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Police said Friday that they have detained a female suspect in the murder of a 23-year old native of Tatarstan in southern Russia, on Friday after he was stabbed to death on July 1 near Avtovo metro station in the Kirovsky district of the city. A graduate of the St. Petersburg Agrarian University, Damir Zainullin had been employed as a part-time night watchman and was on his way to work from the metro when he was violently attacked by a gang. A surveillance camera installed on a nearby building recorded a total of 17 people attacking and brutally beating the man. The attack started with a punch to Zainullin’s face. The recording shows a rapid escalation of the tragic incident. The video also shows assailants slicing Damir’s stomach with a knife then torturing him further with broken bottles. |
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Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
State Hermitage Museum Director Mikhail Piotrovsky steering a boat on the River Neva last week as he celebrated 15 years leading the world’s premier museum of art. |
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In an effort to battle what looks like a cancer epidemic in the city with Russia’s highest incidence of the disease, City Hall has earmarked 5.2 billion rubles ($ 2 million) for a cancer prevention campaign. In St. Petersburg, two percent of the city’s population — or every 50th resident — suffers from cancer. Yury Shcherbuk, head of the City Hall’s Health Committee, said numbers of cancer cases in the city have been steadily growing.
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A St. Petersburg schoolteacher has been found guilty of driving a student to suicide in a case that has been described by prosecutors as unprecedented. The Krasnoselsky Federal Court last Tuesday convicted Vera Novak to a four-year suspended sentence including three years of probation. |
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MOSCOW — In a decision that threatens to raise tensions with the West, President Vladimir Putin declared over the weekend that Russia would suspend cooperation on a key European arms control treaty signed in the closing years of the Cold War. |
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Poet Prigov Dies MOSCOW (AP) — Dmitry Prigov, one of the most influential poets of the post-Soviet era, died early Monday in a Moscow hospital, the RIA-Novosti news agency reported. He was 66. Prigov had been in intensive care since suffering a heart attack July 7. He and his close friend Lev Rubenstein were leaders of the so-called conceptualist school, which arose in unofficial Soviet art in the late 1960s. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Lawyer Boris Kuznetsov has fled the country in the face of possible charges of disclosing state secrets, a case he and his colleagues say may be politically motivated. Kuznetsov said he left because his arrest would have made it difficult for him to defend his clients properly and that his work defending high-profile clients was behind the charges. “None of this is happening by accident,” Kuznetsov said Friday, speaking by mobile phone from an undisclosed location. He added that he would continue to coordinate the defense for his current clients by telephone. Kuznetsov refused to say how or when he left the country, citing concern for the safety of those who assisted him. Moscow’s Tverskoi District Court ruled Wednesday that Kuznetsov had disclosed state secrets by submitting an appeal to the Constitutional Court over a Federal Security Service (FSB) wiretap of his client, former Federation Council Senator Levon Chakhmakhchyan. |
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Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A man hangs from the Chizhik-Pizhik monument on the Fontanka on Friday, having jumped in to collect the coins thrown in for good luck. |
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MINSK — President Alexander Lukashenko on Friday vowed to shut down nongovernment organizations found receiving U.S. funding, saying Belarussians who take such financing are destroying the country. Lukashenko also demanded that Washington stop supporting Belarussian opposition parties. He and other top members of his government have been hit with travel and financial sanctions in the European Union and the United States.
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Harassment Study MOSCOW (SPT) — Government harassment of civil society decreased this year, according to a new study by Agora, a Kazan-based human rights organization. There were 106 reports of state harassment of activists in 38 regions from January to June of this year, Dmitry Kolbasin, a spokesman for Agora, told Interfax on Friday. By comparison, there were 118 such reports from 35 regions last year, Kolbasin said. The most common form of harassment was pressure on nongovernmental organizations from the Federal Registration Service, Kolbasin said. One out of 10 reports of harassment involved actual physical attacks on activists. Missionary Arrested MOSCOW (SPT) — A Sakhalin court on Friday sanctioned the arrest of a U. |
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 PIMCHAKH, Russia — Listening to enigmatic Koryak-language songs and eating traditional salmon soup and cutlets in this village, it is easy to imagine that indigenous cultures still thrive on Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula. |
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MOSCOW — Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov has reiterated his accusation that Moscow is withholding too much of the region’s oil wealth — a new sign that he is taking a more assertive line. Kadyrov, a 30-year-old former rebel who swears allegiance to President Vladimir Putin, who put him in power, has disavowed the separatist cause. |
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MOSCOW — When Yulia Ananyeva decided to study to be a veterinarian, she did not expect that she would have to catch healthy stray dogs and cats and operate on them. |
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 German supplier of equipment and engineering solutions Siemens AG has signed a license agreement with one of the largest industrial enterprises in Russia, Power Machines, to produce new power-generating turbines. According to the agreement Power Machines will produce, sell and provide technical maintenance for the modernized gas turbine, SGT5-2000E, the two companies said Friday in a statement. |
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MOSCOW — The RTS index at last broke through the 2,000-point barrier last week, reaching an all-time high of 2,061 points as the stars came into alignment for recovering local markets. |
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Laundering Law MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — President Vladimir Putin instructed the Cabinet and the Central Bank to amend a law on money laundering and financing terrorism, the presidential press service said in a statement Friday. The amendment will require all bank transfers by individuals of more than 600,000 rubles ($23,600) in foreign currency to undergo special scrutiny, the statement said. The legislation will be submitted to the parliament for consideration, according to the statement. Kudrin Gets VTB Post LONDON (Bloomberg) — VTB Bank named Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin as chairman of its supervisory board, the bank said in a statement Friday. |
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 MOSCOW — Brazil has issued an arrest warrant for Boris Berezovsky on suspicion of money laundering at Sao Paulo football club Corinthians, a step that raises the stakes in the billionaire’s standoff with the Kremlin. |
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MOSCOW — The government began taking bids Monday for an overseas unit of bankrupt oil firm Yukos that controls a 49 percent stake in Transpetrol, Slovakia’s pipeline operator. The Federal Property Fund will take bids for Yukos Finance BV through Aug. 13 and hold an auction Aug. |
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MOSCOW — Total signed a long-awaited deal Friday to develop the giant Shtokman gas field with Gazprom that will allow it to book part of the Arctic field’s lucrative reserves. |
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MOSCOW — Rosneft will borrow about $3.6 billion from Western and Russian banks, the firm said Friday, in a step that would further add to its heavy debt load. The state-controlled oil firm, which has this year spent over $20 billion to buy assets of bankrupt oil firm Yukos at forced auctions, did not say whether it would use the proceeds to refinance its earlier debt or for other purposes. The money will come from a syndicate of Western banks, which will lend $3.25 billion for five years, while the country’s second largest bank, VTB, will provide another 8.4 billion rubles ($329.5 million), the company said. Rosneft’s debt has been fluctuating at around $30 billion this year, as it had secured a record $22 billion in bridge financing from Western banks to buy Yukos’ top assets. |
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 Professor Valery Katkalo, Dean of St. Petersburg University’s Graduate School of Management, talks about the school’s 14 years of work to date, its ambitious development plans for the future and the creation of a vast new campus on one of the city’s historic palace and park ensembles. |
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 The most astonishing revelations in Michael Moore’s new film, “SiCKO,” have nothing to do with health care. They’re about vacation time. French vacation time, to be precise. Sitting at a restaurant table with a bunch of U.S. expats in Paris, Moore is treated to a jaw-dropping recitation of the perks of social democracy: 30 days of vacation time, unlimited sick days, full child care, and social workers who come to help new parents adjust to the strains and challenges of child-rearing. |
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Russia’s winning of the right to host the Sochi Olympics in 2014 must be the happiest event that has happened for Russia in the last couple of years. International Olympic Committee members were given the red-carpet treatment when they came to Sochi. |
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 There has been much talk in the past couple of days that Russian-British relations are undergoing an unprecedented crisis. According to The Times of London, a spokesman for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called Moscow’s refusal to extradite Andrei Lugovoi, the leading suspect in the killing of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London last year, “extremely disappointing. |
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Intelligence is limited by reality, but stupidity knows no bounds. For that reason, it can be quite creative, conjuring up all sorts of things that should never have existed in the first place. |
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The sign by the parade ground at Georgia’s Krtsanisi military training headquarters reads: “NATO Security Guarantee.” Next to the barracks, on the edge of a road, is a huge, sculpted relief map of the country, which include the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. |
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When the presidents of Russia and the United States met earlier this month in their curious Maine event, with its awkward clinches and realpolitik rabbit punching, there was at least one concept on which the two self-described “friends” could agree wholeheartedly: History matters. |
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JERUSALEM — Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Monday to discuss selective security amnesties designed to shore up his West Bank administration against rival Hamas Islamists. The meeting at Olmert’s Jerusalem residence lasted about two hours. There was no immediate comment after it broke up. Israel has described its decisions to free 250 low-security Palestinian prisoners, mostly from Abbas’s Fatah faction, and suspend kill-or-capture missions against 180 Fatah gunmen as goodwill gestures that could beget new peace talks with Abbas. Such summits have been taking place every few weeks, billed by both sides as confidence-building talks. |
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HEART OF A DOG
/ Reuters
A chihuaha puppy in Japan that has become a star after the heart-shaped marking on its back was publicized by the pet-store owner who noticed it. |
 AUSTIN, Texas — Past the images of escalating chaos in Vietnam, the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the triumphant entry into space, at the top of a marble staircase at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, thousands of mourners filed past the coffin of Lady Bird Johnson on Saturday. Mrs. Johnson died Wednesday at the age of 94.
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SYDNEY — The Australian government stopped an Indian doctor on Monday from being released on bail by canceling his visa and ordering him into an immigration detention center. He faces terrorism charges linked to British car bombings. Dr. Mohamed Haneef, 27, has been in custody since July 2 but was only charged on Saturday, sparking criticism by civil rights groups of his 12-day detention without charge. |
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 BOSTON — Nadia Petrova and Yelena Vesnina beat Wimbledon champion Venus Williams and Lisa Raymond in the decisive doubles contest to give Russia a 3-2 win over the United States in their Fed Cup semi-final on Sunday in Stowe, Vermont. Petrova, returning to the court after saving Russia from elimination in Sunday’s second singles, and Vesnina registered a 7-5 7-6 victory, claiming the second-set tiebreaker 7-1, to lift Russia into the final. |
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MARACAIBO, Venezuela — Brazil produced a ruthlessly efficient performance to beat old rivals Argentina 3-0 on Sunday and win the Copa America for the second time in a row. |
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MOSCOW — Zenit St. Petersburg beat Rostov 2-0 to reclaim the top spot in the Russian premier league from Spartak Moscow on Sunday. Argentine striker Alejandro Dominguez put Zenit ahead just before the break and Russian international Alexander Arshavin added a second goal in the final minute. |
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LOS ANGELES — The only cloud on David Beckham’s horizon as he spent this weekend relaxing with his family in their new Beverly Hills home was his swollen left ankle. |
 ROME — A long jumper who was hit by a javelin at the Golden League meeting in Rome was dismissed from hospital on Saturday. French jumper Salim Sdiri was rushed to Rome’s Gemelli hospital on Friday after being hit by a javelin thrown by Tero Pitkamaki of Finland. Pitkamaki slipped at the end of his run-up, sending the javelin sailing 80 metres into the long jump warm-up area where it struck Sdiri in the torso. |
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