|
|
|
|
Group of Eight leaders on Monday inched toward a breakthrough over global trade on Monday, Britain said, at the end of a big-power summit strained by divisions over the Middle East crisis.
After G8 leaders met key developing countries at the summit, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said there were signs of willingness to make the compromises needed to rescue a troubled world trade pact.
“Before we had our lunch discussion I was somewhat pessimistic,” said Blair. “I am less pessimistic now.”
The leaders of the United States, Germany, Brazil, India and the European Commission “spoke very strongly about the necessary flexibility being given to our negotiators” to rescue the Doha round, whose goal is to lift millions from poverty. |
|
GOODBYE G8!
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
The leaders of the Group of Eight nations wave outside the Konstantinovsky Palace on Sunday. (For more photos, see center pages.) The summit concluded Monday after a weekend designed to raise the international profile of St. Petersburg, although its political outcome was mixed. |
|
As heads-of-government from the Group of Eight nations and those from invited countries India, China, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico and Kazakhstan continued summit talks in St. Petersburg on Monday, the soccer stadium where a counter-summit had been planned was empty.
The Second Russian Social Forum, a protest event organized by antiglobalists jointly with political opposition forces to coincide with the G8 summit, wound up Sunday with many of its aims left frustrated by an intense security clampdown in the city and across Russia.
|
|
MOSCOW — Prosecutors in the Andrei Sychyov case ran into trouble Friday when one key witness recanted earlier testimony and a second skipped town despite having received a summons to appear in court.
Sychyov, a first-year conscript serving at the Chelyabinsk Armor Academy, was the victim of a brutal hazing incident in January that left him with gangrene in his feet and legs. |
|
MOSCOW — Central Elections Commission chief Alexander Veshnyakov made headlines last week when he openly criticized a number of Kremlin-sponsored changes in the country’s election laws. |
All photos from issue.
|
|
|
|
|
International charities expressed disappointment at the outcome of the G8 summit on Monday, accusing the prestigious club of failing to maintain a coherent policy and respect its own past commitments regarding humanitarian issues, including poverty and infections diseases. |
|
Statements signed Sunday by Group of Eight leaders broke with decades of tradition by acknowledging deep-rooted divisions — over President Vladimir Putin’s key issue of energy security, among others — in the consensus-driven group. |
|
Russia has an opportunity to significantly boost its relations with Europe after Finland assumed the six-months EU presidency July 1, according to the Finnish prime minister Matti Vanhanen, who was speaking at a press briefing in St. Petersburg last week. |
|
Communists, nationalists, anarchists, AIDS activists and anti-globalists held marches, rallies and a rock concert over the weekend in a motley mesh of angry, sometimes violent protests as G8 leaders convened in a nearby palace. |
|
U.S. President George W. Bush met with some of President Vladimir Putin’s most persistent critics Friday, in a signal of concern to his uneasy ally about the tenuous state of Russian democracy.
The pro-democracy and civil society advocates at the Friday meeting, held at the U. |
|
President Vladimir Putin, who likes to show off his vintage cars when President George W. Bush visits, clearly liked the golf carts that Bush rolled out for the G8 leaders to drive at the 2004 summit on Sea Island, Georgia, for the white electric carts have made a repeat appearance here on the Gulf of Finland. |
|
A meeting of the representatives of the Junior 8 youth forum and the G8 leaders took place Sunday at the Konstantinovsky Palace, with delegates presenting the J8’s “Address to the Leaders.”
The document was the result of a week-long conference of young representatives of G8 nations
Russian delegate Tatiana Ushakova, a 17-year old student from Yekaterinburg, and seven of her peers from the other G8 countries, Kristina Abretti (Canada), Xavier Attwell (France), Sophie Harrison (U. |
|
|
|
|
Running the G8 summit cost Russia 10.7 billion rubles ($397 million), according to official data, Interfax reported. The federal government spent 3.2 billion rubles ($119 million) directly on preparing and running the event in St. Petersburg.
Apart from preparing the Konstantinovsky Palace and hosting foreign delegations, considerable funds were spent on various sites constructed in St. |
|
Three foreign oil companies and a mystery buyer snapped up 49 percent of Rosneft’s $10.4 billion initial public offering Friday, giving the state oil firm an implied value of nearly $80 billion. |
|
MOSCOW — Evraz, the country’s top steelmaker, clinched a deal to buy 79 percent of a South Africa-based vanadium producer, the world’s largest maker of the metal, the company said Friday.
Evraz, partly owned by billionaire Roman Abramovich, will pay $678 million to acquire Highveld Steel & Vanadium from Anglo American, bringing its global share of vanadium production to about 30 percent. |
|
Rosneft’s IPO exceeded expectations when the state oil firm announced a share price of $7.55, giving the entire company a sky-high sticker price of nearly $80 billion. |
|
TOKYO — Japanese electronics giant Matsushita will produce flat-panel TV sets in Russia and Brazil this year to meet growing demand there, a report said.
The major business daily Nihon Keizai Shimbun also said that Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. |
|
Russia and the United States failed to reach agreement on Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization over the weekend, despite a major push by both sides to get an accord signed in time for the G8 summit. |
|
Local businesspeople eager to sort out good personnel from the bad proposed regular state certification of specialists, while the authorities suggested increasing the number of committees as a remedy for the current crisis in the labor market.
Last week, the Rosbalt press center held a round table on labor deficit. |
|
In their search for new clients, local banks are expanding the promotion of their financial services on the web. Last week, FinNews.ru introduced a new service offering online applications for mortgage loans. |
|
MOSCOW — Alcohol ads are good for democracy and alcoholism doesn’t hurt the economy — or at least that’s what Russia’s alcohol lobby would have you believe.
Forced into a corner by a string of damaging legal changes, apologists for some of the country’s top spirit producers went on the offensive Thursday with some interesting arguments about why lawmakers should give alcohol producers a break. |
|
The region’s major landline telephone operator Northwest Telecom doubled net profit last year in comparison with 2004, earning 1.41 billion rubles ($52. |
|
TOKYO — Economists applauded the Bank of Japan’s interest rate increase, the first in six years, as a long-awaited signal that Japan’s $4.6 trillion economy is finally getting back on track.
They said that by moving pre-emptively Friday, long before a return of inflation was likely to became a threat, the central bank was also hoping to demonstrate that it was watching prices carefully, and was therefore up to the task of stewarding Japan’s economy, the world’s second-largest after the United States. |
|
LOS ANGELES — Is the bubble about to burst — again?
Investment in Internet companies has climbed so steeply since the dot-com crash of 2000 that some Silicon Valley veterans worry too much money is again pouring into too many unproven, unprofitable ideas — setting the stage for another high-tech shakeout. |
|
Oil Prices Reach $78
WASHINGTON (Associated Press) — The price of oil briefly surpassed $78 per barrel Friday and finished four percent higher for the week after Israeli attacks against militants in Lebanon stoked fears of a wider Middle East conflict and possible oil-supply disruption.
The run-up in oil raised concerns about inflation and the economy at large, sending stock prices tumbling. |
|
|
|
|
AIDS continues to kill 8,000 people around the world each day. More than 38 million people are now living with HIV, with an increasing number of new infections among women and girls. Only one in five people living with HIV have access to prevention and treatment services. |
|
Ahead of the G8 summit in St. Petersburg, the nagging question was whether Russia under President Vladimir Putin was free enough to deserve a place alongside the world’s leading industrial democracies. |
|
Over and over, the Bush regime and its media apologists have peddled the same mendacious line in defense of their war crime in Iraq: “We’re fighting the terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.” But in fact the occupation is breeding a cadre of vicious terrorists intent on bringing death and destruction back home to America’s streets, using the deadly skills they’ve learned — in the U. |
|
|
|
|
BEIRUT — Lebanon shook under a new wave of air raids Monday after Israel vowed a fierce response to Hezbollah guerrilla attacks with no sign of a let-up in a conflict that has killed about 200 people in six days.
At least 21 people, including Lebanese soldiers, were killed as fighter jets slammed missiles into the port of Beirut, a military base in the northern city of Tripoli, and Baalbek, a Hezbollah stronghold in the east. |
|
GAZA CITY — Israel has bombed the Palestinian foreign ministry in Gaza for the second time in a week, demolishing the building Monday and tightening the noose on the Hamas-led government three weeks after the capture of a soldier. |
|
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Seven Canadians from the same Montreal family, including four young children, were killed in Lebanon on Sunday when Israeli aircraft bombed a house in the south of the country, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation said.
A Canadian foreign ministry spokeswoman confirmed the deaths and said three people were hurt. |
|
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Dozens of heavily armed attackers raided an open air market Monday in a tense town south of Baghdad, killing at least 41 people and wounding 42, police and hospital officials said. |
|
JAKARTA, Indonesia — A tsunami triggered by a strong undersea earthquake off the southern coast of Java island swept away buildings at an Indonesian beach resort on Monday and killed nearly 40 people, an official and media reports said.
The news spread panic across a region still recovering from a tsunami less than two years ago that left nearly 230,000 people killed or missing, mostly in Indonesia. |
|
JUBA, Sudan — Ugandan negotiators at talks to end one of Africa’s longest wars demanded on Sunday that Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels disarm and hand over all their weapons in order to receive amnesty. |
|
BERLIN — Berlin’s “Love Parade” returned on Saturday with around half a million revelers attending the gigantic techno-music party on the streets of the German capital a mere one week after the end of the soccer World Cup.
Dancers wore elaborate costumes or gyrated in their under-garments to deafening bass rhythms produced by disc jockeys on giant flat-bed trucks riding along a 3-km (2 mile) stretch near the Tiergarten Park and Brandenburg Gate. |
|
London Police Go Free
LONDON (AFP) — Prosecutors have decided not to charge individual police officers with criminal offenses for killing a Brazilian man they mistook for a suicide bomber last year, television stations have said. |
|
|
|
|
LOS ANGELES, California — The last time the British Open was played at Royal Liverpool Golf Club, Doug Sanders was 29 when he showed up at Hoylake, England, for the 1967 championship. What Sanders remembers most are the steaks.
“Black-eyed peas, corn bread, turnip greens and big ol’ steaks,” he said. |
|
LONDON — Belgium will be the favorite to win the Fed Cup for the second time after reaching its second final on Sunday with a 4-1 victory over a weakened U. |
|
GAP, France — Frenchman Pierrick Fedrigo emerged strongest at the end of a 145-kilometer breakaway to win the 14th stage of the Tour de France on Sunday.
The 2005 French champion had avoided a three-man crash three-quarters of the way through and then outsprinted Italian Salvatore Commesso in a nail-biting finish. |
Temp: -2°C moderate or heavy snow showers
Issues Archive