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 MOSCOW/TBILISI — Russia said on Thursday its air force fighters had flown over the breakaway Georgian region of South Ossetia to prevent an attack by Georgian forces. The overflight was ordered less than 24 hours before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in Georgia in a show of support for the ex-Soviet state, which wants to join NATO. |
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Archaeologists have discovered the wreck of a Russian battleship designed by Peter the Great in Amsterdam and which played a key role in a 1719 victory over Sweden in a war on the Baltic Sea. |
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LONDON — Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Thursday he told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev at the G8 summit that the issue of ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko’s death in London “would not be closed.” Giving his account of their first face-to-face meeting, which came amid cool relations between Britain and Russia, Brown said he had told Medvedev that the current stalemate over the case was unacceptable. |
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MOSCOW — Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin has denied accusations that he is running an illegal business in the Czech Republic. In an interview published Wednesday in the Argumenty i Fakty weekly, Bastrykin called a report, published last week in Moskovsky Komsomolets about a Prague-based real estate business he purportedly owns, a “crude lie that deceives readers. |
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Avrora Collision ST.PETERSBURG (SPT) — A leisure boat collided with the Cruiser Avrora in the early hours of Thursday morning when the helmsman lost control of the vessel, Interfax reported. The boat was carrying two people, a man and a woman who both sustained serious injuries. The female passenger was treated by the ambulance crew on the spot, while the male driver was delivered to a hospital in condition. |
All photos from issue.
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 RUSUTSU, Japan — President Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday that Russia was “distressed” by a U.S. deal to place parts of a missile-defense shield in the Czech Republic and promised to respond with “concrete steps.” Medvedev also balked at a G8 proposal to impose sanctions on Zimbabwe, reflecting Russia’s reluctance to punish governments for votes that the West describes as not free and unfair — a description that it has repeatedly heard about its own elections. |
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MOSCOW — Police used a dramatic helicopter raid to detain dozens of reputed crime bosses gathered on a yacht to settle a rift between rival dons, an Interior Ministry spokeswoman said Wednesday. |
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A St. Petersburg woman killed her drunk husband with a folding couch, Channel Five television reported Wednesday. The St. Petersburg channel said the man’s wife, upset with her husband for being drunk and refusing to get up, kicked a handle after an argument, activating a mechanism that folds the couch up against a wall. |
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 PERM — Viktor Vekselberg’s Integrated Energy Systems will seek to raise $1 billion from the sale of non-core electricity assets in the next six months to a year, general director Mikhail Slobodin said. “We already have several serious offers for our non-core assets,” Slobodin told reporters as he opened a new turbine at a power station in the Perm region on Tuesday. |
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MOSCOW — New rules will slash the percentage of shares Russian energy and mining companies can sell on stock exchanges abroad and impose less severe restrictions on other companies, the Federal Service for Financial Markets announced Wednesday. |
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MOSCOW — The Central Bank allowed the ruble to strengthen Wednesday for the second time in a month, and dealers said they thought it was not the last time the regulator would use its heavy weaponry to combat inflation. The ruble was trading at 29.42 versus the dollar/euro basket, 0. |
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MOSCOW — Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin said Wednesday that the state supported BP’s presence in the country and that the Cabinet would gradually seek to remove some government officials from Rosneft’s board. |
 ASTANA, Kazakhstan — If there is one thing Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev cherishes as part of his legacy, it is the gold-plated extravagance of his new capital, Astana. Tucked away in the empty heartland of Eurasia, Astana was little more than a windswept provincial town a decade ago, when Nazarbayev declared it the capital of his vast, oil-rich state. |
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MOSCOW — Gazprom-led Nord Stream, a controversial pipeline that will ship Russian gas directly to Europe, can only seek financing once it gains environmental approval from neighboring countries, the consortium’s financial director said Wednesday. |
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 Cast your mind back five years, when then-President Vladimir Putin made his state visit to London. The high-light was a ceremony hosted by Prime Minister Tony Blair, celebrating the creation of a new oil company called TNK-BP. It brought together BP’s technology and expertise with some of Russia’s world-class energy assets. |
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On behalf of all Muslims living in Russia, Geidar Dzhemal, head of the Islamic Committee of Russia, has called for an end to the persecution of Muslims in the country. |
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 A business association dedicated to promoting the interests of its member companies, the American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) in Russia originates from the American Business Club (ABC) that was created informally by a group of businessmen to unite the underrepresented American business community and aid each other in working towards common goals as Russia became independent after the collapse of the U. |
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 One of the most prominent members of the American Chamber of Commerce in St. Petersburg, the Grand Hotel Europe, is in part responsible for rolling back the centuries and reviving the imperial tradition of sumptuous balls in the city. |
 One member of the St. Petersburg chapter of the American Chamber of Commerce had particular reason to celebrate this week, as the Ford Motor Company announced that it had produced its 250,000th Focus model at its Russian plant in Vsevolozhsk, to the north of the city. The quarter-of-a-million milestone was passed on Wednesday, the company reported in a statement released to the press. |
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STRASBOURG, France — French President Nicolas Sarkozy insisted on Thursday he had the backing of all European capitals for his controversial decision to attend the opening of the Beijing Olympics. The Elysee Palace announcement on Wednesday that Sarkozy would attend the ceremony next month on behalf of the 27-member European Union triggered accusations he was undermining EU efforts to pressure China on its human rights record. Defending the move in the European Parliament, Sarkozy said that as the current holder of the EU presidency, he had sought approval from all member states for the trip. “All the member states gave their agreement for me to participate in the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games,” he told the assembly, whose president on Wednesday vowed to snub the Games’ August 8 opening. |
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 The beaches and mountains of Crimea were once the epitome of a Soviet Black Sea holiday. Today the peninsula, which is only connected to southern Ukraine by a short, thin neck of land, seems to draw more middle-class tourists along with large numbers of hikers, campers and cyclists. |
 TEHRAN — Iran tested more missiles in the Gulf on Thursday, state media said, and the United States pledged to defend its allies against any Iranian aggression. Washington, which fears Tehran wants to master technology to build nuclear weapons, said after Iran test-fired nine missiles on Wednesday that Tehran should halt further tests if it wanted to gain the world’s trust. |
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In recent conversations with The St. Petersburg Times, accomplished western musicians either criticized or raved about the current situation in music and the music industry. |
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BEIJING — A new round of talks aimed at disarming North Korea will focus on verifying the North’s own account of its nuclear programs, the chief U.S. envoy said on Thursday. The negotiations are the first in nine months, after North Korea last month produced a long-delayed declaration of its nuclear activities, one of the initial steps pledged under a disarmament deal. |
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This autumn the Mikhailovsky Theater celebrates its 175th anniversary and to mark the occasion the recently revamped opera and ballet theater is taking its ballet troupe on its first London tour. |
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WASHINGTON — U.S. civil rights leader Jesse Jackson complained on Tuesday that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama can seem to be “talking down to black people” at times and should broaden his message. But Jackson apologized for a crude and disparaging remark about Obama at the weekend while he was speaking into an open microphone that he thought had been turned off. Jackson, talking to CNN on Wednesday, said Obama has given what amounts to “lectures” at African-American churches. “I said it can come off as speaking down to black people. The moral message must be a much broader message. What we need really is racial justice and urban policy and jobs and health care. |
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 With his band Televizor on summer vacation, opposition rocker Mikhail Borzykin will perform at a concert that brings together three like-minded rock musicians at Orlandina on Wednesday. |
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LONDON — British author Salman Rushdie won the “Best of the Booker” prize on Thursday to mark the 40th anniversary of one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards. “Midnight’s Children” won the Booker Prize in 1981, and the Indian-born writer was hot favorite to take the award decided by the public from a shortlist of six in an online poll. The 61-year-old, whose 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses” outraged many Muslims and prompted death threats against him, also won the 25th anniversary Booker prize in 1993. “I think it was an extraordinary shortlist and it was an honor to be on it,” Rushdie said in a recorded message from the United States, where he is on a book tour. |
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 The first 40 minutes or so of “Wall-E” — in which barely any dialogue is spoken, and almost no human figures appear on screen — is a cinematic poem of such wit and beauty that its darker implications may take a while to sink in. |
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 SEOUL, South Korea — Guus Hiddink, christened the “wizard” by grateful Russian media, said Tuesday there was no magic to his giant-killing exploits as a coach in big international tournaments. “There’s no recipe, there’s no secret, there’s no magic,” he told journalists during a visit to South Korea, the team he took to the 2002 World Cup semi-finals against all the odds. |
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Issues Archive