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International NGOs struggled to agree on their message for Group of Eight leaders, with participants at a major conference on March 9-10 split on policy recommendations and the health of Russian civil society. About 350 activists ended a meeting of the so-called Civil G8 on March 10 after two days of discussions and an unprecedented meeting with all eight sherpas, or government point men, from the club of rich democracies. |
All photos from issue.
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With the funeral of Slobodan Milosevic scheduled to take place in Serbia on Saturday, a group of local communists has put forward a proposal to name one of the city’s streets after the controversial Serbian politician. The regional organization, named Communists of St. Petersburg, issued a statement on Wednesday calling for Belgradskaya Ulitsa in the south of the city to be renamed Ulitsa Slobodana Milosevica. |
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Ultra Star, owner of mobile phone retailer Ultra, is planning to raise between $20 million and $40 million to finance expansion, the company said Monday in a statement. The company plans to find a strategic investor to fund its growth from 200 to 500 shops by the end of the year, a move that would make Ultra one of the five largest mobile retailers in Russia, the company said. |
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Smolny has announced the construction of a 300,000 sq. meter office complex to house the national giants intent on registering in the city, vice-governor Alexander Vakhmistrov said at a press briefing Tuesday. |
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GM Plans ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — General Motors, the world’s largest automaker, plans to build a factory in St. Petersburg, joining rival Ford Motor Co. in manufacturing cars in Russia’s second-biggest city, Vedomosti said, citing city officials. |
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MOSCOW — U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman called Wednesday for renewed energy ties and new joint projects with Russia, saying he would push the Group of Eight energy ministers to liberalize markets as they began two days of talks in Moscow. |
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CALGARY, Alberta — Petro-Canada and Gazprom agreed on Tuesday to proceed with initial engineering on a liquefied natural-gas plant near St. Petersburg, worth up to $1.5 billion, that would supply Petro-Canada and other customers by 2010. The two companies will go ahead with preliminary engineering studies for the proposed Baltic gas liquefaction project to provide cost and timing for the plant, Petro-Canada said in a statement. |
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Tracking Oil BEIJING (Bloomberg) — Russia, the world’s largest energy producer, aims to increase crude oil exports 25 percent by rail to China this year to tap rising demand. |
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March is election time in three former Soviet republics. Many Russians went to the polls last weekend to vote in regional elections. Voters in Belarus will almost certainly hand Alexander Lukashenko a third term as president on Sunday. And finally, Ukraine will hold a national parliamentary election. |
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Say nothing of the dead but good.” This Roman dictum can, in English, be pronounced in a variety of ways — as most cynics know, you can say, “Say nothing of the dead but, ‘Good!’” Which is what the Russian political establishment should have said about the recently departed former president of Yugoslavia, accused war criminal Slobodan Milosevic. |
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 A reconstruction of a 19th-century French classic, a new cutting-edge piece set to music of Dmitry Shostakovich with the plot inspired by Nikolai Gogols’s “The Overcoat” and a delicious cocktail of the choreography of Marius Petipa, George Balanchine and William Forsythe are at the heart of the Sixth International Mariinsky Ballet Festival which opened Thursday with Pierre Lacotte’s revival of Jules Perrot 1843 “Ondine. |
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 The State Russian Museum two weeks ago opened, within just a day of each other, a couple of impressive exhbitions: one by the classical 20th century art figure Lucio Fontana (see page iv), and one by the young and promising art photographer Anastasia Khoroshilova. |
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John Cale’s concert last week was expected to be a straightforward rock and roll gig, judging by the Velvet Underground legend’s interviews and concert reviews, but in the event turned out to be disappointingly strained. In an account of rock musicians in their 60s, headlined “Sexagenarians, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll,” the British newspaper The Guardian last week singled out Cale as an “exception [to the rule of past-it musicians], having found a new lease of life playing ‘dirty-ass rock ‘n’ roll,’ as he calls it, in sweaty clubs, almost 40 years after changing the course of rock in his capacity as the viola player with the Velvet Underground.” Cale’s St. |
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 International artists may stop by St. Petersburg more often than they used to, but bands on the current British music scene are still an extremely rare sight in the city. |
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The 15th International Festival of Arts “From the Avant-garde to the Present Day,” running through March 25 at the Shostakovich Philharmonic, the Hermitage Theater, and the Sheremetyev Palace, is subtitled “Shostakovich’s Galaxy” this year. It’s in memory of Dmitry Shostakovich, a distinguished Russian composer whose centenary is celebrated this year. |
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Almost a year after the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Rovereto and Trento contributed to “Futurism. The Novecento. Abstraction. Italian Art of the 20th Century,” a hit show at the State Hermitage Museum, the Italian museum has continued the theme at the State Russian Museum with the new exhibition, “Lucio Fontana. |
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SYDNEY — U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice began a three-day trip to Australia on Thursday to thank one of America’s closest allies for keeping troops in Iraq and to discuss China’s emergence as an Asia-Pacific power. With sectarian violence rising in Iraq, the United States is anxious to retain as many foreign forces as it can there. |
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AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE BEIJING — President Hu Jintao has a message for Chinese who are greedy, lazy or unpatriotic: Be ashamed, be very ashamed. Hu’s list of eight do’s and don’t’s was unveiled during the meeting of parliament that ended this week. |
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AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE MELBOURNE — Australia’s superstar swimmers endured a nightmare start to the 18th Commonwealth Games as their dreams of a record gold medal haul suffered a devastating early blow. The host nation’s problems were then compounded when their weighlifting team found itself at the center of a drugs row leaving Asian lifters to seize the opportunity with a double gold strike. |
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INDIAN WELLS, California — Third seed Maria Sharapova overpowered Germany’s Anna-Lena Groenefeld 6-1 6-3 on Wednesday to reach a mouth-watering semi-final with Martina Hingis at the Pacific Life Open. |
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MOSCOW — One driver retired with mechanical trouble and the other finished 17th out of 18 in a reserve car Sunday in a season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix that drove home just how steep a learning curve Russia’s first team in Formula One history faces. While the established order of the Formula One world — Renault, Ferrari and McLaren-Mercedes — picked up where they left off last season by dominating the podium, Russian-owned Midland had made its baptism-of-fire debut in the world’s premier auto racing competition. |
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MOSCOW — She has been hailed as the queen of athletics and Russia’s newest sweetheart, but life does not get any easier for Olympic pole vault champion and world record holder Yelena Isinbayeva. |
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LONDON — Middlesbrough withstood a pulsating fightback from AS Roma to reach the UEFA Cup quarterfinals for the first time on Wednesday. Boro, 1-0 up from the first leg, doubled their advantage through Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink at the Olympic stadium before two goals from Brazilian Mancini set up a thrilling finale. |
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Issues Archive