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 Despite provocations and obstacles created by authorities aimed at preventing a new democratic movement from holding a conference, the event finally took place in St. Petersburg on Saturday. About 250 members of democratic parties as well as other groups and individuals gathered at the Treugolnik Business Center to discuss the program for the movement — called Solidarity — and to elect its local coordination council and delegates to a national congress to be held in Moscow on Saturday. |
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 MOSCOW — For the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian Orthodox Church will begin the process of choosing a new leader. The church’s ruling body, the Holy Synod, chose the often outspoken and independent-minded Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad as interim leader at a gathering on Saturday, the Moscow Patriarchate said in a statement Friday, just hours after the death of Patriarch Alexy II. |
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MOSCOW — Practitioners of kung fu, karate and numerous other martial arts spent Friday night pummeling each other largely thanks to Natural Resources and Ecology Minister Yury Trutnev and Rosatom chief Sergei Kiriyenko. A black belt in karate, Trutnev looked on from his VIP seat at Luzhniki Arena with his wife and two sons. |
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U.S. automaker Ford Motor Co. said on Monday that it would suspend production at its Russian plant for one month, as the global financial crisis slashes demand for cars. |
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A defendant and a key witness in the Anna Politkovskaya murder trial worked on behalf of the Federal Security Service, one of the slain reporter’s editors testified in court Friday. Sergei Sokolov, deputy editor of Novaya Gazeta, where Politkovskaya wrote critical reports about federal abuses in Chechnya, said the FSB was tailing the journalist before she was killed in October 2006. |
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Local police have arrested four suspects in the 2005 murder of Olympic cycling gold medalist Dmitry Nelyubin, the Russian Prosecutor General’s office said Monday. Nelyubin was killed in the early hours of New Year’s Day on 2005 at the junction of Ulitsa Rentgena and Ulitsa Lva Tolstogo on the Petrograd Side in central St. Petersburg. Nelyubin, aged 33 at the time of the attack, was celebrating the New Year with fireworks with his wife and a friend when they were approached by a group of young men and a quarrel started. The incident ended with one of the members of the gang giving Nelyubin a lethal stab wound. The sportsman died at the hospital within hours after the attack. |
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 A team of homeless men from St. Petersburg and other Russian towns lost 5:4 to Afghanistan at the 2009 Homeless World Soccer Cup in Melbourne, Australia, in an intense and dramatic final match that ended the unique tournament on Sunday. |
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HELSINKI —A senior U.S. diplomat said Friday that Russia must stop blocking international monitors from going into Georgia’s separatist South Ossetia region to assess reports of human rights abuses. The monitors have been unable to return to the Moscow-backed region since a war in August between Russia and Georgia, and human rights groups say that in their absence ethnic Georgians are being harassed by the separatists. “There is, unfortunately, a silence and darkness with respect to the international monitors that has descended on South Ossetia,” U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried told reporters at a security conference in Helsinki. |
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 MOSCOW — Patriarch Alexy II, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church who oversaw a post-Soviet religious revival amid allegations of being a proponent of Russian nationalism and a former KGB agent, died Friday outside the city, the Moscow Patriarchate said. |
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WASHINGTON — The U.S. military said Friday that it conducted a successful test of its missile-defense system, but that the target failed to deploy measures that experts said could have helped it avoid destruction. The test took place as the Pentagon braces for more scrutiny of the program after President-elect Barack Obama takes office in January. |
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Russia, the world’s biggest palladium producer, ended a government monopoly on exports of the metal and on platinum. President Dmitry Medvedev Thursday signed amendments to a law on budget and tax policy that strips Almazyuvelirexport of its monopoly on exports of so-called platinum group metals, for which the state trading company charged fees, the Kremlin said Friday. The palladium and platinum reserves of Norilsk Nickel were classified as a state secret until 2005. The company did not have permits to export platinum, which is used in jewelry, for four months last year. “We’re happy with the further liberalization of the platinum market,” Norilsk spokeswoman Maria Uvarova said by phone. |
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 MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev on Friday signed agreements to develop new nuclear plants in India as the countries sought to deepen ties beyond their historic defense and weapon sales relationship. |
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MOSCOW — As the financial crisis tightens its grip on the nation’s economy, companies are slashing jobs and shortening workweeks while authorities scramble to find ways of keeping unemployment numbers from ballooning out of control. Although Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said in his televised question-and-answer session Thursday that the number of unemployed is expected to rise from 1. |
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Economy May Shrink MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Oleg Vyugin, chairman of MDM Bank and a former central banker, said Russia’s economy may shrink as much as four percent next year as prices for the raw materials it exports stay low, Interfax reported. |
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MOSCOW — Gazprom will ask the government to fund 100 billion rubles ($3.58 billion) of investments into its electricity units in 2009, the company’s deputy chairman said Friday. “We have put in a request to the government for it to sponsor at least two projects,” said Valery Golubev, the firm’s deputy chairman. |
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BELGRADE — Serbia and Gazprom again put off an agreement that would finalize the long-planned sale of Serbian oil monopoly NIS by the end of the year, Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller said Friday. |
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CHICAGO — Russia has halted pork shipments from six U.S. sources, including a Smithfield Foods meat-processing plant, saying their products failed to comply with import requirements, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Russia, the fourth-largest buyer of U.S. pork, will not accept shipments from the plants after Dec. |
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Understanding the mechanisms and factors influencing foreign exchange rates can be a tricky matter for those outside the industry. Amid talk of financial crisis, possible devaluation of the ruble and rising inflation, The St. Petersburg Times asked local expert Ruslan Abushaev, an analyst at FxCompany, to help decipher the mysteries of the Forex. |
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During last week’s three-hour nationwide broadcast by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, he said that Russia would avoid “sharp jumps” in the ruble as it fell to the lowest level against the dollar in almost three years. |
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People involved in the trading industry say that the foreign exchange market (Forex) is one of the most volatile markets in the world, because exchange rates change every second, making it almost too difficult to keep track of them. There are some general groups of factors that affect the currency trade. |
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In its annual report this year, the U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) — the body which oversees the Forex market — released a report stating that over the last few years it has seen a steady increase in the number of foreign exchange scams around the globe. |
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 The Soviet Union was born in civil war. Most Russians expected it to die in a similar blood bath in August 1991. Yet the collapse of the Soviet Union was not accompanied or followed by large-scale, neighbor-on-neighbor violence like that which occurred during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s or the collapse of Iraq into Sunni-versus-Shia mayhem following the U. |
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U.S.-Russian relations are in poor shape. The old thinking has failed. As President-elect Barack Obama’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates put it after the Russia-Georgia war: “For the first time, both the United States secretary of state and secretary of defense have doctorates in Russian studies. |
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HARARE — The European Union joined calls on Monday for President Robert Mugabe to step down after 28 years ruling Zimbabwe, where spreading cholera and food shortages have worsened a desperate humanitarian crisis. Mugabe’s old foes in the West have renewed calls for his departure as the crisis has spiraled. Mugabe blames Western sanctions for Zimbabwe’s collapse. Critics blame his increasingly authoritarian rule. “I think the moment has arrived to put all the pressure for Mugabe to step down,” said EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana before a meeting of European foreign ministers in Brussels. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, said in a speech “I say today that President Mugabe must go. |
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 THESSALONIKI, Greece — Riot police fired tear gas at youths smashing storefronts and throwing rocks at a police station in this Greek port city Monday, in the third day of rioting sparked by the fatal police shooting of a teenager in Athens. |
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ISLAMABAD — One of the suspected planners of last month’s attack by gunmen in Mumbai was arrested by Pakistani security forces in a raid on a militant camp near Muzaffarabad, sources in the capital of Pakistani Kashmir said on Monday. The Pakistani government has so far been silent over Sunday’s raid at the camp used by Lashkar-e-Taiba fighters in the hills outside Muzaffarabad. |
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WASHINGTON — U.S. President-elect Barack Obama failed to give a straight answer when asked on a U.S. talkshow on Sunday whether he had managed to quit smoking. |
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 CHENNAI, India — Heavily-armed guards patrolled the boundary of Chennai’s Chidambaram Stadium on Monday as the city prepared to host this week’s first test between England and India following last month’s Mumbai terror attacks. The tourists were due to arrive later Monday from Abu Dhabi where the squad was training, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) said. |
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LONDON — There is still plenty to be decided in the final round of group matches in the Champions League this week even though 13 of the 16 teams through to the knockout phase are already known. |
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Cowboys Fans on Spree IRVING, Texas (AP) — Fans eager for a piece of Texas Stadium have bid on lockers, flags, vehicles and even urinals from the soon-to-be-former home of the Dallas Cowboys. The Dallas Morning News, reported Monday in its online edition that more than $245,000 was spent on memorabilia from the stadium. |
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