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Finland’s Foreign Affairs Ministry officially confirmed on Friday that five-year-old Anton Salonen, the son of Finnish citizen Paavo Salonen and his Russian ex-wife Rimma Salonen, was currently in Finland. It also confirmed that an employee of the General Consulate of Finland in St. Petersburg helped the father to take the boy out of Russia. The incident occurred in early May, when the boy’s father took him out of Russia against the will of Anton’s mother with the help of the Finnish diplomatic employee, causing serious tensions between the upper diplomatic services of the two neighboring countries last week. Russian officials said that the father’s actions were illegal, while the Finnish diplomats said that it was Anton’s mother who had initially taken the child illegally out of Finland. |
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 MOSCOW — Russia won high praise from organizers and participants alike for its hosting of the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest final on Saturday, complete with hovering swimming pools, Dima Bilan “flying” over the audience and a live speech from an astronaut in the international space station. |
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An anti-Nazi activist was sentenced to five years in a maximum-security penal colony by a local court on May 8 for stabbing two men who looked and behaved like neo-Nazis in the city center last year, while he insisted that he acted in self-defense as they attacked him. |
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St. Petersburg opposition leader Olga Kurnosova was officially charged with knowingly obtaining illegally-gotten goods on Saturday, after an investigator came especially for the case from Astrakhan, a city on the Caspian Sea, to present the charges to her. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Migration authorities are promising to create a new agency to eliminate middlemen who obtain work permits for foreigners in exchange for money. Federal Migration Service head Konstantin Romodanovsky told a Federation Council hearing that a state unitary enterprise would be set up by July 1 that would offer “all services so far offered by the migration service,” Kommersant reported Thursday. Romodanovsky said at the Wednesday hearing that the move is aimed at rooting out rampant corruption connected with work permits for migrant workers. It was unclear if the new agency would affect white-collar foreign workers or whether it would work primarily with the millions of manual laborers from neighboring countries. |
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SETTING SUN
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Three nocturnal strollers enjoy a brief rest on Palace Embankment, with the Spit of Vasilievsky Island visible in the background. Forecasters are predicting higher temperatures later in the week. |
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MOSCOW — Fragments of a gun have been found among the debris of the helicopter that crashed last week, killing Irkutsk Governor Igor Yesipovsky and three others, rescue workers said Thursday. The revelation has fueled speculation that Yesipovsky was on a hunting trip when his Bell 407 helicopter crashed May 10 in the Irkutsk region. Hunting from helicopters is banned in Russia, though regional officials have said Yesipovsky was on official business when the aircraft went down, surveying the coast of Lake Baikal in connection with a new economic zone to be established there.
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MOSCOW — A suicide bomber plotting to blow up the Chechen Interior Ministry building killed two police officers and the taxi driver who drove him to the building, prompting Chechen President -Ramzan Kadyrov to call for all insurgents to surrender or be killed. |
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President Dmitry Medvedev expressed optimism Saturday about advancing relations with the United States during President Barack Obama’s visit to Moscow in July even on divisive topics such as NATO’s eastward expansion. |
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WASHINGTON — Signaling U.S. frustration as Washington seeks better relations with Russia, the United States criticized Moscow on Friday for blocking a deployment plan for peace monitors in Georgia. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly urged Moscow to change its stance on keeping monitors from Europe’s top security and human rights watchdog in Georgia. |
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KOSTENEVO, Moscow Region — When the Emergency Situations Ministry declared last week that there were no active wildfires in the greater Moscow region, volunteer firefighters in the village of Kostenevo were surprised. |
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All good things must come to an end, and that end might come sooner rather than later for a recent rally on the global equity markets. Last week, investors saw signs of a correction to this spring’s month-long rally. While the bounce may hold out a few weeks still, at some point fundamentals have to outweigh sentiment, analysts said. |
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About 100 workers of the Ford plant in the Leningrad Oblast gathered on Friday for a meeting in the town of Vsevolozhsk to protest the introduction of a four-day working week at the plant. |
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Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega on Friday accepted delivery of 130 buses donated by the Russian government to help ease the country’s public transportation problems. “Brotherly Russia helped us, without any political or economic conditions,” Ortega said at the ceremony in the country’s capital, Managua, Itar-Tass reported. |
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Summit in Khabarovsk MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia and the European Union will seek joint solutions for the financial and economic crisis during a summit in Khabarovsk this week, Nezavisimaya daily said Monday, citing Vladimir Chizhov, Russia’s ambassador to the EU. |
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The Gazprom-led international company set up to develop Shtokman, a huge offshore Arctic gas field, has opened up bidding for contracts in a step that will better define the project’s costs by the end of the year. Shtokman Development AG will invite more bids over the next few weeks in addition to the offers it has already posted on its web site since the end of April, Andrei Plis, the company’s head of supplier surveys, said Thursday. |
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Most Russian-made ice cream will no longer be called ice cream if the milk industry gets its way. A State Duma committee considered a request from milk producers on Thursday to force makers of ice cream consisting of more than 12 percent vegetable oil to rename their product “melorin” instead of “morozhenoye,” the Russian word for “ice cream. |
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One of Russia’s official policy goals is for the ruble to become a leading regional reserve currency. President Dmitry Medvedev presented his vision in general terms almost a year ago at the St. Petersburg economic forum. More recently, at the Group of 20 meeting in London on April 2, Medvedev suggested against a background of financial volatility that “It would be wise to support the creation of strong regional currencies and to use them as the basis for a new reserve currency.” To many observers, such an ambition seemed derisory even before the financial crisis. With the crisis, it seems almost delusional. Not only are we in the midst of the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, but the flight to safety has, if anything, reinforced the central role of the U. |
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 Prime Minister Vladimir Putin descended on Japan last week, accompanied by a dozen governors and more than 100 Russian business leaders. Yet the visit failed to break the impasse in Russian-Japanese relations over the four islands east of Hokkaido, which Russia seized in 1945. |
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President Barack Obama’s first 100 days and President Dmitry Medvedev’s first year in office roughly coincided, and the contrast is striking. Obama has launched a series of swift and significant actions while changing the mood of the country and the tone of its politics. |
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Patriarch Kirill was installed in office on Feb. 1. His first 100 days have been marked by innovation not only in terms of style, but also in substance — much like the reign of Pope John Paul II in the Roman Catholic Church. |
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Pop music became the latest political battleground between Georgia and Russia last weekend as the government in Tbilisi tried to take some of the shine off the Eurovision Song Contest in Moscow by financing a rival rock festival that celebrated “freedom” and “European culture.” Presumably, Tbilisi wanted to send the message that the Kremlin cherishes neither concept. |
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CAIRO — An Egyptian cabinet minister said on Monday that those behind a bomb attack on a Cairo tourist site that killed a teenage French girl in February have been arrested, the official MENA news agency reported. “The security services have detained those elements who carried out the Al-Hussein terrorist attack,” the news agency quoted Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Mufid Shehab as saying. |
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LONDON — A group of MPs moved Monday to oust the beleaguered speaker of the House of Commons, over an expenses scandal which has rocked the political leadership and triggered widespread public fury. |
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 MADRID — Women’s world number one Dinara Safina claimed her second major clay title in a row here on Sunday as she outclassed Danish teenager Caroline Wozniacki 6-2, 6-4 to win the Madrid Masters. The 23-year-old Russian - who lost the 2008 Roland Garros final to Ana Ivanovic - showed she is on track as a serious title contender when the French Open gets underway in a week. |
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LONDON — Chelsea coach Guus Hiddink bid an emotional farewell to Stamford Bridge on Sunday, but warned his successor he’ll need to spend big money if the Londoners are to stop the Manchester United juggernaut. |
Temp: -1°C clear 
Issues Archive