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 MOSCOW — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez agreed Friday to give broad access to his country’s oil riches to five Russian companies, Russian Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko said. The deal came after a meeting between President Dmitry Medvedev and Chavez in Orenburg, where the Venezuelan leader reiterated his support for Russia’s actions in last month’s military conflict with Georgia. It also came a day after the announcement of a $1 billion loan for Venezuela to buy Russian military hardware. State-controlled Gazprom and Rosneft, as well as private companies Lukoil, TNK-BP and Surgutneftegaz, plan to pour “tens of billions of dollars” of investment into Venezuela, Shmatko said. |
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GOLDEN AUTUMN
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Young people frolic among the leaves in the Summer Gardens on Saturday as the weather takes an autumnal turn. Although no final decision has been made, there are plans to close the Summer Gardens for several years in order to carry extensive renovations. |
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The number of infertile women in Russia is growing by 200,000 to 250,000 each year, with the main cause being complications from abortions, Marina Tarasova, deputy head of the St. Petersburg Reseach Institute For Gynecology and Obstetrics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said on Monday. Speaking at an international conference highlighting new methods of oral contraception, Tarasova warned that by the end of 2007 there were already more than 5.
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MOSCOW — Union of Right Forces leader Nikita Belykh said Friday that he was resigning over proposals by senior party officials to cooperate with the Kremlin, and that the party’s leadership will decide this week whether to disband the party altogether. Some members of the Union of Right Forces, or SPS, believe that the party “should reach a compromise with the Kremlin,” Belykh said in a telephone interview. |
All photos from issue.
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 MINSK — Loyalists of autocratic Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko won every seat Monday in parliamentary elections seen as a democracy test but slammed by the opposition as “illegitimate.” “Not a single opposition candidate was elected” to represent their party, Central Elections Commission chief Lidia Yermoshina told a press conference. |
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NEW DELHI — India will buy 347 T-90 battle tanks from Russia and build 1,000 more locally with Russian help, the defense minister said on Monday, as the two nations decided to iron out differences that had delayed several arms deals. India, one of the world’s biggest arms buyers and Russia, a long time supplier, also agreed to speed up delivery of an aircraft carrier that has been slated for delivery in 2012, a defense official said. The announcement came after a meeting between Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov and India’s Defense Minister A.K. Antony, who said the two countries had also decided to extend a defense cooperation deal by another 10 years. |
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CUTTING EDGE
/ Reuters
The $300 million, 120-meter yacht “A,” owned by MDM Bank’s billionaire founder Andrei Melnichenko, moored in Malta late last week. The bow and other sections have a radical design. |
 The striking gray building near Pionerskaya metro station is one of the few remaining such sites in St. Petersburg that hasn’t been turned into the kind of multifunctional complex that usually proves very successful when located in similar places. Such complexes, which include business centers, restaurants, malls and bookstores have mushroomed on the city’s stable real estate market during the last few years, but the building at Pionerskaya metro remains untouched.
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Property Prices Fall MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian developers are cutting apartment prices in the regions as a decline in mortgages lowers demand for housing, Vedomosti reported. Sales of new apartments in Rostov-on-Don are down 40 percent this month from August, while sales in St. |
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MOSCOW — Oleg Deripaska, the majority owner of United Company RusAl, will this week seek to have London’s High Court dismiss a multibillion-dollar lawsuit filed by former associate Michael Cherney, a person close to Deripaska’s Basic Element holding said Friday. |
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MOSCOW — JPMorgan Chase said Friday that it had named former Unified Energy System chief Anatoly Chubais to its international advisory board. He will be the first Russian to join the exclusive group of consultants to the bank, sitting alongside former U. |
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Several of the country’s largest retailers have announced that they will kick off Apple’s iPhone sales in Russia on Friday, with Eldorado estimating that a total of 150,000 units could be sold by the end of the year. |
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MOSCOW — Central Bank Deputy Chairman Konstantin Korishchenko has been tapped to head the MICEX Group in the first major reshuffle since recent financial turmoil wiped out more than half the value of shares on the country’s leading stock exchange. Korishchenko will replace current MICEX president Alexander Potyomkin, who is moving back to work at the Central Bank, which is the MICEX’s largest shareholder. |
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 In light of the Russian stock market’s troubles, it is imperative that the country attracts long-term individual and institutional investors to prevent future market collapses. Aside from the defaults on subprime mortgages and the crash in the roughly $500 billion in mortgage derivatives, one of the main problems that led to a full-scale financial crisis in the United States was the country’s extremely high rate of internal debt. |
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The United States should recognize the independence of South Ossetia. Short of a major war, South Ossetia will never be part of Georgia again, and half of the country — North Ossetia — is already part of Russia. |
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 A frequent visitor to Russia, British torch singer Marc Almond has not performed a full-fledged concerts here since he was seriously injured in a 2004 motorcycle crash, coming to Russia instead for what he called “appearances” — brief sets where he sang backed by a pianist or a pre-recorded track either at a mall opening or a local gay club. Now he returns with a full concert that is expected to feature new material. |
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 LOS ANGELES/LONDON — Images of U.S. actor Paul Newman, who died late Friday, adorned newspaper front pages around the world on Sunday, his piercing blue eyes vying for attention with the global financial crisis. |
 LYON, France — The 2008/9 opera and ballet season started early in France. Last month the New York City Ballet commenced its two-week tour at the Opera Bastille in Paris, while the Opera Garnier opened with the touring Bolshoi Opera. In Lyon, there was a Russian ballet gala at the huge Amphitheatre in the Cite Internationale Convention Center. The artistic director of this one-night gala was Natalia Osipova, a soloist of the Mikhailovsky Ballet in St. |
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 Rhys Chatham, the New York-born, Paris-based avant-garde composer, guitarist and trumpet player, will open this year’s Aposition festival of innovative and experimental music on Thursday by leading a for-the-occasion band of local rock musicians through his work, "Guitar Trio (G3). |
 The Goethe Institute, which promotes German culture around the world, opens an exhibition on Tuesday that intends to focus attention on the preservation of constructivist architectural monuments and the interaction that took place between Russian and German architects in the 1920s. “Embodying Utopia — New Architecture of the 1920s: Russia-Germany” at the Russian Arts Academy takes place as part of the Petersburg Dialogue International Forum’s Week of Russian Avant Garde in St. |
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BEIJING — Three Chinese astronauts landed safely back on earth on Sunday after a 68-hour voyage and space walk that showcased the country’s technological mastery and were hailed as a major victory by its leaders. Their Shenzhou (“sacred vessel”) spacecraft parachuted down to the steppes of northern Inner Mongolia region at dusk. Doctors rushed to open the capsule and check the men as they readjusted to gravity and recovered from the punishing re-entry. Spacewalker Zhai Zhigang was the first to emerge and was helped to a nearby folding chair, where he was greeted with flowers and applause and said he was “proud of his motherland.” Premier Wen Jiabao told the nation minutes later that the three were heroes for their efforts, which put China in an elite club of three nations that have managed a space walk. |
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 WASHINGTON — As U.S. lawmakers prepared to vote on Monday on a $700 billion government fund to buy bad debt, the global financial crisis kept markets on tenterhooks by forcing European authorities to rescue troubled banks. |
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LOS ANGELES — What if the current financial crisis in the U.S. becomes so severe that Americans start to flee the country? Welcome to “Americatown,” a Chinatown-like enclave of U.S. immigrants in cities around the world. HBO television is developing the futuristic drama series, which hails from writer Bradford Winters and producers Tom Fontana, Barry Levinson, Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy. |
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