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TEL AVIV — Waving colorful banners and singing protest songs, a tireless band of Israeli demonstrators is trying to end the war in Lebanon.
Few are taking notice.
“We understand we don’t represent the consensus. Everyone is asleep,” said Uri Even-Chen, 36, a computer programmer from the town of Ranana, during a weekend street march in Tel Aviv.
Opinion polls show an overwhelming majority of Israelis back the war against Hezbollah, sparked when the guerrillas abducted two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on July 12.
The death, damage and panic caused by Hezbollah’s rockets have only hardened attitudes — more than 2,700 missiles have slammed into northern Israel, killing 48 people. |
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Sergei Karpukhin / Reuters
Deputy head of Russia's heritage watchdog Anatoly Vilkov presents an artifact stolen from the Hermitage Museum and returned to the state in Moscow on Monday. |
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Three people were detained over the weekend in connection with the massive theft from the State Hermitage Museum, but the police are reluctant to give details.
The Interfax news agency, citing an unidentified official which the agency described as a “source very close to the investigation,” said the police detained an art collector as well as the husband and son of Hermitage curator Larisa Zavadskaya.
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Early on a Friday evening deep in dacha season, a couple of dozen people slowly drift into a non-descript office block, tucked away between a Coffee House and a S’barro. You would never know the small Sha’rei Shalom synagogue was here.
Anya, 21, has recently decided to start coming here instead of the Choral synagogue. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — The number of alcohol-related deaths declined in the first five months of 2006 thanks to new registration procedures in the alcoholic beverages industry, Gennady Onishchenko, the country's chief epidemiologist, said Friday.
Alcohol poisoning claimed 1,800 fewer lives in the period from January through May than during the same period last year, said Onishchenko, who heads the Health and Social Development Ministry's Federal Consumer Protection Service. |
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KIEV — Viktor Yanukovych was approved as Ukraine’s new prime minister Friday, and he immediately declared his intention to improve the country’s strained relationship with Russia. |
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MOSCOW — After just one month on the job, the new chief military prosecutor, Sergei Fridinsky, announced on Friday a dramatic decline in the number of suicides and hazing-related deaths in the armed forces.
Speaking at a meeting of top military prosecutors attended by Prosecutor General Yury Chaika and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, Fridinsky said the number of suicides among military personnel was down 10 percent in the first half of the year, while the number of hazing-related deaths fell by 28 percent. |
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MOSCOW — Russian criminal police in the capital are trying to track down two huge safes containing classified documents that had been removed from its offices by mistake as scrap metal, Kommersant daily newspaper reported on Monday. |
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The United States has slapped sanctions on state arms trader Rosoboronexport and jetmaker Sukhoi, accusing them of helping Iran acquire weapons of mass destruction.
Officials in Moscow reacted angrily, criticizing Washington for attempting “to impose U. |
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Killings and disappearances in Chechnya have dropped by more than one-third in the past year, human rights group Memorial said in an annual report. But the group cautioned that the fall might be due to a growing climate of fear in which people are afraid to report crimes. |
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Military prosecutors in the Far Eastern region of Khabarovsk are investigating the possible theft of about $50,000 worth of diesel fuel from a secret nuclear weapons storage facility.
Colonel Yury Navrotsky, the commander of a military unit at the facility, is being accused by the unit’s chief accountant, Major Yury Shashkov, of stealing the fuel in 2004 and 2005, Kommersant reported late last week. |
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Prior to the adoption of a bill on extremism last month, human rights activists had worried that the first targets would be outspoken opposition groups and media organizations. |
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MOSCOW — After the botched implementation of electronic tracking to eradicate bootleg liquor, the authorities are considering using a similar system to combat counterfeit medicines.
Yet, such a crackdown could be extremely dangerous if bungled, say experts in the country’s $8 billion pharmaceutical industry. |
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The UFG Private Equity Fund has acquired a 40 percent stake in St. Petersburg-based tobacco producer Nevo Tabak. The fund intends to pour $100 million into company development, Interfax reported Friday. |
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Last week the Russian government assigned three projects financing from the state investment fund — one of them was the Orlovsky tunnel under the Neva river.
“The first package of investment agreements is ready. We will not consider other projects until September,” Interfax cited German Gref, minister for economic development and trade, as saying Thursday. |
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MOSCOW — Russian state gas monopoly Gazprom and Italian energy giant ENI are in talks to build a 2.5-billion-dollar natural gas liquefaction plant near Saint Petersburg, ENI CEO Paolo Scaroni said in an interview. |
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MOSCOW — Billionaire Suleiman Kerimov’s investment company Nafta-Moskva has emerged as a possible white knight for Yukos and has held talks with former Yukos CEO Steven Theede about taking over the company’s debts, Kommersant reported Friday.
Nafta-Moskva denied the report, which quoted sources close to Yukos’ creditors. |
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MOSCOW — The Central Bank raised its short-term interest rates by a half-point Friday, taking advantage of tightening global monetary conditions to try and curb inflationary money supply growth. |
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Gazprom and LUKoil signed memorandums of understanding Friday with Algerian state company Sonatrach as they seek more joint oil and gas projects.
The Industry and Energy Ministry said Gazprom and Sonatrach agreed to cooperate in upstream asset swaps, joint bidding for assets in third countries and in the liquefied natural gas business, in which Sonatrach is a leading player. |
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As might be expected, there’s more to opening a business in Russia than meets the eye. When six-year resident of St. Petersburg, Mike Sherman, opened his English-language school and translation company, he grappled with Russian bureaucracy at every corner. |
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MOSCOW — Russia’s real estate market is becoming cleaner as more developers adopt Western practices a new global report by Jones Lang LaSalle says, classifying Russia alongside EU member states Greece and the Czech Republic as “semi-transparent.”
While the difficulty in measuring market transparency gives the report a certain subjectivity, the report accurately reflects a significant maturing of Russian real estate, analysts said. |
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MOSCOW — The real estate arm of Morgan Stanley has made its first foray into the Russian market by buying 10 percent of developer RosEuroDevelopment, the U. |
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Stockmann Store
MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Stockmann, a Finnish department store operator, plans to invest 12 million euros ($15.4 million) in opening its fifth store in Moscow.
The store will be located in the Metropolis shopping center, which is being built in central Moscow, the Helsinki-based company said Sunday in a statement. |
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Independence no longer makes sense, at least on the city’s fuel market — the consolidation of petrol station operators seems inevitable. Last week the Peterburgskaya Toplivnaya Companiya (PTK) gave the clearest sign yet of this inexorable process. |
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Last week, the Finance Ministry began investing money from the stabilization fund, thus putting the finishing touches on the fund itself. This, therefore, seems as good a time as any to address the nature of the fund and how it is managed. How successful has the first stage of its existence been? What changes will the initial distribution of petrodollars from the fund bring?
It’s not hard to understand the interest the stabilization fund has created, given that its value works out to more than $500 for every Russian. |
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The UN Security Council issued another ultimatum to Iran July 31: Give up on your nuclear weapons program by Aug. 31 — or we’ll hold yet another meeting to discuss your fate. |
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On Friday, Viktor Yanukovych was confirmed as prime minister by the Ukrainian parliament, more than four months after elections to the body had been held. The process could have moved faster but, given the election outcome, the government is about as good as anybody could have hoped for. |
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As I was driving to meet a few friends the other night, I noticed a banner advertising a chain of Georgian restaurants. “There is no water and no wine, but we’ve managed to preserve the taste of our food,” the rhyming banner boasted. |
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Like a gang of twitchy hit men afraid they’ve botched the job, the Bush regime is creeping back to the scene of the crime: the Congressional backrooms where they thought they’d put the kibosh on the American Republic once and for all.
But it seems there is still a flicker of life in the victim, and thus a threat that the gangsters might have to pay the piper somewhere down the line. |
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MOSCOW — Speaking English with a thick German accent, Adolf Winter occasionally slips into his native tongue as he tries to fathom why Russia declared him a threat to national security.
Winter, an Austrian businessman whose firm sells small gas engines, speculated that he was barred because a bureaucrat didn’t want to return 1 million euros in value-added tax. |
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Three months after then-President Boris Yeltsin named Vladimir Putin as prime minister, a steady stream of foreigners connected with nongovernmental groups and media organizations began having their Russian visas denied. |
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BEIRUT — Israeli warplanes have launched a new wave of bombing raids on Lebanon, killing 14 civilians and turning homes to rubble, after the Jewish state suffered its deadliest day since the conflict began.
At least one Israeli soldier was also killed in battles with Hezbollah guerrillas around a flashpoint border town, with no signs of a let-up in almost four weeks of fighting that has killed well over 1,000 people. |
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CAIRO — Iran’s chief national security official said Sunday that Iran would defy the United Nations Security Council by refusing to halt enrichment of uranium by the end of the month. |
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ROME — Madonna staged a mock-crucifixion in the Italian capital on Sunday, ignoring a storm of protest and accusations of blasphemy from the Roman Catholic Church.
In a sold-out stadium just a mile from Vatican City, the lapsed-Catholic diva wore a fake crown of thorns as she was raised on a glittery cross during the Rome stop of her worldwide “Confessions Tour. |
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SAN DIEGO, Californa — Second-seeded Maria Sharapova beat Kim Clijsters 7-5, 7-5, taking her first triumph in five tries over the Belgian top seed to win a $1.34 million-WTA hardcourt event.
The defeat snapped a 24-match North American summer hardcourt unbeaten streak for Clijsters, the reigning U. |
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MOSCOW — Former Russia manager Yuri Syomin quit as Dynamo Moscow coach following a 3-0 thrashing by city rivals Torpedo in a Russian premier league derby on Friday. |
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Davydenko Wins
SOPOT, Poland (Reuters) — Russian top seed Nikolai Davydenko captured his second title of the season with a 7-6 5-7 6-4 win over unseeded German Florian Mayer in the Polish Open final on Sunday.
Davydenko squandered two match points in the second set as Mayer stormed back from a set and 5-1 down to take the match into a decider. |
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BUDAPEST — Russia’s Gleb Galperin claimed his second diving gold of the European swimming championships when he won the platform title on Sunday.
Galperin, who partnered Dmitry Dobroskok to victory in the synchronised platform event on Saturday, compiled 472. |
Temp: -2°C moderate or heavy snow showers
Issues Archive