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MINSK - Europe's leading democracy bodies said on Monday that Belarus's weekend parliamentary election failed to meet international standards, but authorities said the criticism just proved the West was biased. Election officials reported higher turnout figures than previously, saying an opposition boycott of the poll had failed. |
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KURAPATY, Belarus - Maria Tolstik lets tears roll down her face as she recalls how for four years more than half a century ago her sleep was interrupted nightly by the sound of people being shot to death. |
 When Viktor Cherkesov, governor general of the Northwest region, took office in May, he raised a storm. First, he requisitioned - some thought unromantically - the single wedding palace in town where foreigners and Russians could tie the knot as the headquarters for his regional bureaucracy. |
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MOSCOW - The Kremlin showed them the stick, and now comes the carrot. After adopting a no-nonsense attitude to beat the 2001 budget through parliament in its first reading, the government started Monday to sweet talk lawmakers into approving the legislation on a second reading set for Friday. |
All photos from issue.
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Kursk Theory Sinks MOSCOW (AP) - No fragments of a foreign submarine have been found near the sunken submarine Kursk, and officials no longer consider a collision with another vessel to be the most likely cause of the tragedy, Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov said Friday. |
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MOSCOW - They have already promised to blast a winning U.S. game show contestant into space and turn the Mir space station into a money-spinning cosmic tourist Mecca. |
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MOSCOW - Television stations broadcast images of police loading the black-bagged bodies onto ambulances. An investigator gave an interview to Kommersant about the autopsies. Tearful relatives visited a funeral home to find out how much it would cost to bury their loved ones. |
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The election for the vacant Duma seat in St. Petersburg's district No. 209 finally took place on Sunday - and was promptly declared null and void since not enough people cast their ballots. |
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 MOSCOW - In a meeting more wrought with philosophy than detail, representatives from the European Union on Thursday reiterated their long-standing support for Russia's entry into the World Trade Organization - but conceded that a free-trade zone is still far off in the distant future. |
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Worst May Lie Ahead For Record-Low RTS Equities lost 6.57 percent on the week following the Nasdaq's every move. The Nasdaq was down 1.3 percent to 3,316. |
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Tax Code Amendments We Can Expect for 2001 ALTHOUGH additional amendments to Part I and the newly passed Part II of Russia's Tax Code may pass this year, it looks unlikely that the long-anticipated chapter on Profit Tax will pass in time to become effective by January 1st of 2001. |
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On Domain Name Legislation EVERYONE who has ever dealt with the Internet has encountered "domains" and "domain names." From the technical point of view, a domain is a place mark used on the Internet to represent the location of a computer server. |
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ACCORDING to a Reuters dispatch out of the Geneva headquarters of the International Labor Organization last week, one of the side effects of globalization is a worldwide work force gradually being driven into depression, anxiety, stress and burnout. An ILO subsidiary, the World Federation for Mental Health, surveyed conditions in the United States, Britain, Germany, Finland and Poland. |
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Fourteen journalists and intellectuals signed an agreement Monday to create a new company through which they would hold in trust Boris Berezovsky's 49 percent stake in ORT television, news reports said. |
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Manufacturers sneaking chicory, acorns and caramel into their low-quality coffees are soon to be publicly exposed. They will be required to label their products as coffee drinks once a new state standard for instant and natural coffee is introduced. The new standard is being lobbied for by the recently established Organization of Coffee Manufacturers in Russia, which includes Kraft Foods, Tchibo, Montana Coffee, Paulig and Douwe-Egberts, who produce Moccona brand coffee. |
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$100M Baltika Boost ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Baltika, the country's largest brewery, plans to invest over $100 million to increase production in 2001, compared with $70 million for this year, Interfax quoted Baltika general director Taimuraz Bolloyev as saying on Monday. |
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Russia's largest and oldest maker of turbines for power stations, Lenin grad Metal Factory (LMZ), has just signed off on a deal for $120 million to make two 1,000 megawatt turbines for a Chinese nuclear power station. While the Russian government signed the contract with the Chinese government to make the turbines for the Tyan Van nuclear power plant at the end of 1999, work on the LMZ turbines only began recently. |
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MOSCOW - A forklift operator at the McDonald's factory outside Moscow won a court case Monday against his employer - a precedent that might help unionize the Russian branch of a company famous for its dislike of workers' organizations. |
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NEW YORK - Chevron Corp., the second-largest U.S. oil company, Sunday agreed to buy third-ranked Texaco Inc. in a $35 billion stock deal that will form an energy powerhouse, sources familiar with the situation said. If approved by regulators, the deal will be the latest in a wave of transactions that have reshaped the industry by creating behemoths such as Exxon Mobil and BP Amoco. |
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Southern Exposure This week was a bad one for Christianier-than-thou political activists, it seems. Exhibit A: Bush-backer and Clinton-basher Matthew Glavin, grand poobah of the hard-right Southeastern Legal Foundation. Glavin is best known for his ongoing court battle to have Bill Clinton disbarred by the state of Arkansas. |
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IN April 1993, as South Africans were negotiating an end to the apartheid system, white extremists assassinated a popular black leader, Chris Hani. Black anger brought riots that threatened to derail the negotiations. |
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ALTHOUGH my tan is fading, I still have pleasant memories of my week-long vacation in Anapa, a town on the northern coast of the Black Sea - the beach, the sun, the sea, and the myriad fruit and wine markets. I soon recognized the fact that vacations don't run on these delights alone. The inhabitants of Anapa understand this, too. |
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 ADEN, Yemen - U.S. Navy divers were trying to retrieve bodies from the mangled wreck of the USS Cole in Yemen's Aden port on Monday as plans were being made to take the warship to the United States for repairs, U.S. officials said. Specialist teams have been brought into the poor Arab state to salvage the destroyer, which lies stricken in the southern Yemeni port of Aden after a suspected suicide bomb blew a gaping hole in its side and killed 17 U. |
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IN June 1995, U.S. Vice President Al Gore signed a secret agreement with Viktor Chernomyrdin, then the prime minister, calling for an end to all Russian sales of conventional weapons to Iran by the end of 1999. |
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Floods Sweep Alps TURIN, Italy (Reuters) - The death toll from flooding in the southern Alps crept upwards Monday as torrential rain continued to fall. Ten people were confirmed dead in northern Italy and another 10 were provisionally reported missing. |
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NICOSIA, Cyprus - Greek Cypriots are watching in horror as an ugly power struggle plays itself out in their scandal-tainted Church. Already suffering from the fallout of earlier financial scandals, the Greek Orthodox Church of Cyprus is now having to deal with allegations of sexual misconduct by some of its highest-ranking clerics. |
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