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St. Petersburg’s European University has dismissed claims that it has been closed down for political reasons, saying that a court ordered it to halt its operations because of fire code violations at the institution. The University temporarily stopped its activities on fire safety grounds after the Dzerzhinsky Court handed down a decision on Thursday. But media reports over the weekend speculated that the University was closed because it “trained election observers” with a 673,000 euro grant from the European Union. President Vladimir Putin has warned of what he sees as foreign influence on the upcoming presidential election and has placed limitations on foreign election observers that led the OSCE to pull out of monitoring the March 2 vote last week. |
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 MOSCOW — With three months left in his presidency, Vladimir Putin on Friday called for tax cuts, a downsizing of bureaucracy and less state involvement in the economy — reforms that he said should allow Russians to live longer and better. |
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It was a typical December night in Moscow. The cold was biting, the snow thick and dry. In the Federal Security Service’s headquarters on Lubyanskaya Ploshchad, hundreds of intelligence officers met as they did every year to celebrate the founding of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police. |
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The number of current and former intelligence officers employed by the state has increased significantly under President Vladimir Putin. Here are some senior figures linked to the security services. |
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Feeling it was dangerous to place national security in the hands of a single organization, President Boris Yeltsin split the KGB into around a half dozen agencies in the early 1990s. Here’s what they were. • The Federal Security Service, or FSB. This is the main domestic counterespionage agency. Its initial task was to operate only on Russian territory, including in its embassies abroad. |
All photos from issue.
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Amid fears of a low turnout in March 2 Russian presidential elections, the St. Petersburg Election Commission announced last week it will prepare personal invitations to more than three million registered voters in the city to “boost public awareness. |
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As a retired local boxer stands trial for killing an assailant who was caught attempting to rape his adopted child, the city parliament is calling for increased penalties for pedophilia. |
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MOSCOW — A Moscow court has ordered a U.S. pastor to remain in detention for two months while prosecutors investigate him on suspicion of smuggling ammunition into the country, a U.S. Embassy spokeswoman said Sunday. Phillip Miles, a pastor of the Christ Community Church in Conway, South Carolina, was detained at Sheremetyevo Airport on Feb. |
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MOSCOW — Representatives of the fractured liberal opposition will meet next month to discuss the creation of a broad liberal alliance and the development of a coordinated political platform, opposition leaders said Friday. |
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MOSCOW — Human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin said his efforts to defend citizens’ rights were being hampered by courts that lack independence and that issue poor rulings. In an interview published Friday in government daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta, Lukin singled out Moscow courts for delaying his work. “Moscow courts . |
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Bank St. Petersburg has launched an Internet banking system that managers expect will reduce operational expenses and attract new clients. So far, registering and using the system have been provided for free. However, only 10,000 clients regularly use Internet banking, which has been available since November last year. “We expect to attract new clients with this Internet banking system - people looking for a way to make various sorts of payments without paying burdensome commissions or standing in lines,” Pavel Philimonenok, deputy chairman of the board of Bank St. Petersburg, said Monday at a press conference. Bank St. Petersburg serves 560,000 individual clients. |
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 MOSCOW — Russian gas monopoly Gazprom on Monday granted Ukraine a few extra hours to pay off debt or face a cut in supplies as tense talks overshadowed a visit here by Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko. |
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Sea Port Stake Acquired ST. PETERSBBURG (SPT) — The Dutch company Universal Cargo Logistics Holding B.V. (UCLH) completed the acquisition of a 97.01 percent stake in the Sea Port St. Petersburg open joint-stock company from the former owners, Jysk Stalindustry ApS and Chupit Limited, along with four stevedoring companies belonging to the group, the port’s press service said Monday in a statement. |
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It may not be obvious to shoppers at Lenta, but the city’s largest retail chain is the object of a serious conflict between its shareholders. Lenta was founded in 1993 by the entrepreneur Oleg Zherebtsov and his partners. Along with O’Key and Pyatorochka, it is a local business that has expanded into a national chain. Unlike pricey Moscow-based supermarket chains like Seventh Continent or Perekryostok, Lenta was a classic cash-and-carry that transformed into the sort of economy hypermarket that helps thrifty consumers save both time and money. I can even remember being asked by an arrogant acquaintance: “Don’t you go to Lenta? It’s very fashionable to go there, everyone does. |
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 It’s now been more than two years since Russia cut off gas supplies to Ukraine. It is threatening to do so again this week. Many in the European Union said in 2006 that they had finally woken up to the risks of overdependence on a single supplier. |
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Russian business leaders are very aware of the negative role that alcohol and drug abuse play on the workplace, but the potential threat that HIV poses to the strength of the private sector is not as high on the corporate agenda. It should be. The spread of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) should be a concern to all of us. |
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WASHINGTON — Democrat Barack Obama is riding a burst of momentum into Tuesday’s presidential nominating contests with a string of weekend wins, while Republican John McCain received praise from onetime rival President George W. Bush as he tries to woo conservatives. Locked in a deadlocked state-by-state battle with Obama for the Democratic nomination, Senator Hillary Clinton replaced her campaign manager after Saturday’s losses to the Illinois senator. Obama, who would be the first black president, scored a win in Maine on Sunday after sweeping caucuses in Louisiana, Nebraska and Washington a day earlier. “We have now won on the Atlantic coast, we’ve won on the North Coast, we’ve won on the Pacific Coast, and we’ve won in between those coasts,” Obama said at a rally in Virginia Beach, Virginia after the Maine results were announced. |
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London’s Burning / Reuters
A huge fire destroyed buildings in Camden, north London, on Saturday. By Monday the cause of the blaze remained unknown. |
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LONDON — Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the world’s 77 million Anglicans, gets a chance to respond on Monday to a barrage of criticism after saying the introduction in Britain of some aspects of Islamic law is unavoidable. The Archbishop of Canterbury has remained silent on the subject since his comments on Thursday on the use of sharia in Britain led to calls for him to resign.
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 Managers of Kvartira.Ru investment corporation expect a business-class residential complex that the company is constructing on Sverdlovskaya embankment to benefit from the future development of the nearby territory, which is set to include the future Okhta Center skyscraper that will house Gazprom’s headquarters along with other businesses. “Considering what is being constructed in this area, in just a few years we will be able to advertise this complex as being located at the center of business activity in the city,” Pavel Kanalin, general manager of Kvartira. |
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 Real estate experts optimistically forecast healthy growth in commercial areas of all market segments this year. The development of office areas is expected to increase, while a large number of warehouse facilities are under construction, with projects receiving backing from foreign investors and developers increasingly interested in the St. Petersburg market.
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 Paragraph 36 of the Land Code stipulates that owners of premises located on state and municipal lands have the exclusive right to buy these land plots. The new regulations from October 2007, which will be in force until January 2010, define the buying-out price of the land according to the “privatization history” of premises located on it. |
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ST. PETERSBURG — The large-scale selling of land plots last year by City Hall has resulted in the appearance on the local construction market of a major player — Oleg Deripaska’s Glavstroi company bought 732 hectares of the 767. |
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The Russian-British oil company TNK-BP will buy land plots and invest over $150 million into filling stations in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast over the next five years, the company said Monday in a statement. The company will also invest in existing filling stations. On Monday TNK-BP opened its first multifunctional filling station under the BP brand name in St. Petersburg, at Maly Prospekt on Vasilievsky Island. It is the 50th filling station opened by the company in Russia. “The St. Petersburg retail fuel market is one of the most attractive in Russia, and a key priority for TNK-BP along with Moscow,” Anthony Considine, Executive Vice-President of TNK-BP, said in the statement. |
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 City Tipped For $4 Bln ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — Russian entrepreneur Andrei Rogachev, founder of the Pyaterochka and Carousel supermarket chains, plans to invest $4 billion in property developments in St. |
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 In 1788, Massachusetts playwright Mercy Otis Warren took one look at the unratified U.S. Constitution and declared, “We shall soon see this country rushing into the extremes of confusion and violence.” This, roughly, is the origin of American declinism — and it’s been downhill ever since. |
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There is something very strange about the way news is presented in Russia. On one hand, there is news that we are all aware of — news of Medvedev meeting with dairy farmers, for example, or Medvedev outlawing inflation and increasing pensions. |
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Josef Stalin and President Vladimir Putin epitomize the type of leader who is ready to sacrifice the country’s interests to maintain his power. Of course, Stalin and Putin used ideologies extensively for propagandistic purposes and for the legitimization of their personal power. But given the fact that they were concerned only about personal power, these two leaders were extremely flexible and open to the idea of changing the country’s ideological course in any direction. |
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WASHINGTON — Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am was so inspired by a speech given by White House hopeful Barack Obama that he turned it into a music video filled with celebrities singing the Democrat’s words. Will.i.am says on his website that he made the song, entitled “Yes We Can,” after hearing the silver-tongued candidate’s speech at the primary in New Hampshire, where he lost to Hillary Clinton, in which he repeatedly intoned those three words. |
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LONDON — Jonny Wilkinson returned to something like his normal, composed self and lock Steve Borthwick led by example to help save England from a second successive Six Nations collapse at the weekend. England must, however, improve dramatically if they are to have a chance of upsetting joint leaders and title holders France in Paris on Feb. |
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MANCHESTER, England — Manchester City honored the memory of Manchester United’s tragic 1958 Busby Babes before showing no regard for their arch-rivals’ current title ambitions with an unexpected 2-1 win at an emotional Old Trafford on Sunday. |
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