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 Governor Valentina Matviyenko’s decision to join the United Russia regional party list for December elections to the State Duma has provoked a sour response from both liberal politicians and human rights advocates. “This means that even more government resources will be invested in the United Russia election campaign,” said Boris Vishnevsky, a political analyst and member of the political council of the local branch of democratic party Yabloko. |
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 MOSCOW — New Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov made the first investment in his popularity Wednesday by buying chocolate for a pensioner and kindergarteners in Penza. |
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The State Hermitage Museum and St. Petersburg authorities have clashed over plans for the construction of a skating rink this winter on the city’s central Palace Square. “We will suffer moral damage and St. Petersburg’s reputation as an intellectual city will be lost,” Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the Hermitage, told Gorod magazine in response to plans to put an ice rink in front of the world famous museum. |
All photos from issue.
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 BARNAUL — An east Siberian woman who gave birth to her 12th child — doing more than her fair share to stem Russia’s population decline — was stunned to find that little Nadya weighed in at a massive 7.75 kilograms. Nadya was delivered by Caesarean section in a local maternity hospital in the Altai region on Sept. |
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Local television channel Sto is to be relaunched under the name 100TV, the channel announced Tuesday. Following in the footsteps of another St. Petersburg-based TV station, Channel Five, which has been broadcasting nationally since last year, the channel will increase its news and analysis programming in its new season beginning Monday. |
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MOSCOW — Far from being just a cosmetic makeover, President Vladimir Putin’s government reshuffle has further cemented the Kremlin’s power ahead of crucial elections by packing the Cabinet with loyalists, politicians and analysts said Tuesday. The new government, announced late Monday, has just three new faces amid a minor reorganization of ministerial responsibilities. |
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The cabinet shake-up earlier this week resulted in some changes in the economic sphere. Former Economy Minister German Gref, who oversaw seven years of economic expansion, was replaced by Elvira Nabiullina, 43, an economist who headed the Moscow-based Center for Strategic Development think tank from 2003 until 2005. Nabiullina served as a deputy economy minister from 1997 until 1998, returning to the post from 2000 until 2003. Nabiullina is seen as a “liberal and an able reformer,’’ who will continue Gref’s policies, said Al Breach, head of research at UBS AG bank in Moscow. She is “competent’’ and will provide a smooth transition after Gref’s departure, which was widely expected, Breach said by telephone Tuesday. |
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 General Motors, the world’s largest automotive company, has started assembling its Opel Antara model in St. Petersburg and plans to produce 2,500 units next year, the company’s press service said this week in a statement. |
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MOSCOW — Basmanny Arbitration Court sent a strong signal to the investment community Wednesday, after ordering RusRating, an independent ratings agency, to pay damages to Russky Standart bank for harming its reputation. In her ruling on the case, which has raised concerns about the ability of rating agencies to operate independently and objectively, the judge ordered RusRating to pay $800 in compensation for comments made by one of its analysts in December. |
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The Swedish financial group SEB plans to increase its presence in the Northwest region of Russia by opening ten new branches of SEB Bank over the next two years. |
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Banks to Increase Rates MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian banks will increase mortgage-lending rates and some may temporarily stop issuing home loans because of the rise in borrowing costs, the deputy chairman of Russia’s central bank said. Russian banks rely on foreign funding to finance some lending to domestic consumers and will curb mortgage lending after the collapse of the U. |
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A few weeks ago, Prosecutor General Yury Chaika announced a breakthrough in the search for the killers of slain Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya. According to information leaked to the press, the murder was committed by two hired assassins — the Chechen Makhmudov brothers. Politkovskaya’s address was first obtained from Federal Security Service files, and then confirmed with the help of police surveillance. Moreover, as Chaika disclosed, “There were two surveillance teams. While one group followed the journalist, the second group was monitoring the first.” Many simply laughed at the allegation, viewing the whole investigation as an attempt by authorities to hang the murder on anti-Kremlin tycoon Boris Berezovsky. |
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 While most Russians have nothing but praise for what President Vladimir Putin has accomplished, the way he has handled the recent Cabinet shuffle raises the question as to who benefits more from this exercise, Putin or Russia? Whether correct or not, it is easy to conclude that Putin is reluctant to yield power to a successor until the very last minute. |
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President Vladimir Putin’s Cabinet announcement Monday was thin on changes and even thinner on surprises. Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref had made it known in recent months that he wanted out, and Mikhail Zurabov seemed to lurch from one fiasco to the next as health and social development minister. |
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 Except for a few scenes, Sidney Lumet’s celebrated 1957 film “12 Angry Men” takes place entirely in a cramped, stuffy jury room. Twelve sweating jurors debate whether to send a teenager to the electric chair for stabbing his father. Eleven vote yes. One, played by a serene Henry Fonda, disagrees. |
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This year’s Aposition Forum, an annual avant-garde music event, launched by local musician and promoter Alexei Plyusnin in October 2005, opened with the Beth Custer Ensemble on Thursday. |
 Natalya Pivovarova, the founder of St. Petersburg’s seminal indie pop band Kolibri and the singer with her band S.O.U.S., died in a car crash near Koktebel, Ukraine, on Monday. She was 44. Born in Novgorod on July 17, 1963, Pivovarova formed Kolibri in 1989, but she came up with the idea of an all-women vocal group a year earlier when she organized a one-shot theatrical/musical troupe to perform on International Women’s Day (March 8) at the Leningrad Rock Club in March 1988. |
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 BASEL, Switzerland — At the center of the “three-countries region” where Switzerland, France and Germany meet, Basel thrives on its tri-national location. |
 Trivia hounds the world over can identify Lake Baikal as the largest and deepest fresh-water lake on the planet. But few would be able to describe the lake’s other myriad wonders. That Baikal’s waters are among the purest on Earth. That Baikal holds a fifth of the planet’s liquid fresh water: enough to supply three liters to every living person for 3,000 years. That Baikal reaches more than 1 1/2 kilometers deep — and up to 9 1/2 kilometers through sediment to bedrock, a rift approaching the world’s deepest abyss, the Pacific’s Mariana Trench. |
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 Roman Abramovich is in the news again as the Mail on Sunday published a story about plans to stage a musical based on his life. Oh, and I hear something happened at his football club, too. |
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Probka // 5 Ulitsa Belinskogo, Tel: 273 4904 // Open from 1 p.m. to 1a.m. // Menu in Russian and English // Visa and MasterCard accepted // Dinner for two and two glasses of wine 2,460 rubles ($98) It is unlikely that associative bonds between wine bars, bacchanalia and snobbery will be broken anytime soon. But prices aside, Probka, a viny bar on Ulitsa Belinskogo — a five-minute walk across the Fontanka from the circus — does a good job at challenging familiar sterotypes about wine and establishments that specialize in serving it. From the street, Probka, which in Russian means “cork,” looks no different than what you would expect from a wine bar; discrete tea lights, small wooden tables and the fragmented, intermittent gleaming of glass stemware mystify a dark interior. |
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 Horny is as horny does in the sweetly absurd high school comedy “Superbad.” A tickly, funny tale of three teenage boys revved up by their surging, churning, flooding hormones, the movie joins the tumescent ranks of similarly themed works about male sexual desire — consider “Portnoy’s Complaint,” think “Porky’s” — and its somatic epiphanies, treacherous secretions, anguished lessons and apparently limitless storehouse of embarrassments. |
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LOS ANGELES — The specter of Phil Spector will haunt Hollywood well into 2008. On Wednesday, the judge presiding over the legendary “Wall of Sound” producer’s murder trial declared a mistrial after jurors indicated they were hopelessly deadlocked, 10-2, in favor of convicting Spector on charges that he killed actress Lana Clarkson more than four years ago. |
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AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France — New Zealand will have little problem stepping up a gear for the knockout phase of the World Cup after a string of easy victories in the pool games, according to loose forward Jerry Collins. The 26-year-old, who has been one of the team’s most impressive performers in the tournament, said the knowledge that a bad performance could mean elimination was more than enough incentive for the team to improve. “It is not a concern,” Collins told reporters at the team’s training base in the southern French town of Aix-en-Provence. “After this week it could all be over the following week and you might be talking about us going home. “So for me after Saturday it’s a question of who gets it right on the day... You can have the best form leading into the playoffs, but they are one-off games. |
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DONE DEAL
/ Reuters
President Vladimir Putin shakes hands with the President of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, at Putin’s presidential residence in the Black Sea resort of Sochi on Thursday. After a close contest, in July Sochi won the bid to host the 2014 Winter Olympics. |
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FUJI, Japan — Formula One champion Fernando Alonso will do his talking on the track now that McLaren team boss Ron Dennis has revealed they are barely on speaking terms, the Spaniard said on Thursday. Meeting reporters at the Japanese Grand Prix, Alonso shrugged aside media criticism of his role in a spying controversy with Ferrari that cost his McLaren team a record $100 million fine as well as the constructors’ title.
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NEW YORK — The United States-Russia Davis Cup Final will be held at the Memorial Coliseum in Portland, Oregon, the U.S. Tennis Association announced on Wednesday. The November 30-December 2 competition at the Coliseum, site of U.S. semi-final wins over Australia in 1981 and 1984, marks the first Davis Cup Final in the United States in 15 years. |
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LONDON — Russia coach Guus Hiddink revealed on Thursday that Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich has asked him to take over as manager of the Premiership giant. |
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