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MOSCOW — The State Duma voted Friday to allocate 500 million rubles ($17.4 million) to promote civil society in Russia and defend the rights of Russians in the Baltic countries. Critics said the money was likely to go only to groups that support the Kremlin and was another step in the Kremlin’s campaign to bring nongovernmental organizations under its wing. The new funding was seen as a response to a vote in the U.S. Congress earlier this month to allocate $4 million for the development of political parties in Russia. “We think that we have to finance civil society institutions not only in our country, but also abroad, in the Baltic countries,” Duma Deputy Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin of United Russia said Friday, Interfax reported. |
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FASHION BUZZ
Alexander Demianchuk / The St. Petersburg Times
A model shows a creation by Russian designer Yevgenia Dreshkina during an avant-garde fashion contest in St. Petersburg on Saturday. |
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A team comprising members of the city’s homeless has won a top international sports trophy, beating off seven teams to take top honors. Local soccer players won the European Homeless Soccer Cup this week, after a triumphant 4:0 victory over Poland in the tournament’s final game on Sunday. The local squad traveled to Gdansk last week to compete with other European homeless soccer teams for the prestigious title.
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Finn Dies in Karelia PETROZAVODSK (SPT) — A Finnish citizen died in a forest near the town of Kostomuksha in Karelia on Sunday, Interfax reported on Monday. The Finnish worker, 44, was killed while repairing a saw. The worker was sober, and police have categorized the incident as an industrial accident. |
All photos from issue.
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 The Paris-based singer, actress and political activist Jane Birkin, who performed in the city on Saturday, took time to speak out against fascism, the war in Chechnya and the current conscription system while in the city. Birkin also gave support to Russian human rights groups such as the Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers and Memorial. |
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MOSCOW — In recent weeks, Russian nationalists have been steadily encroaching on the political stage, as seen in the slogans chanted during sanctioned street marches and the spin given to news programs, movies and commercials shown on national television. |
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The Kazakh government on Sunday slammed Russia’s national pipeline monopoly Transneft for refusing to sign an agreement to transport Kazakh oil to Lithuania, a deal the Central Asian state hoped would strengthen its position in the battle for control of the Baltic states’ sole refinery. |
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State-owned aircraft manufacturer MiG will export $300 million worth of fighter jets and upgrades by the end of the year, a senior official said Friday. |
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Falling Russian crude oil exports have hit ports in the Baltic states hardest, while Russia’s Baltic Sea outlets have continued to prosper, port data for January to October showed on Friday. Record-high crude oil export duties encourage Russian firms to send more crude volumes for refining and to export more refined products, which are subject to lower export duties than crude oil, or to sell them at home. |
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To move or not to move, that is the question top-managers of state-owned companies are currently being urged to address. Fashion dictates that they must give serious thought to relocating their headquarters to St. |
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MOSCOW, Nov. 10 – A few years ago, Russia’s finance officials could only dream of the problem Aleksei L. Kudrin described recently. Thanks to bountiful revenue from oil exports, the Kremlin is in a position to pay $15 billion in sovereign debt ahead of schedule next year. “We would be ready to pay the whole sum,” Mr. |
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Carlsberg Expansion NEW YORK (Bloomberg) — Carlsberg A/S raised its stake in Russian brewery Yarpivo through its jointly owned unit Baltic Beverages Holding, Jyllands-Posten said, citing unidentified Russian media. Baltic Beverages Holding, or BBH, which Carlsberg owns with Scottish & Newcastle, has raised its stake in Yarpivo to 87. |
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There’s a new catchphrase in London: Are you a skier? And it has nothing to do with winter sports. It’s a quasi-acronym for: Are you spending the kids’ inheritance? In the age of celebrity culture and instant news, cash is not the only fast currency. Former pillars of the establishment are shorting their reputation, too. |
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Having already devoted two columns to the the preservation of the city’s cultural heritage, I find myself having to return to the same issue a third time. |
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Four years ago, President George W. Bush quietly assumed dictatorial powers with a secret executive order granting himself the right to imprison anyone on earth indefinitely, without charges or trial or indictment or evidence, simply by declaring them an “enemy combatant,” on his say-so alone. This week, the assemblage of bootlickers and bagmen that befoul the U. |
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ULAN BATOR, Mongolia — U.S. President George W. Bush heard multi-toned Mongolian “throat singing” and drank mare’s milk on Monday as he ended an Asian tour inside a nomadic hut that is a symbol of the country that produced Genghis Khan. Bush, the first sitting U. |
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BEIJING — President George W. Bush’s visit to Beijing, which ended on Monday, had the trappings of a whistle-stop campaign appearance intended to sell his message that the United States wants China to free up its politics and economy before the two countries can move closer. |
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Merkel on the Move BERLIN (Reuters) — Angela Merkel, who has vowed to make German-French relations less exclusive and improve ties with smaller European countries, will travel to Paris and Brussels on Wednesday in her first official trip as chancellor. |
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A service commemorating the second anniversary of a suicide car bomb attack on the British Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, was held at the blast site on Sunday. |
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JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, taking the biggest gamble of his political career, quit the ruling Likud on Monday to lead a new centrist party into early elections. Sharon’s dramatic move, after the right-wing Likud faction he helped found nearly 30 years ago rebelled against him over a Gaza pullout completed in September, seemed likely to reshape Israeli politics for years to come. |
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MOSCOW — Maria Sharapova and Nikolay Davydenko have been named Russia’s best players in 2005, the country’s tennis federation announced at its annual award gala on Saturday. This year, Florida-based Sharapova became the first Russian woman to take the world number one spot and she also reached semi-finals at the Australian Open, Wimbledon and the U. |
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A 4-2 victory over Rostov on Saturday handed FC Zenit St. Petersburg a mere consolation prize in the final match of the 2004-05 season. Without ever topping the Premier League but giving champion CSKA and its Moscow rivals stiff resistance at the start of the season, Zenit ran out of steam in the closing stages of the competition with a run of disappointing domestic results. |
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Finland and Russia have always been close, but a new wave of Finnish investment points to accelerated cooperation between the two countries, with St. Petersburg perfectly placed to take advantage. Compared to other foreign investors Finns say they boast special knowledge of the local market and experience of dealing with both the local business community and the city’s administration. |
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Russians are facing an increasing variety of investment opportunities but still the old, familiar methods are proving the most popular, despite their relatively low rates of return. |
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The majority of the population neither has the time nor knowledge to look into the alternative ways of investing their savings – hence the continuing popularity of bank deposits. Alternative vehicles such as mutual funds and stocks have been compromised in the opinion of the Russian population (due to the well known MMM affair as well as many others), whereas commercial banks have also lost a lot of trust during the 1998 crisis. |
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Public Private Partnerships (PPP) are set to overcome current difficulties in legislation and become one of the most popular ways of funding investments in infrastructure, a new report, ‘Delivering the PPP Promise,’ claims. |
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Strategic investment projects in St. Petersburg: • Shanghai Industrial and Investment Company will invest $1.25 billion into construction of a 180 hectares multifunctional Baltic Pearl complex on the coast of the Gulf of Finland, which will comprise of residential and office real estate, shopping centers and hotels providing living space for 35,000 people. |
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Credit cards may soon drive out shops’ express-loans as the loan-product of choice but only if banks can reassure clients about the advantages of the new concept, thereby capitalising on Russia’s booming retail market. |
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Petersburg Paint Sale Finnish concern Tikkurila, part of the Kemira chemical group, is set to acquire a St. Petersburg-based paint-producer Kraski Teks (Paints Teks) by January, 2006, Interfax reported on Monday. According to Tikkurila information, the Finnish company will buy Kraski Teks for $40 million, which is part of the concern development strategy to strengthen its position on the Russian market of paints and enamels. |
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National banks and insurance firms were the first to make a fuss about the prospect of foreign multinationals freely entering the local market. The Russian government showed its support, keeping to a protectionist stance while negotiating for compromises to make a free market safer for local companies. |
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Look up “Banking Technologies” on the internet. They are defined as a totality of different telecommunication and information technologies, computer networks, programs, products, and models of risk management. Ordinary people tend to have other associations. Some immediately picture advertisements of credit cards, some think of cash machines, and others imagine the recent “technological” crimes committed over the internet and given full coverage in the media. |
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Issues Archive