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MOSCOW — Thinking of jetting down to Sochi for a week for some rest and relaxation this summer? If you’re a foreigner and you want to spare your employer from a possible $30,000 fine, you’d better make sure the government knows you’re leaving town. According to a new law that came into effect Jan. 15, foreigners are now required to hand over their registration papers to migration officials — via their employer or other sponsor — every time they leave the country and re-register upon subsequent entry into the country. But the law is steeped in vagaries. Visa agencies say foreigners could incur heavy fines for their employers if they neglect to inform them of even a short trip out of town. |
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Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A blower being used to clear snow by the Grand Hotel Europe in the center of St. Petersburg on Monday. Following heavy snowfall over the weekend, weather forecasters are predicting a drop in temperature to as low as minus 21 deg. C. |
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MOSCOW — Russian prosecutors on Monday brought a series of new charges against Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a move likely to bury the politically ambitious tycoon’s hopes of release from imprisonment before 2008 presidential elections. Khodorkovksy, the founder of the Yukos oil major who is already serving an eight-year sentence for fraud and tax evasion, will now be tried on money-laundering charges, his lawyer said.
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Two dark-skinned foreigners were attacked in separate incidents on Sunday and are now undergoing medical treatment in local hospitals. Both attacks took place at stations on the same Metro line within less than a hour of each other on Sunday afternoon. At about 1 p.m., police received a call from a witness of the first incident, which took place at Politechnicheskaya Metro Station. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Officials said Friday that electricity had been fully restored to hundreds of thousands of homes after winter weather led to power outages in the Black Sea resort that is bidding to host the 2014 Winter Olympics. High winds and heavy snowfalls pulled down power lines across Sochi, located at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains in a nearly 150-kilometer stretch of coastline, cutting electricity supplies to the 400,000 residents of the city. Officials earlier in the week said electricity had been restored in full, but the lights went out a second time, snarling traffic, bringing business to a halt and fraying nerves in the seaside region. Regional emergency officials said Friday that workers had fully restored power supplies to the area, but warned that heavy snowfalls would continue. |
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Sergei Karpukhin / Reuters
Dogs pull a sled along a race track during a training session outside Moscow on Sunday. The Russian team is training for the European dog sled Championships in Slovakia. |
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MOSCOW — Law enforcement agents in the Urals have uncovered a mass grave containing the remains of up to 30 girls and women kidnapped and forced to work as prostitutes before being killed, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported Friday. The grave was found outside the small town of Levikha, situated between the cities of Nizhny Tagil and Yekaterinburg. Eight men aged 25 to 46 have been detained and charged with murder.
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MOSCOW — Three men convicted of helping pull off the 2004 metro bombings that killed more than 50 people were sentenced Friday to life in prison by the Moscow City Court. Murat Shavayev, Maxim Ponaryin and Tamby Khubiyev were found guilty of murder, terrorism and other charges for their roles in organizing the two bombings. |
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St. Petersburg’s water and sewage monopoly has taken up the challenge of meeting about half the city’s demand for new, permanent public toilets within three months, Vodokanal announced. |
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MOSCOW — The Prosecutor General’s Office said Sunday that it hoped to receive permission as early as next week to send investigators to Britain to probe the poisoning death of former security agent Alexander Litvinenko. Prosecutors want to question Kremlin critic and self-exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky, among others. |
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Ski Race Back On ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The St. Petersburg stage of “the country’s biggest winter competition,” a mass cross-country skiing race (Lyzhnya Rossii) will finally start Sunday in the Leningrad Oblast after having been rescheduled a number of times as a result of unsuitable weather conditions, Rosbalt news agency reported. |
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MOSCOW — The mood at the Cheryomushkinsky market in southwest Moscow, normally a buzzing Oriental bazaar with a hubbub of diverse accents from the Caucasus and Central Asia, is subdued: One-third of the stalls stand empty. Some Uzbeks and Azeris, former traders, wander about aimlessly, and the rows of luscious fruits and the spicy aromas that used to be a permanent feature here have all but disappeared. |
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U.S. coffee giant Starbucks has announced plans to open its first coffee shops in Russia later this year. This summer ten coffee shops will start operating in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Bloomberg news agency reported last week. The stores’ franchisee will be Kuwaiti retailer M.H. Alshaya. “We’ll start opening our first stores in Moscow and St. Petersburg in August, then review expansion plans every six months,” Bloomberg cited Mohammed Alshaya, CEO of M.H. Alshaya, as saying. At the end of the last year Jim Donald, Starbucks CEO, said the chain would add 2,400 stores worldwide in 2007. The firm’s target is to attain a total of 40,000 stores around the world. |
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 A union representing workers at the Ford plant in the Leningrad Oblast is to go on strike again this week, Interfax reported Friday. Union head Alexei Etmanov hopes this radical step will force the company’s administration to increase wages. |
 The ruble’s real value is 15.2 to the dollar, according to The Economist’s annual Big Mac index. The index is a simple approach to calculating purchasing power parity by accounting for the strength of individual currencies by pegging them to the cost of a single Big Mac sandwich. |
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Retired U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Michael McConnell told his Senate confirmation hearing that he would focus more attention on Russia and on the risks of foreign-oil dependence as U. |
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MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin will meet with the country’s top business leaders next week to discuss how to diversify the economy away from oil and gas, in a meeting tentatively scheduled for Tuesday. Putin is due to talk with a group of about 20 leading members of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, or RSPP, a day before it celebrates its 15th anniversary Wednesday. “The talk will focus on churning out products with high added value,” an official familiar with the RSPP plans said Friday. The official, who requested anonymity because he said the event had yet to be confirmed, said the businessmen hoped to secure Putin’s support as they pursue that task. |
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 MOSCOW — Alrosa’s president said Friday that he would step down, fueling speculation that the state was preparing to take control of the metals industry and turn Alrosa into a state mining giant. |
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MOSCOW — News that the GDP grew a healthy 6.7 percent in 2006 met with as much anxiety as cheer among analysts, who said the economy got lucky last year with the oil price but is not diverse enough to stay ahead if that luck runs out next year. Reaching $981 billion, gross domestic product climbed almost one-third of a percent faster in 2006 than it did the previous year, according to preliminary data released Wednesday by the State Statistics Service. |
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Pavel Stogar is what one might call an authentic entrepreneur. He might not have studied the first principles of economics, but that did not stop him, at the age of 16, launching his first business. |
 MOSCOW — In a city starved for winter light, little could seem more out of a place than this: On a day dimmed to gray by a canopy of clouds, Russian workers in short sleeves picking green lettuce and fresh herbs, all while illuminated by brilliant light. This is the strange late-January scene at Agrokombinat Moskovsky, a maze of greenhouses at Moscow’s southwestern edge conceived by the Communist Party under Leonid Brezhnev in 1969. |
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Sometimes free choice is pure illusion as well as a market force. Several years ago the old ugly water heating equipment in my apartment was replaced with something brand-new. It was produced by a German company with more than a hundred years of history, and was pretty expensive, so I was confident that my problems with warm water would be alleviated, if not for a century then at least for a decade. The state-of-the-art technology broke twice within four years. The second time was particularly disappointing because it was the most crucial part and could only be replaced by authorized staff. While most companies provide technical assistance almost around the clock, seven days a week, authorized ones don’t venture beyond business hours, something particularly inconvenient for me as well as for many of their clients, I would suggest. |
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 President Vladimir Putin’s administration has introduced a bill to the State Duma calling for the creation of a national development bank to stimulate economic growth by attracting more investment to the economy and increasing the effectiveness of investment already in place. |
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The Sakhalin-2 integrated oil and gas project is the world’s largest, operated by the Sakhalin Energy Investment Co., with Shell as one of its shareholders and technical adviser to the project. With a budget of $20 billion, the project represents the largest foreign investment project in the country’s history. |
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Korean Exchange SEOUL (Bloomberg) — Korea Exchange Bank, controlled by Dallas-based Lone Star Funds, aims to start operations in countries such as India and Russia. Korea Exchange Bank plans to open about 10 offices in these and other countries, the Seoul-based company said in an e-mailed statement Monday. |
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 I confess I was afflicted by a profound world-weariness following the release Friday of the latest gloomy machinations from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The United Nation’s global warming caravansary, founded in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, had this time pitched camp in Paris in order to issue the “Summary for Policy Makers” relating to Working Group One of its “Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007. |
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Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko has given his administration the assignment of replacing the $3.5 billion its economy lost as a result of higher prices for gas and crude oil from Russia. |
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After Moscow and Kiev managed to settle their dispute over prices for Russian gas deliveries at the beginning of last year, a concerted effort was made by the Russian side to portray the whole imbroglio as an anomaly. But the New Year’s holidays again brought another energy standoff — this time with Belarus over oil and gas prices — and the realization that showdowns between Russia and its closest neighbors over energy resources have likely become the normal state of affairs. |
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Not long ago, the London-based Russian novelist Zinovy Zinik speculated in the quarterly journal Kriticheskaya Massa on Western writers’ fascination with “wicked Russia,” concluding that it rested ultimately on envy: “For holding the wrong views in Russia you could be exiled to Siberia or executed, but the poet’s status as a superior being who conversed with tsars (and accordingly possessed real political power) was never in question. |
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In “The People’s Act of Love,” author James Meek has all the ingredients for an energetic adventure novel. Yet he does not write one. Demonstrating the speediness of the Russian publishing industry, James Meek’s acclaimed novel “The People’s Act of Love,” first published in Britain in 2005, appeared in Russian translation in late 2006. |
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President Vladimir Putin began his annual news conference with more than 1,000 national and international journalists on Thursday with an introductory speech putting his administration’s achievements into context. Then Putin opened the floor and took questions. |
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MOSCOW — Ask President Vladimir Putin a sharp question, and you are a star, no matter what he mumbles in response. Vladivostok journalist Maria Solovyenko won the loudest applause at Thursday’s news conference in the Kremlin when she expressed fears that state funds for a new investment program in her native Primorye region would be stolen. |
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LONDON — Most Britons think Prime Minister Tony Blair should step down now, according to an opinion poll published on Sunday after a week of damaging headlines for the premier over an investigation into political funding. Blair, who plans to resign later this year after more than a decade in power, was questioned by police for a second time last month about the case which has also seen some of his closest aides arrested. Blair said in a speech to activists from his Labour Party on Saturday that he did not underestimate the scale of the problems facing his government. But he has said the cash-for-peerages probe will not force him to bring forward his departure date. |
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 HOLTON — Britain aimed to complete the cull of 160,000 turkeys on Monday as a government crisis team met to tackle the nation’s first exposure to the latest deadly strain of the bird flu virus in farmed poultry. |
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NEW YORK — Some 90 million viewers tuning into Super Bowl XLI were served up commercials featuring an accidental kiss, a lonely dog and a questionable hairstyle by advertisers looking to cash in on the year’s biggest TV event. Even everyday people got in the act on Sunday, with Doritos and General Motors’ Chevrolet airing commercials made by customers who had won nationwide contests seeing the best amateur advertisement. |
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LONDON — Apple Inc. has settled its long-running trademark dispute with The Beatles’ company Apple Corps Ltd., in a deal which could pave the way for the band’s songs to be played on Apple’s iTunes music store. |
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MIAMI, Florida — Peyton Manning added the missing ingredient to his Hall of Fame credentials by leading the Indianapolis Colts to a 29-17 victory over the Chicago Bears in Super Bowl XLI on Sunday. Manning, a seven-times All-Pro quarterback slammed by his critics for failing to win when it matters, exorcised his big-game demons by completing 25 of 38 passes for 247 yards and one touchdown in steady rain at Dolphin Stadium. |
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ROME — Italy’s football industry urged government and sporting authorities meeting on Monday to lift a ban on soccer matches as the nation prepared to bury a policeman killed by rioting fans. |
Temp: -2°C moderate or heavy snow showers
Issues Archive