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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev appeared in no hurry Wednesday to congratulate Barack Obama on his victory in the U.S. presidential election, sending the senator a telegram after eschewing an opportunity to acknowledge the win in his state-of-the-nation address. “I hope for a constructive dialogue with you, based on trust and consideration of each other’s interests,” Medvedev said in a plainly worded note sent to Obama and posted on the Kremlin’s web site late Wednesday afternoon. Despite several references to the new U.S. administration, Medvedev refrained from mentioning Obama in his speech at 12 p.m. — long after it was clear that the Illinois Democrat had won. The apparent hesitance came despite the fact that Medvedev has said he would prefer that Obama, 47, become the next U.S. president instead of his rival, Arizona’s Republican Senator John McCain, 72. |
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FLYING THE FLAG
Denis Sinyakov / Reuters
A conductor is silhouetted against a screen with the Russian flag during a rehearsal for a parade on Red Square (to take place on Friday) marking the anniversary of a historic parade in 1941. |
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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev called Wednesday for the extension of presidential terms to six years and for the stationing of short-range missile systems in Kaliningrad, between Poland and Lithuania, in his first state-of-the-nation address. Medvedev also used the 85-minute address to defend Russia’s actions in its August war with Georgia, which he said was the result of the “arrogant course of the American administration.
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Igat Fialkovsky, a human rights activist who has campaigned to protect the rights of lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender people, is in court this week to sue the local police for allegedly publicly humiliating and insulting him. Fialkovsky was stopped at Prospekt Veteranov metro station around 6 p. |
All photos from issue.
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BRUSSELS — The European Commission on Wednesday backed restarting talks with Russia on a partnership deal that were frozen after the Russian invasion of Georgia in August. The EU executive said in a report that EU foreign ministers should agree to resume the talks at a meeting on Monday, and such a step could be finalized at an EU-Russia summit in Nice, France, on Nov. 14. “These negotiations should continue, first because this would allow the EU to pursue its own interests with Russia,” the commission report said. At a summit meeting last month, leaders of the EU’s 27 nations were divided over whether to restart the talks. |
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GM REVS UP
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
The GM plant in Shushary, about 15 kilometers south of St. Petersburg, under construction in the summer. The factory, at a cost of about $300 million, will be ceremonially opened on Friday. |
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VLADIKAVKAZ — A suspected bomb blast killed 11 people outside a Russian market on Thursday, prosecutors said, in one of the worst attacks in months to hit Russia’s turbulent North Caucasus region. The explosion detonated as a minibus taxi pulled up outside the main market in the southern Russian city of Vladikavkaz, killing passengers and ripping the doors off one side of the vehicle.
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MOSCOW — A squad of state officials will join the management and board of Norilsk Nickel to “ensure the interests” of Vneshekonombank, after the lender took a stake in the mining company as collateral for a loan, United Company RusAl said Wednesday. One government representative will be elected to the board, while two others will be given posts in Norilsk’s management, RusAl said in an e-mailed statement, although it didn’t indicate who would be appointed to the specific positions. |
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Litvinenkos Home LONDON (AP) — Relatives of former security services officer Alexander Litvinenko have been allowed to return to their decontaminated London home two years after Litvinenko’s death from radiation poisoning. |
 CHICAGO — U.S. President-elect Barack Obama, who will inherit the worst financial crisis in decades when he takes office, was expected to announce his picks for some key economic jobs soon and he may reveal his Treasury Secretary selection as early as Thursday. President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Timothy Geithner, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker are among those being considered for the Treasury post. |
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 Ironically, the U.S. presidential elections have proven one of the Kremlin’s basic propaganda points: that its foreign policy has become completely impervious to outside influences. Barack Obama’s victory had not the slightest influence on the Kremlin, where demonstrative anti-Americanism has become something of an official creed. |
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The timing of Dmitry Medvedev’s first state-of-the-nation address left something to be desired since he could not compete with Barack Obama’s victory, which was the main news around the world. |
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 Russian rock music, which was in cultural opposition to the Soviet regime before its fall in the early 90s, has tended lately to compromise with the increasingly authoritarian Kremlin rather than challenge it. Some leading Russian rock figures, for instance, entertained Kremlin-backed youth movement Nashi at its summer camp on Lake Seliger in 2005 and 2006 as well as performed on Red Square to celebrate the transfer of the presidency from Vladimir Putin to Dmitry Medvedev on March 2 this year. |
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Leaving aside its tasteless glorification of a genocidal maniac, Lenin@Zhiv Pub and Restaurant offered a warm welcome to a group of Americans and interested observers very early on Wednesday morning, as they gathered to watch CNN’s coverage of the conclusion of the U. |
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 OSLO — The Yangtze River dolphin, the Christmas Island shrew and the Venezuelan skunk frog are all victims in an alarming flood of extinctions, but how do scientists decide when such “possibly extinct” creatures no longer exist? The United Nations says the world faces the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago, with man-made threats such as rising populations, felling of forests, hunting, pollution and climate change. |
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WASHINGTON — Japanese scientists have cloned mice whose bodies were frozen for as long 16 years and said on Monday it may be possible to use the technique to resurrect mammoths and other extinct species. |
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Issues Archive