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 MOSCOW — The Federal Migration Service has until Saturday to decide whether to extend the visa of TNK-BP CEO Robert Dudley, in a key decision in the shareholder dispute between BP and its Russian partners in the 50-50 joint venture. Dudley’s visa expires on Saturday and, unless it is extended, he will have to leave Russia — and TNK-BP — within 10 days, a spokeswoman for the Federal Migration Service said Wednesday. |
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 Russia on Thursday marked the 90th anniversary of the murder of the last tsar, Nicholas II, and his family, a day after investigators announced that DNA analysis has finally identified the remains of the tsar’s heir, Alexei, and his sister Maria. |
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MOSCOW — Former Yukos chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky applied for parole on Wednesday in a bid to challenge President Dmitry Medvedev to follow through on promises to build an independent judiciary, his lawyers said. The case could be the first test of Medvedev’s desire to enforce the rule of law in a country that consistently ranks near the bottom of corruption rankings, said Igor Trunov, a high-profile lawyer not connected to the Khodorkovsky case. |
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The defunct alternative Moscow biweekly The eXile has launched a new web site, a month after its investors withdrew funding following a government inspection of its editorial content. |
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Living City, a pressure group that lobbies for the preservation of St. Petersburg’s historic center and heritage buildings, has collected nearly 2,000 signatures in a petition against skyscraper construction close to the city’s historic center, activist Pyotr Zabirokhin said on Thursday. The activists, who demonstrated on Malaya Konyushennaya Ulitsa for nearly a week between last Friday and Thursday, are demanding that the newly built Stock Exchange be lowered from its height of 67 meters and that the Finansist residential complex be lowered from its height of 65 meters. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a request by the Communist Party to have the results of the State Duma elections annulled on the grounds of what the party described as massive electoral violations. Judge Nikolai Tolcheyev issued a short ruling to wrap up the two-day hearing, saying only that the court had decided to dismiss the complaint and that the full ruling would be issued in writing in the coming days. The Communists presented 12,000 documents as evidence of electoral fraud in the Dec. 2 elections, in which they captured 11. |
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PLAIN SAILING
Mal langsdon / Reuters
The four-masted Russian tall ship Kruzenshtern enters the Bay of Douarnenez in France on Thursday as part of an armada taking part in the Douarnenez 2008 maritime festival. |
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MOSCOW — Italian President Giorgio Napolitano on Wednesday praised Russian proposals for new broad security framework for Europe, saying he would promote the idea within the European Union, in the warmest response so far from a Western politician to the Kremlin’s overtures. Russia’s cooperation within the Group of Eight major economies and investment opportunities were also high on the agenda as Napolitano met with President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin for talks Wednesday.
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TBILISI — Germany’s foreign minister received a cool response Thursday to a peace plan drawn up in Berlin aimed at ending a dangerous dispute over the separatist Georgian region of Abkhazia. Frank-Walter Steinmeier started a two-day trip in Tbilisi that will also take him to Russia and Abkhazia in a bid to defuse a conflict that brought the region to the brink of war just months ago. |
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The Finance Ministry announced last month that Russia does not intend to take out foreign loans between 2009 and 2011 because the federal budget has enough money for all its planned investment and additional needs. Since late 2007, Russian foreign debt has declined 14. |
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The German wood-based panel product manufacturer Pfleiderer laid the first stone for the building of its second plant on Monday near the village of Podberyozie in the Novgorod Oblast, where around 30 locals staged a picket protesting in German against the construction. |
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MOSCOW — Yelena Baturina, the country’s wealthiest woman and wife of Mayor Yury Luzhkov, on Wednesday denied a report in a British newspaper that she had bought a luxurious London residence for $100 million. The Daily Mail Online reported that Baturina purchased Witanhurst — the second-largest private estate in London, after Buckingham Palace — for 50 million pounds. |
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SURGUT, Russia — Germany’s E.ON began building two 400 megawatt turbines at a power station in Russia’s oil heartland, which when completed would make it the largest station in the world, the utility said on Thursday. |
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Russia Takes the Lead ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — Russia surpassed Germany as Europe’s biggest auto market in the first half as sales rose 41 percent to 1.65 million cars, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP said. Spending on autos increased 64 percent to a record $33.8 billion, buoyed by $27 billion of imports, the accounting firm said in an e-mailed report last week, citing data from a PwC study, Russia’s statistics and customs offices and Moscow consultant ASM. |
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 There is war in the air between Georgia and Russia. Such a war could destabilize a region critical for Western energy supplies and ruin relations between Russia and the West. A conflict over Georgia could become an issue in the U.S. presidential campaign. |
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Things have not been going so well for our siloviki. The BBC ran an interview on July 7 with an anonymous high-ranking agent of Britain’s MI5 counterespionage unit who declared that Russian authorities were behind the poisoning death in London of former Federal Secret Service agent Alexander Litvinenko. |
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 The Manic Street Preachers, the seminal British rock band formed in Blackwood, Wales, in 1991, always aimed to bring rock music and revolution together. With its most recent album, “Send Away the Tigers,” reviving the band’s early enthusiasm and energy, the trio will make its Russian debut by performing in Moscow on Wednesday. |
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The street cred of Gogol Bordello has been perhaps affected by its Ukraine-born frontman Eugene Hutz’s recent collaborations with Madonna. He appeared with the pop diva to perform “La Isla Bonita / Lela Pala Tute” at the London Live Earth concert in July 2007, and, earlier this year, starred in her directorial debut, the film “Filth and Wisdom. |
 Veliky Novgorod is a quiet, clean town with green spaces and fresh air 190 kilometers south of St. Petersburg, and a pleasant place to escape to from the city. However, it used to be a powerful city republic whose political system resembled a democracy and whose territory extended thousands of miles from Estonia to the Ural Mountains. The memory of this unique city-state — not to be confused with the city of Nizhny Novgorod — was overshadowed after it was annexed by Moscow, but many of the social, cultural and religious traditions which began here have profoundly shaped Russian culture. |
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 You would have thought that the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 had been picked over by historians, memoirists, political scientists, filmmakers, conference organizers and decision-making theorists, until there was absolutely nothing more to be said. |
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I want to hate David Benioff. He’s annoyingly handsome. He’s already written a pair of unputdownable books, one of which was made into Spike Lee’s most heartbreaking film, “The 25th Hour” — for which Benioff was asked to write the screenplay, leading to a second career in Hollywood. (They should just get it over with and put the man in the movies already.) He takes his morning orange juice next to Amanda Peet. And he’s still in his 30s. See what I mean? Benioff’s new novel reveals why there are so many Russians — not oligarchs or prostitutes, but soldiers and old babushkas — in this nice American boy’s fiction. “City of Thieves” follows a character named Lev Beniov, the son of a revered Soviet Jewish poet who was “disappeared” in the Stalinist purges, as Lev and an accomplice carry out an impossible assignment during the Nazi blockade of Leningrad. |
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 The British chose Winston Churchill; the Americans chose Ronald Reagan; and the South Africans chose Nelson Mandela. Now Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and Tsar Nicholas II, the country’s last monarch, are running neck and neck in a contest sponsored by state-run Rossia television called “Name of Russia,” a Russian version of the BBC show “Great Britons” aimed at selecting the country’s most significant historical figure. |
 Although France celebrated its national holiday, as always, on July 14 (Monday), St. Petersburg’s traditional Bastille Day celebration will take place on the beach of Peter and Paul Fortress nearly a week later on Sunday (July 20). St. Petersburg shares with Paris the spirit of revolution and where better to mark the 219th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille fortress-prison in 1789, a key event in the French Revolution, than near the walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress which also served as a prison for political prisoners in the 18th and 19th Centuries? In the February Revolution of 1917, the prelude to October’s showdown, the fortress was attacked and the prisoners were freed in an echo of events in Paris 128 years before. |
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Sochi Restaurant // 30 Bolshoi Prospekt, Petrograd Side (above Captain Morgan casino). Tel: 230 7230. www.r-sochi.com // Open noon through midnight. Menu in Russian only. |
 As you scrutinize the aging bodies of the Rolling Stones in Martin Scorsese’s rip-roaring concert documentary “Shine a Light,” there is ample evidence that rock ’n’ roll may hold the secret of eternal vitality, if not eternal beauty. Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, the quartet’s three skinny members, certainly look their ages. |
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BOGOTA — Colombia misused the symbol of the Red Cross in this month’s military rescue of politician Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other rebel-held hostages, it said on Wednesday, admitting a possible violation of the rules of war. “We regret that this occurred,” President Alvaro Uribe said in a speech following reports that the Red Cross emblem was displayed on a jersey or T-shirt worn by a Colombian intelligence officer who took part in the rescue mission. Falsely portraying military personnel as Red Cross members is against the Geneva Conventions as it could put humanitarian workers at risk when they are in war zones. Uribe has drawn widespread praise for the July 2 rescue of French-Colombian citizen Betancourt, three U. |
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 SYDNEY — Pope Benedict on Thursday told a huge gathering of young people that they were inheriting a planet whose resources had been scarred and squandered to fuel insatiable consumption. |
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SEOUL — Two South Korean labs are offering pet owners the chance to clone dogs, but for those looking to bring back a beloved beagle, be ready to wait in line and have plenty of cash on hand. The Seoul-based labs -- one affiliated to RNL Bio Co and the other to Sooam Biotech Research Foundation — are separated by about 30 km (20 miles) and bill themselves as the only places in the world where you can clone a cocker spaniel or retrieve a retriever, with costs running at about $50,000 to $100,000. |
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 LAVELANET, France — The Tour de France was rocked by a third positive doping scandal Thursday following the news that Italian Riccardo Ricco tested positive for banned substances. Ricco, who won two climbing stages last week, was taken into custody by French police amid scenes of chaos outside his Saunier Duval team bus before the start of stage 12. |
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MILAN — Ronaldinho arrived at AC Milan’s training ground on Wednesday where he was due to undergo a medical and sign a three-year contract. Barcelona agreed late on Tuesday to sell the Brazil forward for an initial fee of 21 million euros ($33. |
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Issues Archive