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MOSCOW - The professor accused of selling state secrets to Edmond Pope told a court Friday that information he passed on to the American was available in published textbooks, Pope's lawyer said. Anatoly Babkin, a professor at Moscow's Bauman State Technical University, refused to speak to reporters as he arrived at the Moscow court building before being called into Pope's trial, which is being held behind closed doors. Pope's lawyer Pavel Astakhov later said Babkin had retracted statements he had made to investigators, saying he was pressured to sign them soon after suffering a heart attack. Babkin's retraction could play an important role in a spy case that has sent a chill through relations between the United States and Russia. |
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 MOSCOW - One is blue. One is green. The other two are yellow and red. Their target audience can't read, write or speak in complete sentences, but the most famous foursome since the Beatles has already won more than a billion viewers worldwide. |
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Russian environmentalists have moved a step closer to forcing a referendum on the import of nuclear waste from abroad, but some observers said that there was little hope the move would succeed. At the end of last week, city authorities said they would pass on a petition on the issue, signatures for which were gathered by environmental groups across the country, to the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) in Moscow. |
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The Internet can beam the contents of your brain from one side of the world to the other. But St. Petersburg's Third Annual Electronic Commerce conference boiled down to palm pressing, as Russia's handful of Internet users tried to find each other and make a connection the old-fashioned way. |
All photos from issue.
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 MOSCOW - Russia's Prosecutor General ordered financier Vladimir Gusinsky to be arrested for embezzlement on Monday in what could be a new crackdown on post-Soviet media magnates. The charges against Gusinsky, currently outside the country, were disclosed just after his Media-MOST group clinched a deal with its main creditor, the state-dominated gas monopoly Gazprom to clear some of its debts. |
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MOSCOW - The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, after meeting Friday with President Vladimir Putin, said that he supports Russia's plan to develop a new generation of fast neutron reactors that could run on spent nuclear fuel, including plutonium. |
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The 12 Russian divers who participated in the body salvage mission aboard the sunken Kursk submarine returned festively to St. Petersburg early Monday morning, bear-hugging their families and spraying each other with champagne, local news reports showed. |
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MOSCOW - The Communist governor-elect of Kursk, Alexander Mikhailov, said that he and President Vladimir Putin are allies working to rid Russia of Jewish "filth," drawing an outcry Friday from Jewish leaders. |
 MOSCOW - A Russian hijacker and his 58 hostages from a commandeered Russian passenger jet arrived in Moscow from Israel on Sunday night to end a 24-hour drama, Russia's Interfax news agency reported. The hijacker, described by Israeli and Russian officials as being deranged, was flown into Moscow's Vnukovo airport in one Russian government plane, while the 48 passengers and 10 crew from the seized jet arrived unharmed aboard a second plane, the agency said. |
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Lenin Gets a Bath MOSCOW (SPT) - The Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square will be closed to visitors from Saturday until Dec. 25, Interfax reported Friday. |
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St. Petersburg Gov. Vladimir Yakovlev this month approved a plan to build an overland train in the city's southeast, thus bypassing the overloaded metro system and imitating several other cities in Europe and the rest of the world. But as yet, no definite investors for the project have been announced, prompting reminders of several other big ideas the city has yet to see fulfilled, such as the Ring Road and Flood Protection Barrier. |
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The long-collapsed section of metro tunnel between St. Petersburg's northeastern Lesnaya and Ploschad Muzhestva stations will remain impassable until at least 2002, because of local and federal budget snags and a hung-up loan, the Metropolitan's director Vla di mir Garyugin has announced. |
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BAGHDAD, Iraq - Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov arrived in Baghdad on Monday on the first leg of a trip that will take him to Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Ivanov is the first Russian foreign minister to visit Iraq since 1994. The Iraqi News Agency said that Iva nov carried a letter from President Vla di mir Putin to Iraq's President Saddam Hussein on "bilateral relations and current developments in the Arab region. |
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The World Bank funds 33 projects in Russia, at total price of $10.4 billion in loans. Anna Raff takes a closer look to see how that money is spent and what some ongoing Bank projects are doing to the local and national economy. IN October, the World Bank announced that, while talks about a new $800 million loan program with Russia would continue, it was unlikely that a decision on a new program would come before the end of the year. Even if the money never surfaces - as the draft budget anticipated it would - this doesn't mean that World Bank loans will stop flowing into Russia. To observers, the announcement that the talks had fizzled came as no surprise. |
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 VIENNA, Austria - The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) chose the Venezuelan oil minister, Ali Rodriguez Araque, as its new secretary general on Sunday, paving the way for the producers' group to deal with pressing questions of oil output more expeditiously at a time when prices remain stubbornly high. |
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NEW YORK - Technology heavyweight Hewlett-Packard Co. stunned Wall Street on Monday by announcing profits that missed forecasts by nearly 20 percent, two days before results had been expected, and saying it ended talks to buy the PricewaterhouseCoopers consulting business. |
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Meat Co. Makes a Bid NEW YORK (Reuters) - Smithfield Foods Inc., the No. 1 U.S. hog and pork producer, said on Monday it offered to acquire IBP Inc., the No. |
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U.S. Vote Uncertainty Spooks Local Markets Bears trampled stocks to new lows while watching U.S. markets tumble. Uncertainty over the ultimate outcome of the presidential election in the United States triggered selling in the high-tech end of the market, which is watched as an indicator used to judge the investment appetite of emerging markets. |
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Recently an issue has arisen in St. Petersburg that effects every tax-paying, foreign individual in the city: the infamous Tax Payer Identification Number (INN). |
 MOSCOW - Regulations designed to stop pervasive evasion of customs duties by citizens importing cars came into force Friday, Anatoly Galaktionov, chairman of the customs control department, announced at a news conference. He said many people importing cars had not paid any duties at all. |
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MOSCOW - The five-month battle for control of Moscow's Kristall distillery came to an end last week with the appointment of a new general director - the company's third this year. |
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Telecominvest, a holding company for 36 telecommunications companies in northwest Russia, has struck a strategic alliance with Telia AB, Sweden's largest telecom company, which will invest $250 million in the next three years to build a national GSM mobile phone network. |
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MOSCOW - Natural gas monopoly Gazprom has applied to the Federal Energy Commission to raise its tariffs by an average of 35 percent and asked for the hike be retroactive to Oct. |
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MOSCOW - Seeking cash in order to fulfill ambitious plans to triple oil extraction 300 percent in 10 years, LUKoil subsidiary Russian Investment Fuel-Energy Co., or Ritek, on Monday embarked on an aggressive fundraising campaign. "We will focus on drilling and construction of an oil pipeline in Western Siberia," Ritek vice president Alexander Meleshko said at a news conference. |
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MOSCOW - A deputy tax minister has promised that the flat income tax of 13 percent due to come into force on Jan. 1, 2000, will not be changed for three years, the newspaper Vremya Novostei reported Friday. |
 MOSCOW - A small firm called Itera was registered in Jacksonville, Florida, to distribute food and oil products in 1992. Eight years later, Itera is Russia's third-largest gas producer, a mammoth holding consisting of more than 120 companies and subsidiaries. |
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NEW YORK - The still-unfolding drama swirling around the U.S. presidential election will cast a shadow of doubt over U.S. credit markets and should dominate a week that includes key inflation and consumer spending reports and a Federal Reserve policy meeting. |
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Belarus' Minsk Bus Plant (AMAZ) is expanding it's presence in the Russian market, signing a deal with Kirovsky Zavod, one of St. Petersburg's oldest factories, to begin assembling buses in the city. The Interfax news agency reported last week that the plans call for 20 MAZ-103 model buses to be assembled at the plant before the end of the year, with 200 being the predicted total for annual production after that. |
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Old Wounds The American nation teeters on the brink of constitutional anarchy. The Democratic candidate has narrowly but clearly won the popular vote from an electorate still bitterly divided over the recent impeachment battle, when a rakish, scandal-ridden Southern president was almost ousted by the radical Republicans in control of Congress. |
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Putin's Safety Is a Tool for Handling Press ON the morning of Nov. 7, a large motorcade roared past the window of my office here in Rostov-on-Don with lights flashing and sirens blaring. |
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AS the world awaits the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, few have had the time or the emotional energy to look down the road at the longer-term implications of one of the closest electoral contests in U.S. history. At a time when Americans were largely obsessed by the twists and turns of the domestic political soap opera, fewer still were looking at the consequences of the electoral deadlock for foreign policy. |
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 MIAMI, Florida - The U.S. presidential battle was set to move into Florida's courts on Monday with lawsuits and disputed votes dragging out the electoral process to choose the United States' 43rd president. A federal judge will hear Monday a request by the campaign of Republican George W. |
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Zenit St. Petersburg closed the soccer season posting a 3-1 win over Rotor Sunday night at Petrovsky Stadium, their first win over the Volgograd side in the Russian Premier Division championship. |
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JERUSALEM - An adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak said on Monday Palestinian President Yasser Arafat was still interested in peace despite nearly seven weeks of violence that have wrecked negotiating efforts. An aide to Arafat said the Palestinian leader was ready for any genuine peace process, but accused Israel of seeking a military solution, describing Barak as the arch-foe of peace. |
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Land Reform Illegal HARARE, Zimbabwe (AP) - The government will ignore a Supreme Court ruling that declares its land reform program illegal, a government minister said Saturday. |
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Issues Archive