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MOSCOW — Russia has waived entry visa requirements for fans with a valid ticket for the May 21 Champions League Final between Manchester United and Chelsea in Moscow, a match organiser told Reuters on Monday. “A fan can come without a visa and...enter Russia with a valid ticket,” said Alexei Sorokin, the Russian official coordinating preparations for the match. “It is an unprecedented decision by the Russian government,” Sorokin said. Tens of thousands of British fans are expected to travel to the match with the Premier League rivals facing each other in the final at the Soviet-era Luzhniki Stadium. The two English clubs have both been allocated 21,000 tickets each for the match in Moscow. |
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 A democratic opposition march and meeting held amid May Day festivities in St. Petersburg was marred by an unprecedented number of provocations directed against it whilst being patrolled by a massive police presence. |
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BANGKOK — Myanmar’s military government has a provisional death toll of 10,000 from this weekend’s devastating cyclone, with another 3,000 missing, a diplomat said on Monday after a briefing from Foreign Minister Nyan Win. “The basic message was that they believe the provisional death toll was about 10,000 with 3,000 missing,” a diplomat present at the meeting told Reuters in Bangkok. |
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MOSCOW — Swiss-based food company Nestle has apologised to Azerbaijan after CDs it handed out free with packets of breakfast products angered the former Soviet state by accusing it of provoking war with its neighbour. |
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MOSCOW — A Russian hockey fan died aboard a Toronto-bound Aeroflot flight after drinking heavily and harassing other passengers, including Russian Hockey Federation president and Hall of Fame goalie Vladislav Tretyak. The unidentified 41-year-old man was drinking straight from the bottle together with other passengers and began arguing with several passengers on the flight from Moscow on Wednesday, Canada’s Globe and Mail reported. |
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MOSCOW — Thousands of people used traditional May Day marches to call for something new: an end to rising food prices. The protests against rising inflation and living costs coincided with an end on May 1 to government-led price freezes on selected goods, a voluntary curb agreed on by food wholesalers and producers last October as a measure to stem inflation. |
All photos from issue.
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KODOR GORGE, Georgia — Russia says Georgia is massing troops and weapons in this steep-sided valley ready to attack the separatist Abkhazia region, but it does not feel like a place preparing for battle. On-duty policeman Rozman Loladze and his partner were making plans on Friday to hunt mountain goats with their Kalashnikov rifles. |
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WASHINGTON — The administration of U.S. President George W. Bush hopes to send a pact on civilian nuclear cooperation with Russia to the U.S. Congress in the next month, but a congressional aide said there would be strong resistance to the deal. |
 Activists who came to support the people of Tibet and protest human rights violations in the region found themselves outnumbered by Chinese students who came to counter the rally in St. Petersburg on Saturday. More than 100 Chinese people, with Chinese flags, pro-Beijing Olympics slogans, red carnations, and Chinese state symbols stuck to their faces, were sent away by the police who said their meeting was “unsanctioned. |
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MOSCOW — The final act in Russia’s highly choreographed transition of power is set to begin Wednesday at noon. When Dmitry Medvedev arrives at the Kremlin for his presidential inauguration, hundreds of VIP guests will be standing by for the ceremony, including politicians, foreign ambassadors and Russian media chiefs, Kremlin and diplomatic sources said Sunday. |
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City Carnival in May ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Preparations are underway for the annual St. Petersburg Carnival which will take place on the weekend of May 24 and 25 and involve as many as10,000 people marching down Nevsky Prospekt in costume, Fontanka. |
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TURI, Estonia — Tens of thousands of Estonians scoured fields, streets, forests and riverbanks to amass tons of rubbish in the country’s first national cleanup. |
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MOSCOW — An unpaid bill for street lighting could plunge Beslan, the North Ossetian town that suffered the country’s worst-ever terrorist attack, into darkness if the local government doesn’t pay up. The town’s 37,000 residents could have their electricity cut off May 12 if a local electricity retail company fails to pay a debt of more than 25 million rubles ($1.05 million), the regional power distributor said Sunday. The threat of a cutoff angered residents in Beslan, where 331 people, 186 of them children, died in September 2004 after Chechen separatists attacked the town’s biggest school and held hundreds hostage. The town has since struggled to come to terms with the traumatic attack, and, like the rest of the region, it suffers from some of the country’s worst poverty and unemployment rates. |
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 Complex laws are stopping people in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast from buying plots of land they use as gardens despite reforms intended to make privatization easier, experts said last Wednesday at a roundtable held by Rosbalt news agency. |
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MOSCOW — The country’s oil production fell for a fourth straight month in April, confirming pessimistic forecasts for the year, while exports rose on the back of improved weather. Industry and Energy Ministry data released Sunday showed that production stood at 9. |
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U.S. Pork Plants Banned WASHINGTON (Bloomberg) — Russia, the fifth-largest buyer of U.S. pork, has banned imports of meat from plants run by Tyson Foods and Smithfield Foods starting Monday. |
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About 100,000 square meters of new warehousing, depots and distribution hubs for goods and materials are to be added to St. Petersburg’s existing facilities by 2010, according to a plan approved by the St. Petersburg government last week. “Its main purpose is to regulate logistics sites in St. Petersburg,” a statement from the governor’s office released last Tuesday reads. “In this document a total of 20 main zones for development of warehouse facilities were indicated. Logistics sites will be located mainly along the ring road and outside it, so as not to aggravate transportation problems in the city and in the central districts. The plan, designed by the City Hall’s Committee for Transport and Transit Policy, meets requirements in the General Plan for St. |
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 MOSCOW — Before becoming the manager of Hotel Katerina City in Moscow, Katerina Oudalova, 27, ran her own fashion design business in Sweden, where her Russian parents emigrated in 1989. |
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NEW YORK — The United States has fallen into an “awfully pale recession” and may remain stagnant for the rest of the year, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan was quoted on Monday saying. “We’re in a recession,” Bloomberg news agency reported Greenspan had said in a television interview. “But this is an awfully pale recession at the moment. The declines in employment have not been as big as you’d expect to see.” Last week a government report showed employers shed jobs in April at a slower rate than had been feared, providing some relief about the slowing economy. Greenspan doubted there would be an immediate recovery, saying stagnation for the rest of the year was the most likely outcome. |
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 BASEL, Switzerland — Food price inflation may be one of the most serious problems facing the world, but one that monetary policy has little power to tackle, central bankers said on Monday. |
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 LONDON — South Korea’s LG Electronics announced the global launch of its Scarlet TV, the world’s slimmest LCD television set, in London last Wednesday. With a striking, slim silhouette, red back and round aperture surrounded by LED lights, this intelligent device sports a design intended to connect with viewers on an emotional level. |
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LOS ANGELES — Apple Inc said on Thursday it reached deals with top Hollywood studios to sell movies on its iTunes download service on the same day as the titles are released in DVD form, bringing its clout to a nascent market for video entertainment. |
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 A decade ago, the public perception of the agriculture industry was one of subsidies, trade distortions and rigged markets. More recently, public awareness has focused on concerns over food security, price inflation and even shortages. The demand factors are easily identifiable — population growth, urbanization, rising incomes, changing diets and fuel requirements. |
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In the 1970s, Alexander Solzhenitsyn hoped that Russia would be cleansed by its suffering under communism and eventually emerge as a beacon for other nations, leading the West toward moral regeneration. |
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Whether by a calculated design or an unintended chain of events spinning out of control, President-elect Dmitry Medvedev will have a foreign policy crisis on his hands when he officially takes office on Wednesday. The crisis over Abkhazia and South Ossetia will test Medvedev’s leadership in foreign affairs. |
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A decade ago, the triumph of liberalism in Europe was so overwhelming that even parties that traced their political lineage to the early 20th-century revolutionary working class movement did not speak openly about the radical transformation of society. |
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LONDON — Prime Minister Gordon Brown is looking to make popular concessions in a bid to win back support for his beleaguered Labour government after its drubbing in last week’s local elections, media reports said on Monday. He is considering ditching the rubbish bin tax, delaying the 2 pence (4 cents)-a-liter fuel duty rise in October, expanding shared equity schemes to boost the housing market and increasing pressure on supermarkets to reign in rising food prices, newspapers said. |
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VATICAN CITY — Beijing approached the Vatican to let the China Philharmonic Orchestra perform for Pope Benedict in an unprecedented concert that could help improve often thorny relations, Church sources said on Monday. |
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ASHGABAT — A rotating gold statue of Turkmenistan’s former leader is to be removed from the center of the capital, state media said on Saturday, as his successor chips away at the late president’s personality cult. Saparmurat Niyazov spent his 21 years in power building Turkmenistan into one of the world’s most isolated regimes while imposing his mark on the gas-rich Central Asian state. |
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BERLIN — In the latest case to shock Germany, authorities said on Monday they have discovered three dead babies in a freezer and arrested the woman believed to be the childrens’ mother. |
 JERUSALEM — Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wound up a weekend trip to spur Israeli-Palestinian talks with a one-on-one meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Monday, and Olmert was scheduled to meet Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas later in the day. |
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BELGRADE — Serbian President Boris Tadic has received death threats for “betraying the Serb people” by seeking closer ties with the European Union despite its support for Kosovo’s secession, officials said on Monday. |
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AMSTETTEN, Austria — Casual acquaintances knew Josef Fritzl as a jovial fellow who liked to drink beer and enjoyed a bawdy joke. But former neighbors say the man accused of imprisoning his daughter and fathering her seven children ran his household like a dictator. Piece by piece, a picture is emerging of a shrewd liar and an obsessive tyrant. |
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 QUEBEC CITY, Canada — Captain Alexei Morozov scored his second goal in sudden-death overtime as Russia rallied to beat the Czech Republic 5-4 in the preliminary round of the World Ice Hockey Championships on Sunday. Morozov’s goal just over three minutes into the extra session spoiled a superb performance by Czech forward Patrik Elias who had a hat trick at the Colisee arena. |
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Zenit St. Petersburg may not be the most fashionable club but the Russian champions made the rest of Europe take notice when they crushed German giants Bayern Munich 4-0 to reach the UEFA Cup final on Thursday. |
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Issues Archive