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MOSCOW — British police said Wednesday that they arrested a suspect last month in London on suspicion of conspiring to kill self-exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky. “The man was released into the custody of immigration officials two days later,” a Scotland Yard spokesman said by telephone. Berezovsky, an ardent Kremlin opponent, said at a news conference in London that he left Britain on June 16 after police warned him his life was in danger. “Putin is personally behind this plot,” Berezovsky said, adding that he had received threats before. Berezovsky first revealed the plot in an interview published in The Times of London on Wednesday. The Kremlin has denied similar claims in the past. |
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CLOWNING AROUND
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Two actors from the Royal Giraffe theater troupe from Estonia performing on the embankment by the Peter and Paul Fortress on Wednesday in an event promoting the Open Cinema 2007 festival which will be held in St. Petersburg on August 17-19. |
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After a charter flight from St. Petersburg to Turkey was turned back last week when three drunk men started a brawl on the airplane, injuring a female traveler, Russian authorities are discussing the possibility of a complete alcohol ban on board Russian flights. The idea was voiced by Yury Zakharenkov, head of the Russian Interior Ministry’s department for Public Safety on Transport.
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In an article headlined “Teacher Convicted of Causing Suicide” (Tuesday, July 17) misstated the compensation that a court ordered schoolteacher Vera Novak to pay Tatiana Lebedev following the suicide of her grandson Roma Lebedev. The correct amount was 300,000 rubles ($11,540). |
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Compensation ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The St. Petersburg City Court on Wednesday refused to increase compensation to relatives of victims of air crash near Donetsk, Ukraine, in August 2006, Interfax reported. |
All photos from issue.
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A roundtable held on July 12, organized by the St. Petersburg charity Parents Bridge, heard how the problem of Russia’s abandoned children and the children’s homes in which they often end up need a rethink. Parents Bridge presented plans for a new center to help systematize its work with children up to seven years old. |
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MOSCOW — Law enforcement officers stormed the apartment of Arkhangelsk Mayor Alexander Donskoi on Wednesday and took him to a detention facility, sharply escalating an ongoing battle between him and the region’s governor. |
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An American citizen drowned in the early hours of July 8 as he swam in a lake in Leningrad Region, local media reported, quoting police sources. Two St. Petersburg residents who were with the man alerted police using a mobile phone to say that their friend, Richard Hooley, was missing presumed drowned in Lake Vuoksa near Baryshevo, 47NEWS reported on July 12. |
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The St. Petersburg government has decreased its planned spending on the Okhta Center — Gazprom’s controversial construction project to be sited on the Neva embankment near the Peter the Great Bridge. At a meeting of the St. Petersburg government Tuesday amendments were approved to the “Law on the special program for the construction of an administrative and business center in St. |
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MOSCOW — Gazprom on Wednesday denied it was seeking assets from merging French firms Gaz de France and Suez, amid speculation that French President Nicolas Sarkozy promised the Kremlin he would support the move. |
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The Natural Resources Ministry will inform the London Stock Exchange of its finding that the oil reserves of Imperial Energy do not match those in Russian records, an official said Wednesday. The report will be delivered next week by two agencies supervised by the ministry that have responsibility for monitoring reserves of natural resources and their exploitation, the official said. Natural Resources Minister Yury Trutnev said last week that a working group, drawn from the ministry, auditors and oil companies, had found that the reserves declared by London-listed independent oil company Imperial Energy were artificially inflated. Imperial Energy has rejected the accusations and said auditor DeGolyer&MacNaughton’s estimates were based on true and correct information. |
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 New legislation on compulsory third party liability motor insurance (OSAGO) has raised serious concerns among both insurers and drivers. Experts believe that tariffs could increase, quality of service could deteriorate and a number of insurers could go bankrupt as a result of the proposed changes. |
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MOSCOW — The government has revived the idea of tax breaks for offshore oil and gas deposits, and will discuss it with global oil majors Tuesday following a landmark deal with France’s Total over the huge Shtokman gas field. The Natural Resources Ministry said Monday that its chief, Yury Trutnev, would meet executives from ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, Total and Chevron among other firms Tuesday. |
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MOSCOW — Industrial output grew by 10.9 percent in June, posting the first double-digit gain since May 2006 as manufacturing boomed, the State Statistics Service said Wednesday. |
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Chevron Venture MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Chevron wants a 49 percent stake in a joint venture with oil producer Gazprom Neft, Chevron CEO David O’Reilly told Vedomosti in an interview published Wednesday. Gazprom Neft CEO Alexander Dyukov said in June that he wanted his company to raise its stake in the venture to 75 percent from 30 percent. |
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 In the six or seven years in which they interacted on a regular basis, President Vladimir Putin’s police state and journalist Fatima Tlisova had a mostly one-way relationship. Tlisova’s food was poisoned (causing a nearly fatal case of kidney failure), her ribs were broken by assailants unknown, her teenage son was detained by drunken policemen for the crime of not being an ethnic Russian, and FSB agents forced her into a car, took her to a forest outside the city of Nalchik and extinguished cigarettes on every finger of her right hand, “so that you can write better,” as one of her tormentors informed her. |
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In a recent interview with the Financial Times, RusAl owner and billionaire Oleg Deripaska declared that, “If the state says we need to give it up, we’ll give it up. |
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 With tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions between the U.K. and Russia over the crisis caused by the poisoning of Kremlin opponent Alexander Litvinenko in London last year, the timing might have been better for an impressive cultural mission from Britain to St. |
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The Kremlin’s view of Russia as a besieged fortress, surrounded by enemies, i.e. NATO, has been embodied in a song and a video by Moscow rappers Diskoteka Avariya. |
 Maybe you’ve seen them playing in parks throughout St. Petersburg. They have names like JuPiter, Dogma and Flying Steps, and yell “Hammer!” “Huck!” and “Layout!” while they chase a little flying disc down a field. Who are these groups, and what are they doing? They are Ultimate Frisbee teams, and they are one of the newest ways people are staying in shape in St. Petersburg. Ultimate Frisbee (Ultimate for short) is a sport developed in the 1960s in the U. |
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 The exuberance of physical power, a signature feature of the sculptural language of 16th-century master Michelangelo, took center stage at a new exhibition at the State Hermitage Museum that opened Tuesday in the Twelve Column Hall. |
 In 1931, Izvestia announced an open competition — the largest such in Soviet history — to design the Palace of Soviets, a grand structure to be built on the site of the soon-to-be demolished Church of Christ the Savior in Moscow. In addition to such foreign luminaries as Thomas Lamb, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, whose entries were commissioned by the Soviet government, the competition included submissions from homegrown avant-garde architects like Moisei Ginzburg, the Vesnin brothers and Aleksei Shchusev. |
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 When Edgard met Lena, he was a tiger tamer turned reality show contestant, while she was a budding pop singer who took third place at the Eurovision Song Contest. |
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Receptoria Gourmet Boutique and Restaurant // 10 Admiralteisky Peospekt. Tel. 312 7967 // Open 12 a.m. until the last customer leaves (orders accepted until 11.30 p.m.) // Menu in Russian and English // Lunch for two without alcohol 3,754 rubles ($144) Receptoria, a corner of French rustic elegance opposite the Admiralty Gardens, offers a warm welcome from the maitre d who invites guests into this small shop and restaurant with a broad smile. Inside the first room dark wooden shelves groan under the weight of gourmet chocolate, specialty coffees, glowing jars of fruit preserves and glinting bottles of dark olive oil. One wall is dominated by an enormous chilled cabinet stuffed with a huge range of French cheeses, arranged in weighty blocks and peeking through grease proof paper, Italian cold cuts and fancy fruit juices. |
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 As if acknowledging the challenges it faces in finding an American audience, “La Vie en Rose,” Olivier Dahan’s long, feverish film biography of Adith Piaf, notes that its heroine, an incomparably bright star in the French cultural firmament, never quite caught on over here. |
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KUALA LUMPUR — Malaysia’s cabinet wants answers for the “national disaster” that culminated in the firing of football coach Norizan Bakar after the national side’s latest Asian Cup loss, to Iran. The Football Association of Malaysia (FAM) has been ordered to report to the cabinet committee for sports at its meeting on July 31, the New Straits Times reported Thursday. |
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