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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev promised to “bonk some heads” at the Russian Post after a businessman from the Far East questioned the fairness of the way the state-run postal company conducted business with some of its suppliers. “Now this is serious talk. Give me all the information. Our people from the [presidential] administration are sitting here, and we’ll do some knocking of heads together... if this can be established,” Medvedev told the businessman, Sergei Mishin, during the trip to Birobidzhan on Friday. Mishin said Russian Post shut his packaging supplies firm DV Upak-Servis out of a bid to supply packaging materials to the state-run postal service. |
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LIFE’S A BEACH
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Sunbathers relax on the beach by the Peter and Paul Fortress on Sunday. Weather forecasters are predicting highs of 29 degrees Celsius this week, albeit with thunderstorms. |
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A group of lawmakers from the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly has embarked on a moral crusade with an eye to producing an etiquette code for foreigners in the city. The draft behavior code suggests that non-residents should refrain from speaking their native languages and advises them against celebrating their religious holidays in public places.
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MOSCOW — Each of the 15 medals that Russia won at the Vancouver Winter Olympics cost the country a staggering 388 million rubles ($12.4 million), the Audit Chamber said in a report that criticized the government’s training program as ineffective and corrupt. |
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Nine protesters were arrested during a City Hall-sponsored Beer and Kvas Festival held near the Peterburgsky Sports and Concert Complex (SKK) in the south of St. |
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Spies in Britain? MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia may have as many as 35 intelligence officers deployed at its missions in London, the Financial Times reported, citing intelligence experts it did not identify. Up to half of all Russian officials operating in European capital cities may be intelligence officers, the newspaper said, also citing unidentified people. |
All photos from issue.
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 Amid protests from Russia’s environmental community, St. Petersburg’s Baltiisky shipyard hosted the launch ceremony of a floating nuclear power plant called the Akademik Lomonosov on Wednesday. Sergei Kiriyenko, head of the state atomic agency Rosatom, said that floating nuclear power stations “open a new era and create new prospects for modernizing the power energy infrastructure of some of the more distant and isolated regions of Russia. |
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MOSCOW — Two years after the State Duma allowed drivers to have a bottle of beer before getting behind the wheel, deputies passed in a third and final reading on Friday a zero-tolerance bill on drinking and driving. |
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MOSCOW — Two drug dealers suspected of gunning down a Russian tourist in a drug deal gone awry have been detained by the Miami Beach police, the Miami Herald newspaper reported Friday. According to the report, Roman Gubanov, 38, and his friend Andrei Orlov, 33, both from Tver, approached Duran Reed and Turaine Depri Burgess in Miami Beach on June 25, looking to buy cocaine from them. |
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MOSCOW — A government watchdog has slapped Vedomosti with a formal warning, saying the newspaper promoted extremism by publishing an opinion piece by a well-known writer and journalist three months ago. |
 MOSCOW — Most court rulings must be published online in their entirety, including the names of all parties involved, except witnesses, from Thursday in an initiative that proponents say will improve transparency at the expense of privacy. The change, introduced in a law signed in 2008, is one of the first steps in a campaign against “legal nihilism” launched by Dmitry Medvedev at the start of his presidency. |
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MOSCOW — Bashkortostan prosecutors have cleared local officials of wrongdoing in their acquisition of a shipment of German-built trucks, despite an acknowledgement from Daimler that it had paid bribes of about $30,000. |
 MOSCOW — An unmanned Russian supply vessel docked Sunday without trouble at the International Space Station, two days after a technical glitch forced a similar maneuver to be aborted. Space officials said they managed to avoid the radio signal problems that forced them to abandon last week’s docking. |
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Assessments of St. Petersburg’s investment climate were predominantly optimistic at a conference devoted to the subject held in the city last week. Positive forecasts were made and the prospects of the city’s investment development discussed, with participants identifying a number of obstacles and problems that could be solved by sound investment policy. |
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The Ministry of Health is attempting to improve the content of obligatory first aid kits carried by Russian drivers. A new order that came into force on Thursday means medicines will disappear from first aid kits, while the number of bandages and sticking plasters are set to increase. |
 City Hall has named the price it would like for the building of the Hotel Astoria at 39 Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa. Smolny intends the federal monument, which is currently leased through 2046, to fetch no less than 1.5 billion rubles ($48 million). According to preliminary estimates, the starting price of the Astoria, which covers an area of 17,000 square meters, will be at least 1. |
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Kudrin: Ratings to Rise MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said he expects his country’s debt rating to be raised by credit companies now that the economy has returned to growth after the deepest contraction on record. |
 MOSCOW — Motivating people to participate in an innovative economy has been a key success for the government as it attempts to lure investors to participate in a new technology center in Skolkovo, said Sergei Belousov, a technology entrepreneur. In the past, the main outlet for talented, motivated people has been in sectors where there is a lot of money up for grabs but that are not necessarily going to make the country more successful, said Belousov, chairman and founder of two software companies, Parallels and Acronis. |
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MOSCOW — Moscow City Hall said Friday that it agreed to reopen an extra two lanes on the busy highway to Sheremetyevo Airport, following a reprimand from Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and complaints from businesses of a “blockade” on Leningradskoye Shosse. |
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 As U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton traveled to Baku and Yerevan on July 4-5, an old issue again dominated her discussions: the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev no doubt had a wry smile if he watched the media reports. |
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Elie Wiesel, winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, has now lent his moral authority to the drive to free former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky from prison. |
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 This week, talk has only been of the spy scandal, which has an unreal air to it, with reporters gaining most of their information from Facebook and the Russian equivalent, Odnoklassniki, and spinning out the details. The focus has been on Anna Chapman, 28, who was immediately dubbed a “flame-haired femme fatale” by Western journalists, even if her hair color seems to fluctuate in photographs. |
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 MOSCOW — Lloyd Donaldson moved to St. Petersburg in 1992 in a borrowed coat with a huge hole on its right side — and put nearly his last $800 into an English-language newspaper. Called The St. Petersburg Press, the paper soon turned into a successful operation that was sold in 1996 at a profit to Independent Media and rebranded as The St. |
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