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 Luciana De Marchi was 13 when her father — Italian filmmaker Gino, a communist living in Moscow — was arrested by the Soviet secret police and disappeared without a trace. That was in 1937. The daughter, who has since invested determination, courage and resilience into finding the truth, traveled to St. |
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Two children kidnapped in St. Petersburg in May have been released unharmed with no ransom paid, the prosecutor’s office said Monday. The girl was freed on Thursday and the boy was released on Sunday, Yelena Ordynskaya, the chief assistant to the St. |
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Gender-Based Tickets MOSCOW (SPT) — Russian Railways is allowing passengers to choose male, female or mixed compartments on long-distance traims, Fontanka.ru reported. Tickets bought using the new service went on sale from Sunday at all booking offices. Prices do not vary for the different sexes. |
All photos from issue.
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 Sergei Gulyayev, a former lawmaker in the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly and the founder of a new liberal political movement with a nationalist twist, has announced that he will run for president as an opposition candidate. Gulyayev is the fourth opposition figure to declare his intention to compete for the post of president. |
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MOSCOW — Former Nuclear Power Minister Yevgeny Adamov said Friday that a U.S. court ruling had vindicated him of charges of stealing $9 million, and he demanded an apology from the United States. |
 A live global television broadcast from St. Petersburg on Friday by international cable news network CNN was hit by a sudden downpour that cut short the half-hour show and left its presenter soaked. The show, which went live at 6.30 p.m., was the final broadcast in a week of special programming on CNN International that focused on Russia and featured live broadcasts from Moscow and St. |
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MOSCOW — Internet cafes and computer game clubs will be required to hold special licenses to rent out game software, the Supreme Arbitration Court said in statement posted on its web site. The court said it would approve an instruction to arbitration courts on considering such intellectual property rights cases on July 16. |
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The country’s five biggest blue chips — Gazprom, Rosneft, LUKoil, Sberbank and Unified Energy System — all held their AGMs last week along with a handful of other firms, and an interesting pattern emerged. |
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Pumping Oil MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia’s oil output in June rose 2 percent from a year earlier as export duties advanced, encouraging oil companies to refine more crude inside Russia. Russia produced 9.85 million barrels a day (40.3 million tons) in June, according to preliminary data from CDU TEK, the Energy Ministry’s information center. |
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MOSCOW — The government wants Italy’s Eni to be quick about developing its new Russian oil and gas assets, and will check up on its progress in a few months. |
 Bruno Balvanera, head of the North West Federal District office of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, speaks on EBRD’s expansion in the Northwest region and across Russia as a whole. Why is the bank suddenly focusing on Russia? The bank was created in the early 1990s to support the transition to a market economy. |
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 The problems created for the country’s investment climate by the Kovykta gas field have now been resolved. The delay in rendering a decision on the revocation of the TNK-BP license to exploit the field had provided cause for hope that some kind of unexpected resolution to the conflict between the state and the energy company could be found, but the result was in line with what had long been expected by most analysts. |
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A precocious 4-year-old named Alyona was the star attraction in our compartment on a train back to Moscow not long ago. As articulate as she was appealing, Alyona explained to her fellow passengers that she was actually 4 1/2 now and could write lots of numbers and letters. |
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The Federal Tax Service has come out with an interesting new initiative. In an effort to identify people renting out apartments without paying taxes, they have asked people to report any “suspicious” people in their buildings. More than 100,000 apartments are rented out in Moscow alone, and the majority of landlords don’t pay the relatively low 13 percent tax on the income. |
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 A global movement is under way to reduce tobacco use — and thereby save millions of lives each year. Unfortunately, Russia has so far chosen to remain on the sidelines in the fight against this preventable public health epidemic. Russia is not among the 147 nations of the world who have signed and ratified the international agreement known as the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. |
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It will be up to the next presidents of Russia and the United States to repair the relationship between their two countries. That relationship is worse than need be, and some improvement can come fairly quickly with the new atmosphere that new administrations usually bring. |
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There wasn’t much point traveling to Azerbaijan for the freedom of speech demonstration in Baku in June. It was never likely to happen, and in the end, it didn’t. The authorities in the Azeri capital don’t often give permission for protests these days, and if they do, they tend to specify a remote area of town where any impact on public awareness is minimal. |
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Europe is back, the papers and politicians tell us, thanks to the Reform Treaty agreed in Brussels in the wee hours of last Saturday morning. “What counts for us,” says German Chancellor Angela Merkel, “is that we are moving out of stoppage, out of reflection. |
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NEW YORK — Internet media company Yahoo Inc. will offer its marketing clients tools to create more personalized advertisements to Web users as it strives to build its share of graphical display advertising. Yahoo is due to unveil on Monday a new system dubbed SmartAds that allows advertisers to compile ads on the spot based on a Web user’s Internet profile, including such data as their location, recent product searches and, in some cases, age or household income. |
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FRANKFURT — A merger between German group Arcandor’s KarstadtQuelle department stores and British retailer Debenhams may have limited scope for synergies but they may do a deal anyway, analysts and bankers said on Monday. |
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LONDON — England slammed the door on smoking in bars, workplaces and public buildings Sunday in what campaigners hail as the biggest boost to public health since the creation of the National Health Service in 1948. The chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson said there would be teething problems with the change, but he expected people to comply with the new law. |
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BUENOS AIRES —The wife of President Nestor Kirchner will run as the government candidate in Argentina’s October presidential election after he decided not to seek re-election, a government spokesman said on Sunday. |
 SAN FRANCISCO — It took Apple Inc. more than six months to build the iPhone but curious gadget fanatics needed only minutes to tear one apart. Within hours of the first iPhones going on sale on Friday, enthusiasts scrambled to be the first to discover what makes the devices tick, posting photos and videos of disassembled phones on the Internet. |
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ACCRA — African leaders gathered behind closed doors on Monday for a debate on how to beef up its continental system of government with Libya’s Moamer Kadhafi leading a push to create a confederation of states. |
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 ROME — Cyclist Alessandro Petacchi spent two hours with Italian anti-doping officials on Monday in a bid to explain why he tested for excessive levels of salbutamol during the Giro d’Italia in May. Petacchi, desperate to take part in the Tour de France starting on Saturday, has a medical certificate to use a set amount of salbutamol in his asthma inhaler and was heard by Ettore Torri, the Italian Olympic Committee’s doping prosecutor. |
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GUATEMALA CITY—A victory for Russia’s Sochi in the race to host the 2014 Winter Olympics would affect millions of lives in Russia, leaders of the bid said on Sunday. |
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Bomb Scare LONDON (AP) — Security at Wimbledon was increased Friday after British police defused a bomb in central London. “All around the ground the security has been intensified,” Lawn Tennis Association chief executive Roger Draper told BBC Radio. “We are a high-profile event, and the championships take security very seriously,” Draper said. |
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