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 MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev denounced U.S. plans to build a missile-defense shield in Central Europe while visiting China on Friday, keeping the foreign policy course laid out by his predecessor, Vladimir Putin. Traveling abroad for the first time as president, he criticized the plans in a joint statement that he signed with President Hu Jintao in Beijing, one of Moscow’s closest allies and biggest trade partners. |
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TBILISI— The UN concluded in a report Monday that a Russian fighter jet shot down an unmanned Georgian spy plane last month, boosting Tbilisi’s claims of Russian military interference on its territory. |
 With his Eurovision victory Saturday night, Dima Bilan provided the country with its first win in the song contest and his hometown in the republic of Karachayevo-Cherkessia with a street and a school bearing his name. Bilan may also have given St. Petersburg the opportunity of hosting next year’s competition after his producer Yana Rudkovskaya expressed support for the idea in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s victory at the contest, which is often ridiculed as a freak show for its descent into camp and kitsch. |
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MOSCOW — The crew of the international space station could have a rough return to Earth because its re-entry capsule has the same glitch that caused problems on the last two landings, a Russian space industry source said. |
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A fire at an air force arms depot destroyed all 450 missiles stored there in the town of Lodeinoye Pole, Leningrad Oblast, on Friday, Interfax reported. The missiles did not contain live charges. The fire began at the depot that belongs to the air force garrison at Lodeinoye Pole at around 3 p. |
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BERLIN — Germans fretted about being unloved in Europe on Sunday after their most popular band of the last decade got zero points from 40 of 42 countries in the Eurovision Song Contest and they ended up sharing last place. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — St. Petersburg communists are campaigning against the new Indiana Jones movie, complaining that its portrayal of the Russian villains is insulting and historically inaccurate. “We are really outraged by this film, which has nothing to do with reality,” Veronika Klinovitskaya, a spokeswoman for the Communists of St. |
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MOSCOW — The negotiations between Moscow and Brussels for a new and wide-ranging cooperation agreement could get tougher than the cumbersome 18 months of wrangling leading up to them, the European Union’s top representative in Moscow said. |
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Foreign investment increased by 10 percent in St. Petersburg during the period from January to March this year, despite falling by 43 percent in Russia as a whole, as car producers helped boost the city’s economy. Direct foreign investment into St. Petersburg’s economy reached $266 million in the first quarter of 2008 — up 9. |
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Banking Experts Gather ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The 17th International Banking Congress will be held this week from Wednesday to Saturday. The theme of the forum, which will be held at the Park Inn Pribaltiskaya hotel, is “Banks in the financial brokerage system: the situation and its prospects. |
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MOSCOW — Former U.S. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh has advised a Russian court to dismiss a $22.5 billion lawsuit that the Bank of New York Mellon is facing in Moscow. Since last May, the Russian government has been seeking compensation after a former vice president at the bank, Lucy Edwards, helped launder more than $7 billion from Russia in the late 1990s through Bank of New York accounts and dummy companies. Reviving the decade-old case, lawyers for the Federal Customs Service have based their claim on a U.S. law known as RICO, which was passed in 1970 to combat the mafia. Thornburgh, known for fighting organized and white-collar crime in the Justice Department under five U. |
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 More than 20 businesswomen from the U.S.-based Financial Women’s Association arrived in St. Petersburg on Friday to take part in the 24th annual international conference. |
 MINSK — Ukraine said Friday that it would hold talks on Russian natural gas supplies with Moscow simultaneously with negotiations on Russia’s membership in the World Trade Organization. “I believe that simultaneously preparing a strategic agreement on Russian gas supplies to Ukraine . |
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MOSCOW — The Russian central bank, worried about galloping inflation and fast lending growth, said on Monday it will aggressively raise bank reserve requirements from July 1 in order to curb inflation. |
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MOSCOW — The chief executive of BP’s Russian venture, TNK-BP, has acknowledged for the first time that the Russian and British shareholders disagree on matters, saying it could damage oil production. “There is of course some disagreement among TNK-BP shareholders... on the question of investment, on the question of the sale of some assets in Russia,” Robert Dudley told Monday’s edition of Vedomosti. TNK-BP, which is half-owned by BP and a group of Russian billionaires, has been the subject of long-running market speculation that the Kremlin wants one of the groups to sell out to a state firm, such as gas export monopoly Gazprom. Russian security services have raided TNK-BP and BP offices in Moscow and arrested an employee on commercial espionage charges. |
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 Motorists in St. Petersburg and about 50 other cities across the country protested rising gasoline prices Saturday and called on the government to take measures to punish producers of substandard fuel. |
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MOSCOW — Former electricity monopoly Unified Energy System will ask the potential buyer of power producer OGK-1 to make a final decision on the acquisition in early June, a source close to the sale said Friday. Also Friday, UES chief executive Anatoly Chubais told reporters that a deadline for the negotiations over the sale of OGK-1 had been set, although he declined to say what it was. |
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TOKYO — A senior U.S. Treasury official on Monday urged Japan to open up to foreign investment, underscoring growing concern overseas that Asia’s largest economy is becoming more insular. |
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MOSCOW — Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Friday that buying Yahoo was not a strategy in itself, and dropping the bid meant it now had $50 billion to spend on other acquisitions. “Yahoo was never the strategy we were pursuing, it was a way to accelerate our online advertising business,” he told a packed hall at a technology conference in Moscow. |
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FRANKFURT — Deutsche Telekom said that it has uncovered the illegal monitoring of phone calls while investigating claims that management had spied on rebel directors. |
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 President Dmitry Medvedev’s two-day state visit to China has important symbolic significance. The visit, which began last Friday, is the highlight of Medvedev’s first foreign trip since taking office in early May. Medvedev visited Kazakhstan last Thursday. |
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Dec. 25, 2041. Moscow. Today, President Dmitry Medvedev presided over the 50th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union, now a national holiday marked by parades, speeches and a spike in drunk-driving fatalities. |
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Most journalists have unquestioningly embraced the notion that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin formed the new government. A typical headline after the Cabinet shakeup read: “Putin Reinforces Power Base by Giving Top Jobs to Kremlin Aides” (Financial Times). But is that true? Many Russian insiders disagree, as has been reflected in this newspaper. |
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 In this age of grisly televised violence and graphic reporting from the front lines of war, literary models are struggling to keep their hold on the popular imagination. A murder imagined from the page somehow lacks the immediacy of a murder witnessed on the screen. The thriller genre seems to be responding to this fact by escalating its brutality — often early on in the story. In the novels of crime writers such as James Patterson and Patricia Cornwell, the first few chapters have the feel of a ceremonial bloodletting. |
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 Almost three years after the death of Mikhail Gasparov, one of Russia’s greatest literary scholars and intellectual icons of the last few decades, his new book has hit bookstores. |
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 As he soaked up the feeble May sunshine at an outdoor cafe on Moscow’s Red Square, State Duma Deputy Robert Shlegel, Russia’s youngest lawmaker, held forth on how the Kremlin should breed a new generation of patriotic public administrators. “Fifteen people under 30 elected to the Duma isn’t a bad start,” Shlegel, 23, said as he sipped a $10 juice, which he insisted, somewhat defensively, that he could afford. |
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CAROLINA, Puerto Rico — Struggling presidential contender Hillary Clinton campaigned in Puerto Rico on Sunday as she prepared for a pivotal ruling and sought to end a firestorm ignited by her reference to the 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy. Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, was to join her on Monday for a third straight day of campaigning on the Caribbean island, where she has been favored to win. |
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CANNES — Critics hailed the first French victory at the Cannes film festival for 21 years, after the acclaimed classroom drama “Entre Les Murs” (The Class) won the Palme d’Or for best picture late on Sunday. |
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MIANZHU, China — China was preparing to dynamite rock, mud and rubble forming a dangerously large “quake lake” on Monday, hoping to avert a new disaster two weeks after a catastrophic tremor struck Sichuan province. The government put the death toll from the May 12 earthquake at 65,080, an increase of more than 2,400 from a day earlier. The figure is certain to rise as searchers account for the 23,150 missing. A total of 360,058 people were injured. The Communist Party’s decision-making Politburo warned that the situation remained “grim” and relief work arduous for the country’s “most destructive” tremor since 1949, the official Xinhua news agency said. |
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 BEIRUT — President Michel Suleiman, the army chief elected Lebanon’s head of state on Sunday, kept the military unified through three years of turmoil that pushed the country to the brink of a new civil war. |
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YANGON — Foreign aid workers saddled up for the cyclone-ravaged Irrawaddy delta on Monday to see whether army-ruled Myanmar will honor a promise made by its top general to give them freedom of movement. “We’re going to head out today and test the boundaries,” one official from a major Western relief agency told Reuters in Yangon shortly before his departure for a region that has been off-limits to nearly all foreigners since the May 2 cyclone. |
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 MONACO — McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton battled to a masterful Monaco Grand Prix victory on Sunday despite hitting the barriers on an afternoon of mayhem on the principality’s slippery streets. “This has got to be the highlight of my career, and it will be the highlight for the rest of my life,” declared the ecstatic Briton, the first English winner of the showcase race since Graham Hill in 1969. |
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MOSCOW — Russia must avoid the internal problems that have plagued them at major tournaments in the past if they are to do well at Euro 2008, coach Guus Hiddink said on Saturday. |
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LONDON — Chelsea sacked manager Avram Grant on Saturday, three days after his team were beaten on penalties in the Champions League final by Manchester United. “Chelsea Football Club can confirm that Avram Grant has had his contract as manager terminated today. |
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CARDIFF — Munster won the Heineken Cup for the second time when they edged triple champions Toulouse 16-13 in a fearsomely competitive Heineken Cup final that more than lived up to its billing at the Millennium Stadium on Saturday. |
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 MOSCOW — When Moscow photographer Serge Golovach decided to present portraits of beautiful women for an HIV/AIDS awareness project, he was revealing a startling truth about AIDS in Russia today — it is quickly becoming a problem with a woman’s face. At the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in Russia, those infected were predominantly male. |
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Issues Archive