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SCHENKENDORF, Germany - Count Dracula, an affable antiques dealer living in a castle near Berlin, is being driven out of Germany - not with garlic, crucifixes or sunshine but by neo-Nazi arsonists and intransigent local bureaucrats. The 60-year-old Berlin native and adopted descendant of the Romanian royal family has turned his famous name into a thriving restaurant, beer garden and antiques business in a rural hamlet south of Berlin. A philanthropist at heart, Count Dracula also hosts a popular "blood donor" festival on his estate for the Red Cross each June, rising from a coffin to open the party that draws thousands of donors who have left behind more than 3,000 liters of blood. |
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 MURMANSK, Far North - Divers working in the Barents Sea retrieved eight more bodies from the wreck of the Kursk submarine on the weekend, a spokesman for Russia's Northern Fleet said on Monday. |
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As the months-long conflict between Pulkovo customs and Culture Ministry officials rages on, those thinking of taking home even innocent souvenirs beware: They stand a good chance of being confiscated. The battle over who gets which taxes for the export of so-called cultural valuables will take a new twist from the beginning of November, with airport customs looking set to seize everything it deems culturally valuable. The problem is in the definition of valuable. While any item over 100 years old must automatically stay in Russia, observers of the case say that there are no clear rules for assessing the worth of paintings bought from a street artist, Russian folk art sold in hotels, or manuscripts from the 1950s. |
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 When St. Petersburg geologist Mikhail Karchevsky led a group of children on an archaeological expedition over the summer, the kids expected to find some interesting rocks and perhaps some old tools buried in the dirt. |
All photos from issue.
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Duma Nixes Observers n MOSCOW (AP) - The State Duma on Friday turned down a motion by hardline lawmakers to send observers to monitor the U.S. presidential election for violations. The lower house voted 267-12 against putting the draft on the agenda. |
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UNITED NATIONS - After a decade-long UN embargo on air travel to Iraq, the Saddam International Airport has started to bustle with planes carrying few passengers but packed with political significance. |
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The governor general of the Northwestern region, Viktor Cherkesov, last week set up a so-called security coordination council - officially the Council for Military Management and the Solving of Emergency Problems - concentrating the power of all regional military and security structures in his own hands. |
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MOSCOW- Cheri Pope, wife of U.S. businessman and accused spy Edmond Pope, said last week that her husband was ill, sad and alone. He has not been allowed to read most of the letters his family has written since his arrest in April or see his wife more than once during her visit to Moscow this week, and his Russian friends have all fallen silent, she said. |
 MOSCOW - Russia's leaders have filled bookshelves and bookshelves with their scribblings. Lenin wrote prodigiously, Stalin wrote badly, Leonid Brezhnev pretended he could write, and now President Vladimir Putin has joined the literary line with his first book. Just don't expect an insight into his political philosophy or the answer to whither Russia. |
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BRUSSELS - China has moved closer to World Trade Organization (WTO) entry by ironing out disagreements with the European Union over European firms' access to its insurance and retail markets, EU officials said on Friday. In talks with the EU, China confirmed it would grant seven further licenses to allow EU insurance companies to operate in the Chinese market, in addition to two already issued, the officials said. |
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NEW YORK - AT&T Corp. on Wednesday said it would restructure into a family of four separately traded companies, marking the biggest restructuring of the corporate icon since its 1984 breakup that created the Baby Bells. |
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LONDON - Microsoft Corp. is in talks with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. about investing more than $1 billion in the media firm's Sky Global Networks Inc. satellite TV unit, the Wall Street Journal said Monday. If a deal is reached, Microsoft will take a 3.5 percent stake in Sky Global, Murdoch's soon-to-be-floated unit which consolidates News Corp.'s global satellite TV assets, the newspaper said citing "people familiar with the situation." Microsoft could not immediately be reached for comment and News Corp. representatives in London referred calls to its New York office where no one was immediately available either. Bringing Microsoft on board would be an important coup for Sky Global, which is likely to see its plans for a flotation pushed back until next year amid volatility in the tech sector, analysts said. |
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 The Leningrad Optical-Mechanical Association, or LOMO, plans to become the center of the local optical-mechanical sector by uniting enterprises of the same profile into a single holding company. |
 MOSCOW - In a move to boost its capitalization and borrowing power, the board of natural gas monopoly Gaz prom asked the government Friday to liberalize regulations on trading its shares. The board also asked the government to let its shares be sold at two of the country's main trading venues so that foreign and local investors could buy local shares and convert them into American Depository Receipts, or ADRs. |
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PARIS - French natural gas company Gaz de France said a plan to build a new pipeline exporting Russian gas to western Europe that bypassed Ukraine was only at the study stage and it would take at least six months for a deal to be finalized. |
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NEW YORK - Oil major BP is in preliminary talks with state-owned oil major Rosneft to buy a stake in offshore oil and gas project Sakhalin 1, chief executive John Browne said. "We have had preliminary discussions. We will continue talking. We'll see what will emerge," Browne said in New York this week. This was the first time BP has confirmed actual discussions on the deal. BP told Rosneft last month that it was interested in buying half of the Russian firm's 40 percent stake in Sakhalin 1. Sakhalim 1 is an offshore oil and gas project still in the exploration stage in Russia's Pacific waters near the Sakhalin Islands. The size of BP's offer has not been disclosed but oil analysts said that between an upfront payment and future investments the stake could go for as much as $400 million. |
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 MOSCOW - A parliamentary commission held public hearings Friday on conflicts between workers and management at a McDonald's food-processing factory, and State Duma deputies urged the company to sit down immediately for negotiations with a union there. |
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MOSCOW - Unknown hackers with a St. Petersburg e-mail address have accomplished what a U.S. Justice Department antitrust lawsuit failed to do: extract the secret blueprints for Microsoft's Windows operating system. "They did in fact access the source codes," Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer told reporters Friday in Sweden. |
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LONDON - OPEC oil exporters said Monday they would raise production by 2 percent Tuesday to curb a price rally stoking fears of inflationary damage to the world economy. |
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St. Petersburg's Telix company has begun the construction of a new cable TV network based on broadband technology in the city's Kalininsky District. Once the work is completed, subscribers to the Telix network will receive programming from as many as 25 channels, both domestic and satellite-based, according to a company press release. |
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Mission Aborted CNN, as we all know, is a network carved in the mold of its maverick creator, Ted Turner: cutting-edge, iconoclastic, edgy, out-there, anti-establishment. We all know they would never suck up to the powers-that-be - or even to the powers-that-could-be-soon. |
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Companies Do Battle With Counterfeiters THERE'S no such thing as a free lunch, goes the saying, but counterfeiters might disagree. While international companies often spend millions of dollars on advertising, turning a simple TV slot into an entire mini-series, there are people working on imitating the very same product in a quiet basement somewhere, whose fakes effectively get the same advertising results as the real thing. |
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Do the Ends Justify Means In Regions? THERE is little reason to be sorry to see Alexander Rutskoi lose the governor's office in Kursk. He was by any measure a terrible governor. When he was not calling on farmers to raise ostriches he was busily installing relatives in government positions and then making a family-wide effort at running the region into the ground. |
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THE news out of the Middle East lately has become more and more reminiscent of reports from Chechnya. In fact, the very essence of the two conflicts seems surprisingly similar. |
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WASHINGTON - Republican George W. Bush held a three-point lead over Democrat Al Gore in Sunday's Reuters/MSNBC national daily tracking poll, but separate surveys of nine key battleground states showed the race could still go either way. The national survey of 1,213 likely voters in the Nov. 7 election, conducted Thursday to Sunday by pollster John Zogby, found the Texas governor with 45 percent and the vice president with 42 percent. On Saturday, Bush led Gore by 44 percent to 43 percent. Just over a week remains until the Nov. 7 election. Green Party nominee Ralph Nader polled 5 percent; Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan stayed at 1 percent; Libertarian Harry Browne also had 1 percent, and the rest remained undecided. |
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 PRISTINA, Yugoslavia - Moderate ethnic Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova claimed victory over guerrilla war veterans in Kosovo's first free elections, and analysts said the outcome could foster dialogue with estranged minority Serbs. |
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