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WASHINGTON — The United States is trying to intensify world diplomatic pressure on Russia and Georgia to ease tension before it spirals out of control, a senior U.S. official said.The U.S. State Department's key person on Europe, Dan Fried, said he made clear in recent visits to Russia and Georgia that tensions must be lowered. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice delivered the same message while in Russia one week ago.
"Our immediate focus now is in avoiding some blowup," Fried said Friday.
Tensions are high after Georgia briefly detained four purported Russian spies last month. Moscow responded with a sweeping transport and postal blockade on Georgia and a crackdown on Georgian migrants living in Russia. |
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TIDE UP
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A fisherman angling on the Neva River opposite the Peter and Paul Fortress on Saturday during what meteorologists have said is the 300th flood in St. Petersburg since records began. Weather forecasters are predicting snowfall for the rest of the week, with lows of minus 6 degrees Celsius. |
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What is on your shopping list if you have a million or two to spare? How about a 300 euro toaster or a house on a desert island or even the island itself? Or maybe a $1.4 million car?Millionaires, billionaires and those with just 1,000 rubles to their name were some of the tens of thousands of visitors to the second Millionaire Fair at Crocus City.
The four-day fair, which ended Monday, featured 250 stands touting high-end real estate, baldness cures and every other luxury that might appeal to Russia's growing millionaire market.
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The House of Veterans of the Stage, occupied by retired actors, will not be put in the hands of developers, St. Petersburg Governor Valentina Matviyenko said Saturday, Interfax reported, resolving a long-standing dispute.According to its agreement with the Union of Theater Workers, the building's owner, Systema-Hals, the real estate division of the Moscow-based Sistema financial corporation, was to reconstruct the building in exchange for acquiring a section of the adjacent park on which it planned to build an elite residential complex, Interfax reported. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Natural Resources Minister Yury Trutnev — the scourge of foreign energy investors — earned more than any other Cabinet member last year and 22 times more than British Prime Minister Tony Blair.Transportation Minister Igor Levitin and IT and Communications Minister Leonid Reiman placed second and third, while Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref came in last. |
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Russia over the weekend became possibly the first country in history with a two-party system in which both parties share the same overriding principle — that the executive is always right. |
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ALMATY, Kazakhstan — It felt like I had been chewing for days, yet the plate of stewed horse, lamb and unidentified liver, served on a bed of greasy dough, appeared to be getting no smaller.Determined to prove to the local officials hosting a group of foreign reporters that I would not spurn the Kazakh national dish, beshbarmak, I chomped on. |
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Demand for mortgages fell last month for the first time in years, banks said. For some, excessively high mortgage prices squashed any hope of purchasing an apartment, while other potential homeowners chose to wait out the price boom in hope of a downturn. |
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Dozens of people have died and more than a thousand have been hospitalized from an alcohol poisoning epidemic across the country that was spawned by the government's crackdown on counterfeit wines and spirits.The latest reports of mass poisoning with toxic alcohol have come from the town of Balashov in the Saratov region. |
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Air MergernST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The Rossia state transport company has completed the reorganization of Pulkovo state unitary aviation company, Prime-TASS reported Friday. |
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President Vladimir Putin invited foreign bankers and oil executives to his Novo-Ogaryovo residence Friday night to thank them for helping pull off Rosneft's IPO.Noting that July's initial public offering was the world's largest in the oil and gas sector, Putin suggested that the foreign partners had done the right thing by taking part. |
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MOSCOW — Natural Resources Minister Yury Trutnev struck a conciliatory note with Shell's Sakhalin-2 project Friday, saying he was not seeking to shut it down and acknowledging that the operator had made some progress in cleaning up environmental damage. |
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Mordashov Plansn CHEREOPOVETS Bloomberg) —Russian billionaire Alexei Mordashov plans to raise as much as $1.88 billion by selling shares in Severstal, Russia's biggest steelmaker by sales.Mordashov plans to offer global depositary receipts in the Cherepovets, Russia-based company for between $11 and $13. |
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WASHINGTON — Russia surpassed the United States in 2005 as the leader in weapons deals with the developing world, and its new agreements included selling $700 million in surface-to-air missiles to Iran and eight new aerial refueling tankers to China, according to a new congressional study. |
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An unusual direction is developing in the St. Petersburg market of content services for mobile phones — content kiosks. At the moment one can download the latest content to ones mobile in more than 15 places across the city, including cafes, cinemas, large trade centers and shops. |
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TOKYO — Nintendo plans to launch its videogame business in Russia later this year, competing with Sony and Microsoft in a growth market, business daily Nihon Keizai Shimbun said on Sunday. |
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Freshly-made capitalism has changed our habits and lifestyle. It's hard to imagine that just 15 years ago there were only a few types of bread on sale at the bakers, and procuring any cheese at all was a cause for celebration. I remember queuing for hours in the winter of 1991 for basics like meat or milk. |
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Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller's announcement earlier this month that the huge Shtokman gas field in the Barents Sea would be developed without the participation of foreign partners, and that its production would be sold exclusively to Europe, sent shock waves through the investment community. |
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In his annual call-in show, President Vladimir Putin again stood front and center as a leader, the person who ultimately answers for what is happening in the country. Unless, of course, something is not going well — in which case it is either someone else's fault or beyond anyone's control.That, at least, was the message that Putin delivered Wednesday. |
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Fifty years ago Soviet tanks entered Budapest. The commemoration of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 should have been both a somber and a celebratory moment for Europe. Hungary is now free, democratic and a member of the European Union. But ask many Western European politicians about political events in Central Europe and you will find that the mood is one of concern rather than celebration. |
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Hollywood's policies are not the United States' foreign policy — nor should they be — and the U.S. trade agenda is not the same as the entertainment industry's. |
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The call came late on a Friday night, summoning us from our restaurant table to the Georgian Foreign Ministry for a midnight press briefing. An unusual time, perhaps, but then these have been unusual times in Tbilisi. Georgian Foreign Minister Gela Bezhuashvili wanted to fire off some instant reaction to President Vladimir Putin's suggestion that Georgia was preparing for bloodshed in the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. |
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It is no secret that there is considerable corruption and bribery in Russian higher education. What I personally find most disturbing, after more than a decade in Russian universities, is that no one has yet bothered to offer me a bribe worthy of the name. |
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LONDON — Britain issued a call for urgent action on climate change on Monday after a hard-hitting report painted an apocalyptic picture of the economic and environmental fallout from further global warming.The report said failing to tackle climate change could push world temperatures up by 5 degrees Celsius (9 Fahrenheit) over the next century, causing severe floods and harsh droughts and potentially uprooting as many as 200 million people. |
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LOS ANGELES — No one was buying hell on Friday — or at least its red-hot web address.HELL.com was among hundreds of Internet domain names up for auction in Hollywood, Florida, by domain asset management provider Moniker. |
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SAN FRANCISCO — As Aaron Strickler sees things, the world would be better off if others could see him having sex on film."Filming sex is fun and bringing joy and levity to other people is the biggest thing we can do in this life," he said before he premiered a short film of explicit footage in a split-screen, black-and-white format. |
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SYDNEY — Australian scientists unveiled three test-tube koala joeys on Monday as part of an artificial insemination program to preserve the vulnerable mammal. |
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KINSHASA — Counting from Congo's election proceeded swiftly on Monday but thousands of ballot papers were burnt in the east after a soldier killed two election officials.International monitors and diplomats expressed satisfaction about the presidential run-off and provincial elections across the huge central African country on Sunday and said trouble was confined to isolated incidents. |
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DAKAR — Chadian rebels who fought government forces over the last week, briefly seizing two towns, said on Monday they were still inside Chad and would strike again against President Idriss Deby's army. |
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KHAR, Pakistan — Pakistani army helicopters killed around 80 suspected militants on Monday in a dawn attack on a religious school run by a pro-Taliban commander wanted for harboring al Qaeda fighters, a military spokesman said.The army said the religious school or madrasa in Chenagai, 10 km (six miles) north of Khar, the main town in the Bajaur tribal region bordering Afghanistan, was being used as a militant training camp. |
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PARIS — Sebastien Loeb claimed his third consecutive world title on Sunday, but the Frenchman knows it was far from plain sailing.The Citroen driver, who has won a record 28 career victories, was crowned champion after Finnish rival Marcus Gronholm failed to make it onto the podium at the Rally of Australia at the weekend. |
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LINZ, Austria — Top seed Maria Sharapova won her second WTA tournament in a week, defeating Russian compatriot Nadia Petrova 7-5, 6-2 in the final.Sharapova defeated Daniela Hantuchova in three sets to win the Zurich title last Sunday and her win in Austria will give her favourite status for the WTA Tour Championships in Madrid in the second week of November. |
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LONDON — As many as 11 clubs could secure a place in the knockout round of the Champions League this week if all the results went the way of the favourites when Matchday Four is played on Tuesday and Wednesday.Teams like Chelsea (Group A), Bayern Munich (Group B), Valencia (Group D), Olympique Lyon (Group E) and Manchester United (Group F) all have one foot in the door after winning their opening three matches and it would take an unlikely loss of form as well as a series of unlikely results to stop them advancing now. |
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SOTOGRANDE, Spain — Irishman Padraig Harrington won the European order of merit title in dramatic style after finishing joint second at the Volvo Masters on Sunday just a stroke behind India's Jeev Milkha Singh. |
Temp: -2°C moderate or heavy snow showers
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