company and telecoms equipment maker Intracom, online newspaper gazeta.ru quoted Sistema sources as saying on Monday. |
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MOSCOW — Jerry Greenfield, the cofounder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream company, is in town this week to encourage Russia-based firms to channel part of their profits into socially responsible projects. Greenfield, who founded Ben & Jerry’s with Ben Cohen in 1978, introduced Americans to the idea that a company might donate a percent of its earnings to support non-profit organizations. |
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MOSCOW — The president of investment bank Renaissance Capital, Oleg Kiselyov, is facing fraud charges, his lawyer Alexander Asnis said Friday. The investigation, which is being handled by the City Prosecutor’s Office and the Moscow city police, is related to an alleged attempt in the last year to steal shares in one of Russia’s biggest iron-ore producers, Mikhailovsky GOK. |
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Pipeline Made Urgent MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — President Vladimir Putin has instructed Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov to expedite plans for an $11.5 billion crude-oil pipeline from eastern Siberia to the Pacific Ocean, Vedomosti reported Monday. Putin sent Fradkov a letter telling him to resolve differences between various government bodies over the route and design of the link because the project has been “unjustly delayed,” the newspaper said, citing an unidentified senior Kremlin official. |
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It must seem like the sky is falling — that it’s about to rain chaos and death as the dreaded H5N1 avian flu appears to close in. Last spring, bird flu broke out in Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. It spread to western China, Siberia, Kazakhstan and Mongolia in the summer. |
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If St. Petersburg were to have as many automobiles per square kilometer as any major Western European city, then driving through town would be virtually impossible. |
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Some of the far-fetched fables we cover as breaking news could easily serve as a plot for a novel, perhaps even of the fantasy genre. Recently, another tall story of this kind made it into the press. A wealthy businessman, Vladimir Kogan, is selling his main asset, a large and prosperous bank, in order to become a state employee. |
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Having railed at the wanton criminality of the Bush faction for so long, this column naturally partakes of the general glee arising from the looming possibility of genuine, grade-A grand jury indictments for some of the gang’s top thugs. |
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French Open semifinalist Nikolai Davydenko will be hoping for a home crowd boost at this week’s St. Petersburg Open after a disappointing third-round finish at the Madrid Masters on Thursday. The Russian No. 1 seed is scheduled to face unseeded Lukas Dlouhy of the Czech Republic in the first round of the week-long ATP tournament at the city’s Sportivny Konsertny Kompleks. |
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CHICAGO Illinois — The Houston Astros have three games to prove just how tough they are to beat at home as the World Series heads to Texas for the first time ever, with the Chicago White Sox on top 2-0 in the best-of-seven contest. |
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Zenit Loses Ground ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — FC Zenit St. Petersburg lost 0-2 to FC Moscow on Sunday to fall seven points behind leaders CSKA Moscow, with only three matches of the season remaining. In other games at the weekend, CSKA Moscow won 1-0 at Amkar Perm to move closer to dethroning champions Lokomotiv Moscow, who drew 0-0 with bottom team Alania Vladikavkaz. |
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Before, it was enough to associate business with war, to call the open market a ‘field,’ competition a ‘battle,’ and each event a ‘launch.’ The only problem for the companies was how to convince staff — the rank and file — to follow into action, to fight for the corporate cause. |
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In some things in life, size is everything. But not when it comes to choosing your recruitment agency, it seems. While some industry players claim that in recruitment Big means Big Possibilities, others point to the “hand-picking” approach of smaller agencies as more careful and precise. |
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No matter whether the reduction in price is real or not, people like to buy things on sale. The element of “an extra,” of “a bonus” rarely fails to attract. On the St. Petersburg labor market, where employers are growing tired of constantly raising salaries, the “extras” are becoming a company’s best staff-magnet. |
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Outsourcing — a global trend to delegate the non-core functions of a business to other organizations — seems to be having a hard time acclimatizing in Russia. |
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A CEO of a large corporation enters the meeting room and hears the verdict of the company’s board. “You’re fired. And here is your $30 million,” says one of the directors. Sounds like fiction, like a perversion of “The Apprentice” reality show? But, it is not. |
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Resumes have their own language. A “summer internship” often means studious coffee-making. “Basic German” means you can say your name with a German accent. |
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Finding a job as a young graduate or as a school-leaver in St. Petersburg is not easy, despite there being more job offers than applicants. All companies want experience, not just a degree. But how much harder is it for young people from so-called “difficult backgrounds,” such as the disabled or those from orphanages, to find a job? A U. |
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Margarita Gokun Silver, President of the Global Coach Center We are all familiar with the situation: a company enters a market, hires well-qualified people, invests time and resources in training, gets accustomed to their expertise, and then … then, it begins to lose them. |
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In the U.S. one third of company losses related to employee absences are due to illness health caused by poor working conditions, according to a report by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. One way to alleviate this problem that has gained in popularity in the West over the last decade has come from the Chinese teaching of Feng Shui, a 3,000 year old practice of placement and arrangement of space to achieve harmony with the environment, based on Taoist principles. |
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Glamour, nightly parties and wild creativity — that’s the stereotypical image of the magazine industry that attracts many a young pen to glossy pages, but does the reality live up to it? Natalya Dudi, chief editor of Cosmopolitan-Petersburg, tells all. |
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