|
|
|
|
MOSCOW — Mayor Yury Luzhkov proposed placing a replica of a 46-meter-tall war monument razed in Georgia on Poklonnaya Gora in western Moscow on Wednesday as a suggestion by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to build the replica gathered steam. State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov said United Russia was ready to raise funds for the World War II monument and part of it could be built by the Victory Day holiday on May 9. Luzhkov, Putin and Gryzlov spoke after meeting with Zurab Nogaideli, a former Georgian prime minister-turned-opposition politician who promised to rebuild the monument in Georgia’s second-largest city, Kutaisi, if his party assumed power. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s government ordered the monument commemorating the Soviet Army’s victory in World War II to be demolished to make room for the construction of a new national parliament building. |
|
Dmitry Astakhov / Kremlin / RIA Novosti / Reuters
President Dmitry Medvedev prepares for his end-of-year television interview in Moscow. The broadcast was transmitted live on all three of Russia’s national channels. Medvedev said that Russia was close to reaching an agreement with the U.S. in arms talks. |
|
MOSCOW — British citizen Tremayne Elson recently spent six hours in a Moscow line to reregister the Antal Russia Recruitment Company where he is managing director, starting the ordeal at 5 p.m. “You queued to get into the compound, then you queued to get into the building, then you queued to get a ticket to give you a place in the queue to go to the counter,” he said.
|
 GUDERMES, Chechnya — Russia needs a military strategy to resist the United States and other Western powers that are stoking disorder in the North Caucasus to destroy Russia, Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov said in an interview. Kadyrov, 33, said last year’s attack by Georgia on South Ossetia was part of a Western plot to seize the whole Caucasus region. |
|
MOSCOW — The United States has not asked for the extradition of suspected organized crime boss Semyon Mogilevich, whom the FBI put on its 10 most wanted list this fall, a top law enforcement official said Tuesday. |
All photos from issue.
|
|
|
|
|
MOSCOW — An Orthodox priest who scolded a trio of drunken men for urinating in the hallway outside his apartment was shot dead by one of them in the Moscow region city of Podolsk, marking the second slaying of a priest in recent weeks. Oleg Shekhov, a 38-year-old Podolsk resident previously convicted in a separate murder, admitted in televised comments to shooting the priest, Alexander Filipov, 39, with an air pistol modified to fire regular bullets late Tuesday. “It was a mistake,” Shekhov, a thin man wearing a green jacket and a black baseball cap, said after investigators brought him in handcuffs to the crime scene Wednesday. “Nothing was premeditated. |
|
 MOSCOW — The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the 2003 arrest of Yukos partner Platon Lebedev was illegal, marking the biggest victory yet for former Yukos owners in their long-running legal fight with the government. |
 MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev had to remind Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin to mind his manners Wednesday after a testy debate about a national payments system with Vneshekonombank chief Vladimir Dmitriyev. Dmitriyev said a law was needed to create a national payment system that would be operated by a noncommercial entity and could include some 80 percent of Russian banks. |
|
MOSCOW — The economy will probably contract 8.7 percent this year, and the nascent recovery still faces risks, particularly faster inflation, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Wednesday. |
|
MOSCOW — Gazprom on Tuesday agreed to resume Turkmen gas imports next year, ending a nine-month political dispute, but the volumes were less than half of what had been agreed in deals before a supply dispute prompted Ashgabat to develop new markets in China and Iran. |
|
MOSCOW — Former Yukos chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky became an oligarch through “the support of a fairy godfather” and Russia became a free country under Vladimir Putin, billionaire Oleg Deripaska said in an interview published Monday. |
|
|
|
|
Russia will finish out 2009 sadder and a slightly more sober than usual but hardly any wiser. Russia’s economy fared worse than all other Group of 20 countries during the crisis, and the excessive number of catastrophes it suffered underscored how woefully ineffective, incompetent and corrupt the government is. Nonetheless, the government hasn’t budged one centimeter from the status quo course that has driven the country into a political and economic dead end. The State Duma’s reaction to Yegor Gaidar’s death is highly symbolic and is a fitting way for President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to conclude their disastrous year as leaders of the nation. |
|
 The Cold War is over, but the nuclear deterrent remains. This is largely because the West and Russia never fully seized the opportunity that arose 20 years ago. |
|
Exactly 2,000 years ago in 9 A.D., harsh reformer Wang Mang seized the Chinese throne and proclaimed the start of the Xin Dynasty. Wang Mang had every chance to go down in Chinese history as the founder of a dynasty. But when the Yellow River flooded and tens of thousands of people died, most Chinese believed that the emperor was to blame. |
|
|
|
 In an age when all one needs is a cell phone to snap a picture when inspiration strikes, photography has truly become the artistic medium of the masses. More than ever, people are documenting their lives and the world around them. The ease of use and decreasing cost of digital cameras, along with the popularity of photo-editing software, mean that a photographer no longer needs years of specialized training to take a good picture—though it probably helps. |
|
A major local rock music venue succumbed to the fire-security campaign raging in Russian cities after the Dec. 5 deadly fire in the nightclub Khromaya Loshad in Perm. |
 The year 2009 marks the first time in the 17-year history of the existence of the Russian Booker Prize that a St Petersburg novelist has won what is arguably the country’s most prestigious independent literary prize in the country. Andrei Ariev, editor of the local literary journal Zvezda, which previously published the work in its pages and nominated it for the competition, said at a gathering held last week to celebrate the victory that “‘A Time of Women’ corresponds to Alexander Pushkin’s definition of the novel as ‘a historic epoch presented in the form of literary narration’. |
|
From dried calamari beer snacks to slick sushi restaurants to fishing in the Neva, Petersburgers have a serious love of seafood, and who can blame them? This is, after all, a port city with a long history of connection to the sea. |
|
|
|
 There are a million and one reasons to go to Switzerland. Some go for the spectacular ski resorts, whether it be St. Moritz to Zermatt. Others go for the famous classical music festival in Lucerne, an exclusive beauty treatment in a private clinic in the Geneva Lake region, or a weekend of wine tasting in Valais. |
Temp: -1°C clear 
Issues Archive