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MOSCOW — The Federal Security Service is investigating accusations of British espionage on Russian soil in what appears to be a tit-for-tat exchange after London demanded the extradition of Andrei Lugovoi, the chief suspect in the poisoning death of Alexander Litvinenko. The FSB said in a statement Friday that it had opened the criminal investigation based on “Lugovoi’s statement and additional information from him about intelligence activity by the British special services on the territory of Russia.” No other details were given, and an FSB spokesman refused to elaborate. The British Embassy declined to comment. “It is our long-standing policy not to comment on matters of intelligence,” a spokesman said in an e-mailed statement. |
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ROLL UP, ROLL UP!
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A Rolls Royce car made in 1922 is reflected in the paintwork of a Rolls Royce manufactured in 2007, at the Peter and Paul Fortress on Friday. The two cars had been brought together as part of events celebrating the opening of St. Petersburg’s first Rolls Royce showroom. |
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With a skyrocketing number of cases that originate in Russia heard in the European Court of Human Rights, appeals from war-torn regions like Chechnya sometimes cost people their lives and Russian lawyers admit helplessness against what they call “a corrupt system in which the police falsify evidence, the courts procrastinate and the state does not enforce verdicts.
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All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Yabloko intends to nominate its leader, Grigory Yavlinsky, to run for president next year, further complicating efforts to field a single opposition candidate. Yabloko council delegates decided Saturday to recommend that Yavlinsky be nominated at the party’s main convention in the fall, although other candidates could also be considered, including Federal Anti-Monopoly Service head Igor Artemyev and ombudsman Vladimir Lukin, Itar-Tass reported. |
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LONDON — Moscow remains the world’s most expensive city for expatriates with London close behind after rising three places due to the weakness of the dollar, said an annual cost-of-living survey to be published Monday. |
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MOSCOW — Political parties and candidates might be barred from using billboards in electoral campaigns, depriving opposition parties of one of their few remaining sources of widespread public exposure, the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service said. The agency said in a letter to the Central Elections Committee that the use of billboards in elections violated advertising laws, a service spokeswoman said Friday. |
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MOSCOW — Austria’s arrest of a high-ranking space official on spy charges is putting considerable strain on relations between Moscow and Vienna, which President Vladimir Putin had just last month praised as “problem-free. |
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MOSCOW — Drinking alcohol not meant for consumption, including antiseptics and medicines, accounts for nearly half of the deaths of working-age men in Russia, according to a new study. British researchers found that hazardous drinking — which includes the excessive consumption of regular alcohol as well as so-called “surrogate” alcohols — caused 43 percent of deaths in the Urals city of Izhevsk, said the study, published Friday in The Lancet. |
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Storm Kills 3 MOSCOW (SPT) — A fierce storm swept across Urals and Volga River regions over the weekend, killing three people and injuring 52, including three children, RIA-Novosti reported Sunday. |
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 Gambling enterprises in St. Petersburg will be abolished from Jan. 1, 2008 — sooner than a federal law requires — after Governor Valentina Matviyenko signed a decree to that effect last week, the governor’s press service said in a statement. According to City Hall, 21 casinos and 571 gaming halls operate in St. |
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MOSCOW — A bit like a Hilton sister thrown in jail, the Russian oil and gas sector is finally getting some love, or at least some attention, as analysts start predicting a sharp and short-lived comeback for an industry that’s hit rock bottom. |
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Kaliningrad Flights ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Kaliningrad based airline KD Avia has begun regular transit flights from Russia to Europe through Khrabrovo airport in Kaliningrad, Interfax reported Friday. Twelve Boeing 737-300 planes will fly four to six times a week from Moscow, St. |
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The global pharmaceutical market will more than double in value to $1.3 trillion by 2020, according to a new PricewaterhouseCoopers report published last week. |
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The growing competition that traditional postal services face against new information technologies, the liberalization of the industry and its survival in the internet era are all topics set to be discussed in St. Petersburg starting Tuesday, when postal industry professionals from around the world gather at the Pochtovaya Troika event. |
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MOSCOW — Billionaires Vladimir Yevtushenkov, Alexei Mordashov, Mikhail Prokhorov and Alexander Abramov will take seats on the government’s new nanotechnology council, Kommersant reported Friday. |
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MOSCOW — Steelmaker Evraz, partially owned by billionaire Roman Abramovich, will merge its two coal mining companies, creating the world’s third-largest producer of coal for the metals industry, the group announced Friday. Evraz will seek to improve safety at the Siberian coal companies, Raspadskaya and Yuzhkuzbassugol, in an effort to prevent any repetition of the underground explosions that claimed 149 lives at Yuzhkuzbassugol this year, it said. |
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MOSCOW — The Federal Subsoil Resource Use Agency has put off a decision on the Kovykta gas field run by a subsidiary of BP’s joint venture, TNK-BP, officials said Friday. |
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The pace of modern life is constantly increasing, and people are finding themselves with less and less free time. But this is happening at different rates in different countries. Russians, for example, are more concerned about lacking money than having free time. The predictions made by the futurologists of the 1960s seem comical today. They thought that by the 21st century, the introduction of new timesaving technologies would lead to a significant reduction of the average workweek, six months of vacation per year and a boom in the amount of work done from home. Alvin Toffler, the author of the bestsellers “Future Shock” and “The Third Wave,” predicted that special leisure consultants would be needed to help people cope with the extra time on their hands. |
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 A group of European readers recently wrote to me, arguing that from an economic point of view, dictatorships have been outperforming democracies for many years and that if the trend continues there will be very little incentive to replace autocrats with the rule of law. |
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If there is anything Vladimir Putin’s presidency has had in common with that of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, it is the desire to return the country to the path it was following prior to the 1917 Revolution. The 74 years of Communist leadership that followed involved a fruitless search for effective developmental models, but since 1991, things have been returning to what passes for normal. Even the recent noises from the proponents of the “Let’s go back to the Soviet Union” approach actually have more in common with a return to pre-revolutionary conditions than to those under communism. In the humanities, in fields of study like economics, political science, history and sociology, the return to normalcy often takes much longer than in actual political life. |
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 When U.S. President George W. Bush declared, at Tuesday’s dedication of the Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, that communist regimes had been responsible for taking the lives of 100 million innocent people during the 20th century, he did not so much misspeak as underspeak. |
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Ñóòêè: a 24-hour period The one thing we foreigners mastered in Russian 101 was the basics of Russian greetings: Äîáðîå óòðî (good morning), äîáðûé äåíü (good day), and äîáðûé âå÷åð (good evening). Can’t screw that up, right? Wrong. It turns out that one nation’s morning is another nation’s night. |
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The legacy of Josef Stalin’s predilection for uprooting ethnic groups and brutally shifting them around the Communist empire still has the power to spark conflict in the Caucasus. |
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Exchanges are, by definition, two-way streets: You give something, they give something, a deal is done and everybody’s happy, or at least temporarily satisfied. Russians and Americans have been two-way streeting on the educational, cultural and scholarly-scientific routes for a good half-century now — and good for us. |
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SAN FRANCISCO — IBM may acquire more software companies this year as it tries to boost software’s share of total IBM profit to 50 percent, according to analysts. International Business Machines Corp. is banking on software, which accounts for 20 percent of revenue but generates 40 percent of pretax earnings, to lift the overall profitability of a company that spans computer hardware, services and software. |
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NEW YORK — Of all the media scrutiny given to Princess Diana, perhaps the most outrageous was tabloid commentary that she was too fat, Prince William said in a television interview aired on Monday. “Someone said she had cellulite or something like that. As a woman in the public eye, she tried so hard and was so glamorous, always in the gym,” William told NBC’s Matt Lauer. “For any woman, I imagine, it’s just outrageous that these people sit behind their desks and comment on it. There were many times we just sort of had to cheer her up and tell her she was the best thing ever,” William said. The interview with William, 24, and Prince Harry, 22, was conducted last month in London. |
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 LONDON — Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Monday he would not agree to a new European Union treaty that gave Europe a greater say over Britain’s judicial system or its tax and benefits arrangements. |
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PARIS — French President Nicolas Sarkozy met his prime minister on Monday after securing an unexpectedly small parliamentary majority and losing a senior minister—setbacks that nonetheless left his reform program on track. Sarkozy formally reappointed Prime Minister Francois Fillon, and their first task will be to find a replacement for government No. |
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LONDON — Former top Russian spy Oleg Gordievsky rubs shoulders with cricketer Ian Botham, author Salman Rushdie and actor Barry Humphries in the Queen’s birthday honors list, published on Saturday. |
 HOUSTON, Texas — Astronauts put the final touches to a new solar power unit for the International Space Station on Sunday in their last spacewalk before the scheduled departure of the shuttle Atlantis on Tuesday. Still to come on Monday was a test to make sure the space station’s guidance system is in good shape after a computer crash last week. |
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LONDON — Twelve months after enchanting Wimbledon’s crowds with her flamboyant brilliance, reigning champion Amelie Mauresmo is ready to plug into the All England Club magic once again. The 27-year-old Frenchwoman was a popular winner last year when she beat Justine Henin to add the Wimbledon crown to the Australian Open title she won earlier in the year when the same opponent retired in the final. |
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