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The local branch of the liberal party Yabloko announced it is under an immediate threat to be evicted from its headquarters in central St. Petersburg that the organization has rented for the past 14 years. Maxim Reznik, head of the party's local branch, said that the City Hall's Property Committee has been ignoring Yabloko's attempts to prolong the deal. Yabloko's previous 10-year contract with the City Hall expired in May 2006. “All our letters remain unanswered,” Reznik said. “It is a clear sign that the authorities are looking for alternative tenants. Making us nervous about the rent — we are aware of the fact that it can now be terminated any time — is an attempt of psychological pressure, nearing the nationwide parliamentary elections in December and a series of opposition protests planned for this fall. |
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 ZHUKOVSKY, Moscow Region — At the opening of the MAKS 2007 air show, half a dozen bewildered delegates from Italian industrial group Finnmeccanica sheepishly boarded a barely marked shuttle bus as the temperature was rising and their patience running thin. |
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Hundreds of St. Petersburg’s infamous Khrushchyovki residential buildings are to be demolished, City Hall said on Thursday, in a plan that may begin by the end of this year. Residents of the identikit five-story blocks, named after Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev who pioneered their construction in the 1950s to solve a post-War housing crisis, will be moved to new flats as close as possible to their original residences, officials said. |
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MOSCOW — Two Royal Air Force jets shadowed a Russian strategic bomber that approached British airspace, Britain’s Defense Ministry said. The incident occurred Friday, the same day that President Vladimir Putin placed strategic bombers back on long-range patrol for the first time since the Soviet breakup. |
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MOSCOW — Little more than three months before the parliamentary elections, Channel One has hired a television executive linked to United Russia to oversee its election coverage. Opposition politicians said the appointment not only dashed their slim hopes of objectivity in pre-election television coverage but also showed tacit support of nationalism in the Kremlin. |
All photos from issue.
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With a week left before the start of the pre-election campaigning for the Russian Duma or the Lower House of Parliament elections scheduled for Dec. 2, signs of irregularities appeared this week as web sites of two opposition parties were hacked in what one of the party’s leaders says was pre-election sabotage. “In this incident I see the beginning of the election campaign,” said Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a leader of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) in reference to the hacking of his party’s web site. The Yabloko party’s web site was also attacked on the same night, although it was not immediately clear if the incidents were related. Meanwhile, the St. Petersburg regional Yabloko party has complained that the City Hall’s Property Committee (KUGI) was yet to extend the rental contract of the office building on 46 Ulitsa Mayakovskogo since its expiry in May last year. |
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Valeriy Belokryl / Reuters
Relatives of the victims of an August 2006 plane crash weep at a commemoration ceremony at the site of the crash in Ukraine. The plane crashed on its way to St. Petersburg killing all those on board. |
 Governor Valentina Matviyenko has turned down the chance to see for herself the extent of pollution in St. Petersburg’s waterways after environmental group Greenpeace invited her to take part in an inspection of the Neva in one of its boats. Dmitry Artamonov, the St. Petersburg director of the environmental organization, said he had invited Matviyenko on the trip so that “ .
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Soldier goes AWOL LENINGRAD OBLAST (SPT) — A search was launched on Thursday in the Leningrad Oblast to locate a fugitive soldier in possession of a Kalashnikov machine gun, Regnum.ru reported. The soldier had been working on contract for the Ministry of Defense in the Vyborg region when he went missing. |
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 ZHUKOVSKY, Moscow Region — The country plans to secure at least 10 percent of the world airliner market with new passenger jets that it hopes will lift its aviation industry out of its post-Soviet slump, Igor Shevchuk, the president of plane maker Tupolev, said Wednesday at the MAKS 2007 air show. |
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The growing market for foreign second-hand cars has finally caught the attention of major dealers. By helping customers to sell-off their old cars, dealers will take a healthy commission or, better still, sell them a new replacement. |
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MOSCOW — Russia on Wednesday nominated Josef Tosovsky, a former Czech prime minister and central bank chief, to run the International Monetary Fund, but the Czech government immediately disowned his candidacy. The announcement confirms news that broke Tuesday and brings a second contender into the race to head the global lender after the European Union proposed France’s former finance minister, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. |
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BEIJING — China is hedging against a slow-going Russian gas deal by aggressively pushing for imports from Turkmenistan, which could force Moscow to accept Beijing’s price demands or watch its Asian strategy unravel. |
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Kazatomprom Profit ALMATY (Bloomberg) — Kazatomprom, Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium miner, said first-half profit tripled, bolstered by surging prices for the fuel used in nuclear power plants. Net income rose to 16.659 billion tenge ($133 million), from 5.544 billion tenge a year earlier, the Almaty-based company said in a statement published in Kazakhstanskaya Pravda Thursday. |
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 It is no surprise that the United States and Canada have been discussing their strategies for the Arctic at a North American leaders’ summit in Quebec this week. The resource-rich region has certainly been receiving a lot of attention recently. The Canadian government last week announced plans for two new military facilities in the country’s northern extreme. |
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It’s been two weeks since a rocket was dropped in the Georgian village of Tsitelubani, and my amazement over this story grows with every day. Lieutenant General Igor Khvorov, head of the Russian Air Force Main Staff, announced that the bomb actually exploded in a different location, and that the fragments were taken from that site and buried in a hole near the village. |
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NOFX, a pioneering U.S. skate punk band, will perform at PORT on Tuesday. Formed in 1983 in Berkley before relocating to Los Angeles, the band has influenced generations of U.S. punk bands, but, surprisingly, cites such acts as Cheap Trick and Eric Clapton as its own influences. “Well, you can’t have an attitude,” said NOFX’s Fat Max in an interview to True Punk magazine, answering the question what attributes a good punk band should have. “There can’t be any rock stars in the band. Punk rockers are shit. Punk bands are not very good musicians typically and even if you are a good musician, I think it’s harder to type than it is to play to guitar. |
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 The wedding seemed peaceful until the first punch was thrown. Then the camera jolted between various fights, capturing men chasing one another and finally focusing on a man who was lying unconscious — then faded to black. |
 TALLINN — While a lot of fuss was raised by the Kremlin over the Bronze Soldier, a Stalin-era monument that was relocated from the center of Tallinn to a military cemetery, there is another monument which might give a bigger, more detailed picture of the country’s history of the last 100 years. |
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The land of onion-domed churches and hirsute priests kowtowing to icons may have seemed exotic to Renaissance Westerners, but in terms of architecture at least, Russia cut its window through to Europe long before the reign of Peter the Great. |
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Traveling in Russian winter is difficult at the best of times, but for British photographer Simon Roberts, who was compiling his book, “Motherland,” it was that extra bit challenging. “No one is out in winter; it’s impossible to meet people, so taking portraits was really difficult, and getting my camera to do what I wanted it to do at minus 40 degrees Celsius, was close to impossible,” he said in a recent telephone interview. The photographer became fascinated by Russia while studying Human Geography at the University of Sheffield. In 2004, he and his wife traveled for a year, covering a distance of over 75,000 kilometers, to capture the vastness of the country for the book of photographs, which came out earlier this year. |
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 She’s the former wife of a billionaire, while he is a simple Channel One television presenter. What could possibly bring them together, apart from a shared love of hair spray? Luckily it was written in the stars that Ivana Trump should do battle for a sunlounger in St. |
 In “Stardust,” a sprawling, effects-laden fairy tale with the thundering stamina of a marathon horse race, Michelle Pfeiffer is Lamia, as deliciously evil a witch as the movies have ever invented. Shooting deadly green lightning from rings on her tapering long-nailed fingers, she suggests a seriously lethal beauty contestant of a certain age who will stop at nothing to seize the crown. |
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Wunderbar // 9 Dobrolyubova Ulitsa. // Tel: 232 5523 // Open from 11 p.m. through 1 a.m. // All major cards accepted // Dinner for two with wine 1,450 rubles ($56. |
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 BAGHDAD — Fourteen American soldiers died on Wednesday when their helicopter crashed in northern Iraq, the military said. Military officials said mechanical failure appeared to have brought down the helicopter, a UH-60 Black Hawk, which crashed overnight while traveling on an operation with a second helicopter. Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a military spokesman here, said the crash was being investigated. |
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 KANSAS CITY, U.S. — President Bush delivered a rousing defense of his Iraq policy on Wednesday, telling a group of veterans that “a free Iraq” is within reach and warning that if Americans succumb to “the allure of retreat,” they will witness death and suffering of the sort not seen since the Vietnam War. |
 LIVERPOOL, England — An 11 year old boy was murdered as he played football with his friends in Liverpool. Rhys Jones died after being shot on Wednesday night in the carpark of the Fir Tree pub in the Croxteth area of the city. Media reports said he was shot by a young killer who rode past on a BMX bicycle, with his face covered by a hood. |
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HOUSTON, U.S. — Houston, which leads the nation in carrying out the death penalty, executed the 400th person since the state resumed capital punishment in 1982 on Wednesday. |
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SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea sent its first batch of emergency aid on Thursday to relieve flooding in North Korea that has killed hundreds, and a top Pyongyang official said the North is aiming to restore basic services by the end of September. North Korea and international aid agencies said the impoverished state was hit by some of its worst flooding in years earlier this month that ravaged farm land, destroyed thousands of buildings and left more than 300,000 people homeless. |
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OSAKA, Japan — A trio of European women and an African distance runner could be on course for historic victories at the world championships beginning on Saturday. Russian pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva, Swedish heptathlete Carolina Kluft, Croatian high jumper Blanka Vlasic and Ethiopian Tirunesh Dibaba each could set standards never before achieved in the championships. |
Temp: -2°C moderate or heavy snow showers
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