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A Kaluga man who returned from his honeymoon in the Dominican Republic has been hospitalized with Russia’s second confirmed case of the A/H1N1 influenza virus, also known as swine flu, health authorities said. The man, 25, and his wife flew into Moscow from the Dominican Republic on May 19 and sought medical attention after feeling ill, though he was hospitalized only on Thursday, the Federal Consumer Protection Service said in a statement late Sunday. “His wife has been placed under medical observation, but no signs of the virus have been confirmed,” the agency’s chief, Gennady Onishchenko, told Interfax. “The man’s condition is satisfactory.” Four of the infected man’s relatives who had contact with him are also undergoing medical examinations, Onishchenko said. |
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THREE-IN-ONE
/ For The St. Petersburg Times
The buildings at numbers 55 and 59 Nevsky Prospekt have been rebuilt as replicas of the originals and now house the new expanded Corinthia St. Petersburg Hotel, formerly known as the Nevskij Palace. The new facilities include boutiques and a large conference center. |
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MOSCOW — Russia cannot guarantee that there will be no halts in gas supplies to Europe, President Dmitry Medvedev warned at a news conference closing an EU-Russia summit in Khabarovsk on Friday. Further raising the specter of a new gas shut-off, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin separately indicated that the country would not extend any loans to Ukraine.
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The Finnish diplomat who helped Finnish citizen Paavo Salonen to take his five-year-old son Anton out of Russia may face criminal charges, Interfax reported on Friday, citing an anonymous source in Moscow. Simo Pietilyanen, a former employee of the Finnish Consulate in St. |
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MOSCOW — The State Duma on Friday passed in a third and final reading a Kremlin-drafted bill that would tighten control over the selection of the Constitutional Court’s president and double the length of the judge’s term. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — The Central Election Commission is fuming that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s election watchdog has appointed a Russian citizen to head its observer mission in upcoming European Parliament elections. Commission member Igor Borisov said the watchdog, the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, or ODIHR, should have asked for permission before appointing Vadim Zhdanovich to head the mission that will assess the elections on June 4 to 7. |
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MOSCOW — A U.S. court has convicted a Russian-born artist of assault in a bizarre incident aboard a plane in which she drank a bottle of liquid hand soap and attempted to bite the flight crew. |
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MOSCOW — A baby in the Chita region died from his drunken mother’s breast milk after she downed half a liter of ethanol before feeding him, the region’s Investigative Committee said after sentencing the woman, Reuters reported. Yelena Sinitsyna was handed a one-year suspended sentence and a three-year probation period last week for death by negligence of her 4-month-old son in the small town of Sretensk, near the border with China in eastern Siberia. |
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Poisoned Migrants ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The bodies of two Uzbek migrant workers were found in a workmen’s shack on a building site in Pushkin, just outside St. |
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MINSK — Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko criticized Russia on Friday for failing to carry out decisions on integrating the two states a week before Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is due to visit. The two countries have talked for more than a decade about a “union state” bringing the countries closer together, even though Lukashenko has sought a rapprochement with the West after years of isolation and accusations of human right abuses. |
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 A refined Art Deco lobby and lavish ballroom are some of the impressive new features of the Corinthia St. Petersburg Hotel, which has just completed a large-scale expansion and refurbishment project at a cost of 100 million euros of foreign investment. |
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The volume of cars imported to St. Petersburg decreased by more than three times in the first quarter of 2009. In January to March of this year, 1,467 cars were imported to St. |
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Ford stopped production at its Russian factory just outside St. Petersburg on Monday until June 5 because of falling sales, spokeswoman Yekaterina Kulinenko said, Interfax reported. The factory, which opened in Vsevolozhsk in the Leningrad Oblast in 2002, produces Focus and Mondeo models and employs about 200,000 people. |
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Prices for food products in Russia grew ten times more than in the European Union from January to April, according to the Federal Statistics Service. Prices for food in Russia grew by 5. |
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TMK Talks to EBRD MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — TMK, the world’s second-largest pipemaker for the oil and gas industry, is in talks with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development on a $200 million loan, Vedomosti said, citing an unidentified person familiar with the negotiations. |
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Things are looking up for Russia’s platinum producers as prices for the precious metal have started to reclaim pre-October levels thanks to new demand from investors and China’s growing jewelry market. |
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MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — BP Plc said it’s considering candidates to take over as head of its joint venture in Russia after a newspaper reported one of the oil company’s billionaire partners could take the post. Viktor Vekselberg, currently TNK-BP’s executive director for gas development, is a candidate to become chief executive officer for as long as two years, Vedomosti reported Monday, citing an unidentified person. |
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Gazprom Neft, the country’s fifth-largest oil producer, launched a new offer to raise its stake in Sibir Energy to as much as 30 percent, a bank representing the company in the buyout said Friday. |
 BERLIN — Canadian auto parts maker Magna International Inc. says it is joining forces with Russia’s biggest lender, Sberbank, in a bid to take a majority stake in General Motors Corp.’s Opel unit. In a statement released late Friday, Aurora, Ontario-based Magna for the first time offered details of its bid, one of three from companies interested in Opel. |
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 Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. While Russia was determined to create a center of power in the Commonwealth of Independent States, the enlarged European Union started paying more attention not only to the “new Eastern Europe” (Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine), but also to the South Caucasus and Central Asia — all areas of what is still being called, with decreasing validity, the former Soviet Union. |
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I confess: I welcome the global economic crisis at some level. If anything, it has curbed unbridled free-market triumphalism and cast doubt on the notion that greed is the driving force of progress. |
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 There is a music shop in Yekaterinburg that gets letters every year from all over Europe about an instrument that it doesn’t sell. The reason they write is Vladimir Kuzmin, the man behind the Polivoks synthesizer, an instrument with a design based on Soviet military radio that was once one of the least coolest in Soviet times but is now one of the hippest amongst Western bands. Franz Ferdinand’s latest album “Tonight” is only one of many foreign acts, including Goldfrapp and Rammstein, to have used the distinctive sound of the synthesizer. Franz Ferdinand said in interviews to publicize their latest album that they were fascinated with the synthesizer once they saw its strange design and even stranger sounds. |
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PIPE DREAMS
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A member of staff at a new establishment on the Petrograd Side, Denispopovbar, smokes from a hookah pipe. The bar is located in the former premises of the Aquarium Chinese restaurant. |
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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev has ordered the creation of a new commission tasked with countering attempts to rewrite history to the detriment of Russia’s interests, the Kremlin said Tuesday. The presidential decree establishing the commission follows a May 8 video address posted on Medvedev’s web site in which the president complained that attempts to falsify history were becoming “increasingly harsh, depraved and aggressive.
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YANGON — Myanmar’s military regime on Monday lashed out at international criticism of the trial of Aung San Suu Kyi, as the European Union called for the immediate release of the pro-democracy leader. As the trial of the Nobel Peace Prize winner entered its second week, the increasingly isolated junta gave an apparent concession when it said it would reopen the court to diplomats and journalists for one day on Tuesday. |
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BIRMINGHAM, England — Alan Shearer has warned owner Mike Ashley that Newcastle risk repeating a Leeds United style nose-dive into oblivion unless he sorts out the host of problems destroying the club. Ashley was at Villa Park on Sunday to watch Newcastle surrender their 16-year membership of the Premier League thanks to an own goal from Damien Duff. |
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Issues Archive