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GROZNY, Russia — A pro-Kremlin party led in Chechnya’s Moscow-sponsored parliament elections on Monday, election officials said, signaling an outcome that will entrench a pro-Russia strongman in power in the rebel region. In Moscow, President Vladimir Putin, who has pursued a harsh campaign to stamp out Chechen separatism, hailed Sunday’s poll as a milestone in rebuilding the constitutional order in the war-shattered Muslim region. “There is no doubt that the election to the first parliament of our republic was legitimate,” Chechen election chief Ismail Baikhanov told journalists. |
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Rudolf Yelnik / For The St. Petersburg Times
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton at the Grand Hotel Europe in St Petersburg on Saturday with General Manager Thomas Noll. |
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MOSCOW — Outspoken Ren-TV newscaster Olga Romanova was abruptly taken off the air after complaining that the channel’s management was blocking her from airing reports that might irritate Kremlin officials. Romanova and media freedom advocates criticized the decision to dump her “24” news program as an assault on free speech, but Ren-TV general director Alexander Ordzhonikidze insisted that he had axed the show in a revamp aimed at boosting ratings.
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Celebrity guests and millionaires were invited by a British clothing tycoon to St. Petersburg this weekend to attend three days of lavish balls, concerts and parties at the Grand Hotel Europe and palaces in the city. “Guests included former U.S. President Bill Clinton, singer Sting and his wife Trudie Styler, and model and actress Liz Hurley,” Irina Khlopova, PR manager at the Grand Hotel Europe, told the St. |
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For 800 children sent on summer vacation to the Urals in 1918, it was meant to be a three-month escape from war-torn St. Petersburg. Known as Petrograd at the time, the city was suffering chronic food shortages. |
All photos from issue.
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A senior Vatican official attending an international conference in St. Petersburg on the social doctrine of the Catholic Church was due to meet the head of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow on Tuesday, Interfax reported. Cardinal Renato Martino, who heads the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, was scheduled to meet Tuesday with Patriarch Alexy II and Metropolitan Kyrill, head of the Russian church’s foreign relations department, Martino’s office said. |
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The great granddaughter of Felix Yusupov, the last owner of the Yusupov Palace, opened the city’s first arts festival dedicated to the Silver Age at the palace on Saturday. |
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The United Russia party approved a new logo at its sixth congress in Krasnoyarsk on Saturday, retiring the brown bear on its colorful emblem in favor of a white bear and a more minimalist approach. The new logo features a white bear with a blue outline striding above the party’s name in block letters. |
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MOSCOW — Police physically prevented human rights activists from attending a City Hall-approved rally against fascism near Belorussky Station on Sunday, and when demonstrators rallied instead at City Hall, dozens were promptly detained and whisked away to a police station. |
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A new high-speed link road is set to be constructed in St. Petersburg after the government signed a decree last week offering over $620 million for the project — about one third of the total cost. The 46.4 kilometer road would run north-south through the city connecting the ring road’s western interchanges with the sea port and main transport hubs of the city. |
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ST PETERSBURG — Workers at a Russian assembly plant run by U.S. carmaker Ford Motor Co. stopped their week-long go-slow on Monday, but labour union officials said action may resume if pay demands are not met. |
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Foreign Control Fears MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian officials, fearing the new subsoil resources draft law will create a way for foreigners to gain control of key deposits, are keeping the bill from a parliamentary reading, Vedomosti reported Monday. The new law would limit companies that are half or more than half foreign-owned to minority stakes in strategic fields, which are determined by the size of their reserves. |
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Moscow — Pension reforms have ground to a halt because most people cannot decide where to invest their savings, leaving the state with a flood of cash which threatens to swamp the domestic bond market. Under the three-year-old reform meant to stimulate the development of a pension fund industry, younger Russians were given a choice over where they invest part of their retirement savings. |
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ISTANBUL (Bloomberg) — Alfa Group bought a 13 percent stake in Turkcell Iletisim Holding AS, Turkey’s biggest mobile phone company, completing a deal that’s been challenged by Turkcell shareholder TeliaSonera AB. |
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Irina Meshko, financial director at the Sestroretsk tool works, says that a career in business was never part of the plan. However, having been hired as an accounting assistant at Jensen group in 1999, it took the 30 year-old Meshko only six years to rise up the professional ladder. |
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MOSCOW — Russia’s oil boom is driving the domestic IT sector to grow nearly three times faster than the rest of the economy, the country’s leading IT companies said Wednesday. |
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MOSCOW — While all of Russia’s major corporations have been guilty of using unlicensed software, companies are increasingly cracking down on abuse, an anti-piracy lobby group said Wednesday. “All big [firms] have illegal software,” Jean-Paul Seuren, the Russia representative for Business Software Alliance, said in an interview. |
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The Northwest is one of the leaders in educational and cultural web projects, a competition to find the nation’s best web site has revealed. Assessing regional entries for the project is part of St. |
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MOSCOW — Germany’s Siemens has won backing from the Industry and Energy Ministry for what it said was a bid to buy 25 percent plus one share in engineering firm Siloviye Mashiny, or Power Machines, the ministry said on Friday. Siemens has asked the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service to approve the bid, said a ministry spokesman. |
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As Russia booms, Western hotel operators are fighting for a piece of the action, scouring the provinces for locations for their ambitious mid-range rollouts and sparring for the capital’s juiciest sites. |
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During U. S. President George W. Bush’s recent trip to Asia, there was a sharp contrast between his public call for more freedom and democracy in China and his closed-door meeting with President Vladimir Putin. Apparently, the White House has become convinced that Russians are only fit for a stunted kind of freedom and a mongrel “managed democracy. |
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Special Economic Zones MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia gave preliminary approval for creation of six so-called special economic zones where companies will be allowed to pay lower taxes, in an attempt to diversify the economy away from oil, Economy Minister German Gref said, quoted by the Interfax news agency. |
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During U. S. President George W. Bush’s recent trip to Asia, there was a sharp contrast between his public call for more freedom and democracy in China and his closed-door meeting with President Vladimir Putin. Apparently, the White House has become convinced that Russians are only fit for a stunted kind of freedom and a mongrel “managed democracy. |
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President Vladimir Putin’s government looks like a democratic government. There is a parliament, there are courts, there are regional governors — but all of them ultimately answer to the Kremlin. |
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This week, I’ll be providing you with a perfect example of the problems outlined last week, and demonstrating just how essential these public hearings really are. Despite the array of pessimistic predictions on the speed with which we’ll see a civil society developing in Russia, life does have a way of cheering us up once in a while. |
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Last week, America’s troubled sleep was shattered by a trumpet blast of truth sounding deep in Washington’s corridors of power, where the rule of the Lie has held sway for so long. |
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WASHINGTON — The top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee urged President George W. Bush on Sunday to go before the American public to explain his plan for the war in Iraq. Virginia Senator John Warner told NBC’s “Meet the Press,” said such a public address would be helpful to hold on to public support during the next six months while Iraq sets up its own government and gains the ability to maintain its security. |
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KIEV — Ukraine’s President Viktor Yushchenko said on Saturday it was time to apportion blame for the man-made famine that killed millions of his compatriots under Soviet rule in the 1930s. |
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JERUSALEM — Israeli elder statesman Shimon Peres may leave the Labour Party that ousted him as its leader and join Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s new centrist list, a spokesman for Peres said on Monday. The defection of the 82-year-old Peres would represent a vote of confidence by the Nobel peace laureate in Sharon’s oft-repeated pledge to make “painful concessions” for peace with the Palestinians. |
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BEIJING — An explosion ripped through a state-owned colliery in northeast China, killing 68 miners and trapping 79 underground, just days after Chinese leaders called for vigilance to prevent major accidents. |
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TEHRAN — Ten people were killed and 50 injured when an earthquake razed mud-brick villages on the Gulf island of Qeshm off Iran’s south coast on Sunday, officials and state media said. Iran’s official news agency IRNA said the quake, with a magnitude of 5.9, shook southern Iran for about 10 to 15 seconds at 1:53 p. |
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LONDON — Manchester United came from behind for a pulsating 2-1 Premier League win at West Ham United on Sunday in their first game since the death of the club’s former great George Best. A minute’s applause rang around Upton Park before kickoff, while Best’s former team mate Bobby Charlton paid tribute to the Northern Ireland winger who died in a London hospital on Friday. |
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Double world champions Tatyana Navka and Roman Kostomarov eased to victory in ice dancing on Sunday, completing a Russian sweep of all four events at the Cup of Russia Grand Prix. |
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Sibneft Dump CSKA MOSCOW (Reuters) — Sibneft oil company, sold last month by Chelsea’s billionaire owner Roman Abramovich, said on Monday it would be terminating its $54-million sponsorship deal with UEFA Cup holders CSKA Moscow. “The new owner decided that it would make no sense to invest money into advertising the brand of Sibneft on the international or regional level,” Sibneft spokesman Alexei Firsov said. |
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Issues Archive