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 More than 3,000 friends, colleagues and well-wishers joined the family of Lt. Capt. Dmitry Kolesnikov, whose note gave a chilling insight into the final hours of the Kursk submarine, to attend his burial on Thursday at St. Petersburg's Serafimovskoye Cemetery. His was the first funeral for any of the 118 victims of the Kursk submarine, which sank in the Barents Sea during exercises in August after two explosions in its forward torpedo compartment. |
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 IZBORSK, Pskov Oblast - If it were possible for a small town to have its 15 minutes of fame, then Leonid Panov's modest dream, called "In Putin's Footsteps," wants to make his town's day in the sun last at least a couple of months. |
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MOSCOW - A former Federal Security Service officer who once accused his superiors of plotting to kill Boris Berezovsky has flown to London and requested asylum, saying he fears for his life and the life of his family. Alexander Litvinenko flew to Heathrow Airport on Wednesday with his wife, Marina, and 6-year-old son, Anatoly. He immediately approached a British policeman and asked for political asylum, said Alexander Goldfarb, Moscow representative of the Public Health Research Institute of New York, who accompanied the family from Turkey and served as interpreter. Litvinenko told the policeman that he fears people in the FSB may try to kill him to prevent him from revealing information, including information about the apartment bombings in Moscow last year, Goldfarb said Thursday night in a telephone interview. |
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 LONDON - Garry Kasparov's 15-year reign as king of world chess ended on Thursday when he was trounced by former pupil Vladimir Kramnik in the World Chess Championship. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW - Back in 1992, a provincial southern governor was battling a longtime White House insider for the U.S. presidency. In Russia, there was a new Kremlin chief barely a year into the job. Eight years after Bill Clinton was elected president and Boris Yeltsin started ill-starred economic reforms, a mood of cautious optimism has been replaced by one of disillusionment and disconcerting indifference in bilateral ties. |
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MOSCOW - Federal prosecutors said Wednesday they plan to bring criminal charges against media tycoons Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky later this month and threatened to arrest them. |
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The thought of having radioactive materials passing through your city at night may not put the mind at ease, but state nuclear power officials have no doubts: Don't worry, it's safe. But put that reassurance in context, say environmentalists, and it is merely a prelude to shipping in nuclear waste from other countries for reprocessing and long-term storage. |
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French Beef Ban MOSCOW (AP) - Russia has banned imports of beef and cows from seven regions of France in order to prevent any outbreak of mad cow disease, an agricultural official said Wednesday. |
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 MOSCOW - Natural gas monopoly Gazprom on Wednesday opposed a plan to levy a 40 percent duty on pipes imported from Ukraine. The Economic Development and Trade Ministry has proposed protectionist measures against Ukrainian pipemakers in reaction to the lobbying efforts of local pipe plants. |
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MOSCOW - The cabinet on Thursday approved five amendments to the Tax Code, most of them aimed to improve tax administration. However, insiders say the government is only halfhearted about the measures - some of which are long overdue while others could have a boomerang effect - so it is unlikely to put a lot of pressure on the State Duma to pass them. |
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Production Jump Slows MOSCOW (Reuters) - The growth of the nation's manufacturing sector slowed considerably in October, taking the Moscow Narodny Bank Purchasing Managers' Index to its lowest level since January, the bank said Wednesday. The seasonally adjusted PMI, intended to give a snapshot of business conditions, fell to 55. |
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MOSCOW - The Moscow Arbitration Court this week postponed the hearing of the Finance Ministry's $118.9-million claim against MOST-Bank for failing to perform obligations under a trust management securities agreement. |
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MOSCOW - Experts are predicting a shortage of fodder grain despite this year's grain harvest of about 65 million tons being the best in the last three years. Average prices of food-quality wheat in the Volga, which had a bad harvest, and the Urals region, which had a good one, dropped by about 100 rubles ($3. |
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The case of Sergei Moiseyev, a pensioner who put the merger of three St. Petersburg Telecommunications companies on hold by filing a suit defending his shareholders rights, came to a close when the Kuibishevsky District Federal Court in St. |
 Time is running out for the Mil Moscow Helicopter Factory, and strange things are happening. Key foreign investors are quietly jumping ship, money and assets seem to be evaporating, an external bankruptcy manager has been savagely beaten - and by some accounts, top managers have themselves quietly skipped town. |
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RUSSIAN political and military authorities continue to speculate that the Kursk nuclear submarine was sunk by a collision with a foreign counterpart sent to observe Russian naval exercises in the Barents Sea, despite both the fact that no concrete evidence of this has yet emerged and the strenuous denials on the part of American and NATO officials. |
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Dear Editor, Boris Kagarlitsky's article comparing Chechnya to the Palestinian Authority and Israel with Russia ["Chechnya and Mideast Are Both Results of a Bad Peace," Oct. |
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The anti-Chechen War stance adopted by French President Jacques Chirac and his European Union allies went by the wayside in Paris this week, as President Vladimir Putin returned home after having garnered billions of dollars of investment promises. At the same time, two of Russia's leading businessmen didn't look like they were going to be on the receiving end of any favors from the government - but were perhaps due for some special treatment of a very different nature. |
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 Arguably one of the most dynamic independent film events in St. Petersburg is the Deboshir Film Festival, subtitled "Pure Dreams," which serves as a forum for Russian and international low-budget, non-commercial filmmakers including a large group of young directors from St. Petersburg. Organized by actor-director Alexander Bashirov's film studio Deboshi r Film, this year's festival is the third, and it takes place at the Spartak Cinema from Saturday, Nov. |
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 For classical music connoisseurs, Tchaikovsky may seem like a composer whose legacy has been examined scrupulously enough not to hold any surprises - at least in the maestro's home country. |
 Leningrad, the folk-punk band which has kept clubs in both St. Petersburg and Moscow packed for the past couple of years, is releasing its third album next week. Called "Dachniki" it contains 13 raunchy and fun tracks - which deal with pop icons and stereotypes, include quotes from a wide musical spectrum, ranging from Deep Purple to the James Bond theme, and contain even more obscene words than the band's previous releases. |
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This year, St. Petersburg's prestigious theater prize, the Golden Sofit, repeated the nominations for the Golden Masks with striking accuracy. The same names made their appearance on the list of nominees: Lev Dodin, Grigory Dityat kov sky, Yury Alexandrov, Emil Kapelyush, Vladimir Firer, Nikolai Boryachikov. |
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Friday will offer plenty of choice. The respectable public, which can afford to pay one or two thousand rubles for a ticket, will gather for Ray Charles' one-off show at the Oktyabrsky Concert Hall. The singer and pianist will be coming hot from his two Moscow dates. Those interested in cute young guys and/or so-called "Russian Britpop," should go to SpartaK. |
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Barcelona Car Bomb BARCELONA, Spain (Reuters) - A car bomb exploded in central Barcelona early on Thursday, injuring a policeman and a security guard, in the second attack in Spain this week linked to the Basque separatist group ETA. Fifteen minutes before the blast, callers claiming to represent ETA alerted authorities to the bomb, which shattered windows in the area and littered the street with debris, police said. |
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TAIPEI, Taiwan - Taiwan rescue workers searched for 32 people on Thursday after Typhoon Xangsane, the island's most destructive storm in five years, triggered flash floods and landslides that killed at least 53 people. |
 TAIPEI, Taiwan - Grieving relatives turned their wrath against Singapore Airlines on Thursday as investigators probed whether a jumbo jet, which crashed during a typhoon, used a runway closed for repairs or struck an object on takeoff. The airline's officials, dealing with the first crash in the history of one of Asia's most profitable carriers, faced a storm of criticism from family members of the victims. |
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LIMA - Peru's respected rights monitor flew to the southern Andes on Thursday in a new bid to mediate the surrender of military mavericks, whose uprising has deepened a seven-week-old crisis that has dumbfounded the nation. |
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SUVA, Fiji - Fijian authorities said on Thursday that they had wrested control of the country's main military barracks from rebel troops, after two soldiers were killed in eight hours of sporadic gunbattles. "The army is back in control," said Laisenia Qarase, who was appointed interim prime minister by the military after nationalist rebels staged a coup in May. |
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