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The conflict over Russia’s demand that the regional offices of the British Council be closed down has escalated with the intervention of the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown who called the decision “totally unacceptable.” Speaking in London before a group of British parliamentarians Thursday, Brown stressed that the British Council “does a tremendous job both in Russia and in every part of the world”. “We wish this action to be desisted from immediately,” Brown said. “We are making our views known to the Russian government.” Despite orders from the Russian government to close down its regional offices, including its St. Petersburg branch, The British Council looks set to continue its activities, said the organization’s press officers in Moscow and St. Petersburg. “The British Council does not intend to close down, and will carry on with its operations,” Stanislav Smirnov, communications manager at the British Council in St. |
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TINSEL TOWN
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A worker decorates the New Year’s tree on St. Isaac’s Square with the aid of a cherry-picker on Wednesday. Forecasters are predicting that the weather will remain warm over the weekend. |
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MOSCOW — The government will lift an import ban on Polish meat next week, bringing to an end a damaging two-year dispute that has prevented Russia from starting talks on a broader cooperation agreement with the European Union. The announcement came after talks in Moscow between Agriculture Minister Alexei Gordeyev and his Polish counterpart, Marek Sawicki.
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 The atmosphere in St. Petersburg’s School No. 305, from which Russian presidential candidate Dmitry Medvedev graduated 25 years ago, is elated. Both teachers and students of the school feel excited and proud that it was none other than a graduate from their school who was nominated for the presidency. |
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WASHINGTON — U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that Dmitry Medvedev, named by President Vladimir Putin as his preferred successor, was “of another generation” of Russian leaders, USA Today reported Wednesday. |
All photos from issue.
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The Small Enterprise Forum opened at the Lenexpo exhibition complex Thursday and will continue through December 14, while simultaneously, an exhibition of small enterprises has opened aimed at finding clients for small enterprises, attracting financial institutions interested in financing SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) and stimulating cooperation between small and large companies. |
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MOSCOW — Gazprom-Media has agreed to sell its stake in newspaper Izvestia to Bank Rossiya, according to a source within Gazprom. Gazprom’s media unit will sell 51 percent of the holding that controls Izvestia and its office building in central Moscow to Bank Rossiya’s insurance unit, Sogaz, Kommersant cited an unidentified Gazprom official as saying. |
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MOSCOW — The Agriculture Ministry’s animal and plant health watchdog is investigating whether the death of 35,000 poultry in the Rostov region was caused by the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu, a spokesman said Wednesday. Preliminary data from the Gulyai-Borisovskaya poultry farm in the Rostov region shows that the deaths, which began at the end of November, were caused by the virus, said Alexei Alexeyenko, a spokesman for the agency. “There is suspicion that it is H5N1,” Alexeyenko said. “We will have the results in about two days, maybe earlier. There are preliminary data but they need to be confirmed.” The outbreak, if confirmed, would be the country’s fourth major instance of bird flu this year. |
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 MOSCOW — Russia is back as a major player on the world nuclear market as President Vladimir Putin crafts a state behemoth to consolidate the country’s atomic assets after the chaos that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union. |
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MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday appointed Atomenergoprom chief Sergei Kiriyenko as the head of the country’s new state-run nuclear corporation, Rosatom. The state-run giant will incorporate Atomenergoprom, as well as all civilian and military nuclear facilities, research institutes and all organizations working in the field of nuclear security, the Kremlin said in a statement. |
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PAVLODAR, Kazakhstan — Kazakh metals major Eurasian Natural Resources opened a $900 million aluminum smelter on Wednesday, the country’s first, which it expects will hit full capacity of 250,000 tons per year by 2011. |
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Baltika Exports Expand ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Baltika Brewery has started exporting beer in plastic bottles to Germany. Baltika is the first Russian company to obtain permission from Deutsche Pfandsystem GmbH, which controls turnover of disposable containers, Baltika said Tuesday in a statement. |
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 President Vladimir Putin has a master manipulator’s talent for keeping his country guessing. Speculation about his successor, to be chosen in the presidential election in March, has for months been gathering intensity, but when the future seems clear, Putin utters another Delphic remark that throws everything awry. |
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Russia’s presidential election was held Monday. President Vladimir Putin voted for First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to become the new president. |
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 MOSCOW — At the age of 16, Albert Popkov left his high school to make money. He was interested in working with computers, but sold batteries on market stalls to earn his first cash. Now if Popkov’s school friends looked for him on the hit web site Odnoklassniki. |
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“People are so friendly,” said Terry Hall, The Specials’ former frontman, after performing at U.K. Flavours, the British Council-promoted outdoor event in July, soon after diplomats had been expelled as a reaction to Russia’s refusal to cooperate with the investigators of Alexander Litvinenko’s murder in London. |
 While figure skating may be a traditional sport in Russia, lessons for adults haven’t always been accessible to the general public. Olympic skaters willing to train for countless hours per day have been and continue to be appreciated and supported. But for the average person to suddenly decide to pick up figure skating as a form of exercise or artistic expression is relatively new. Quite possibly, it was last year’s television show “ Stars on the Ice” followed by this year’s version, “The Ice Age” which is responsible for such a phenomenon, as viewers watch movie stars perform on the ice rather than at the mercy of a director. |
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 Vladimir Bukovsky, a legendary Soviet dissident residing in the U.K. and a possible candidate in the upcoming presidential elections, spent a week in St. |
 MOSCOW — In the reality show “Temptation Island,” participants at least got a nice tan on a tropical beach while they discovered that their partners were cheating love rats who would chase anything in a bikini. Sadly, Muz-TV can’t run to those sort of expenses, so the channel’s equivalent show, “Fidelity Test,” involves doubting partners sitting in a backroom of a strip club, which probably smells of old G-strings, watching their other halves being propositioned by the club’s hardworking professionals. |
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Botanika // 7 Ulitsa Pestelya // Tel: 2727091 // Open 12p.m. through 11.30p.m. // Menu in Russian and English // Dinner for two: 1,110 rubles ($45) If the vast majority of restaurants in western Europe, regardless of the kind of cuisine on offer, now include a vegetarian section in their menus making it easy for everyone other than the strictest vegans to eat out, in Russia it is a different story. |
 Greatness hovers just outside “American Gangster,” knocking, angling to be let in. Based in rough outline on the flashy rise and fall of a powerful 1970s New York drug lord, Frank Lucas, the film has been built for importance, with a brand-name director, Ridley Scott, and two major stars, Denzel Washington as Lucas, and Russell Crowe as Richie Roberts, the New Jersey cop who brings him down. |
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 LISBON — Leaders of the 27-nation European Union signed a landmark treaty Thursday to revitalize the bloc’s decision-making, hailing it as a way to strengthen European unity while maintaining national identities. “History will remember this day as a day when new paths of hope were opened to the European ideal,” Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates said ahead of the signing ceremony with EU leaders and foreign ministers. |
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LONDON —David Beckham looks a good bet to win the 100th cap he craves but Fabio Capello’s appointment as England manager may not be good news for some of the other big names in the national squad. Capello, who was expected to be confirmed as Steve McClaren’s successor on Thursday following “extremely positive” talks with the English Football Association, has earned the opportunity to become the best-paid coach in world football over the course of 16 years in charge of four of the world’s biggest clubs. |
Temp: -2°C moderate or heavy snow showers
Issues Archive