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The State Duma voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to support amendments to environmental law that would allow for the import of irradiated nuclear fuel for reprocessing and long-term storage, despite concerns of environmentalists who say this will turn Russia into the world's dump for nuclear waste. With 318 deputies for and only 32 against, the first reading had a satisfactory conclusion for Nuclear Power Minister Yevgeny Adamov, who has lobbied long and hard for the legislative change. And Vladimir Klimov, deputy head of the Duma's power, transport and communications committee, was also happy with the result. "The 1992 environmental law was a victory of the emotions over common sense. |
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 Busts of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin used to be as common as paperweights in the former Soviet Union. In fact, they often were paperweights. But an effort by a St. |
 GORI, Georgia - Hundreds of Georgians celebrated the 121st anniversary of the birth of Josef Stalin on Thursday in one of the few places where the late Soviet dictator is still openly revered - his home town. About 500 people gathered outside the colonnaded museum erected in his honor in Gori, a small town some 65 kilometers west of the capital Tbilisi where the future revolutionary was born on Dec. |
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MOSCOW - Perhaps anticipating that gifts and well-wishes might be in short supply as Russia's secret police celebrated their 80th anniversary, the Foreign Intelligence Service has come up with a very special present to itself. |
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Stalin-Era Spy Charged TALLINN, Estonia (AP) - An elderly ex-secret police agent has begun serving a prison term for crimes against humanity, one of the few men in a former Soviet republic jailed for Stalinist repressions. Karl-Leonhard Paulov, 76, was convicted earlier this year of crimes against humanity and sentenced to eight years in prison. |
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MOSCOW - The Federation Council voted Wednesday to restore music personally chosen by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as the country's post-communist national anthem. |
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MOSCOW - Hundreds of American employees in government-funded aid programs across Russia have one less problem to worry about after the Russian government on Wednesday pledged to uphold a bilateral treaty exempting them from taxes. The agreement, which was signed by the United States and Russia in 1992, was never formally ratified by the State Duma and is therefore not officially valid. |
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MOSCOW - An attack on a top Moscow city official responsible for dealing with lucrative business sectors should not frighten away investors, but will add to public tension, Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov said Wednesday. |
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OTTAWA - President Vladimir Putin got most of what he wanted in Canada - agreements on closer cooperation, support for joining the World Trade Organization - but was unable to persuade Prime Minister Jean Chretien to reject a proposed U.S. missile defense plan. |
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MOSCOW - The number of staff working at the offices of the State Duma has grown so large that three different departments are now being used just to collect and distribute daily reviews produced of stories published in the Russian press, according to a new report that has been compiled by a Duma deputy. |
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MOSCOW - Russian police, working with British and U.S. colleagues, arrested two suspects accused of selling child pornography over the Internet in Europe and the United States, a police spokeswoman said Thursday in Moscow. The spokeswoman said one of the suspects was arrested on Wednesday evening in a Moscow apartment, while the other was nabbed simultaneously in a military hospital in St. Petersburg. Both were unemployed men, aged 30 and 28. She said police from the United States and Britain had played a role in the arrests, but did not elaborate. Police seized 588 video cassettes, 112 video discs and more than 1,000 photographs of pornography, some of it involving children. |
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 The St. Petersburg City Court declined to fulfill the City Prosecutor's Office's request to re-imprison local media mogul Dmitry Rozhdestvensky - freed last August on grounds of ill-health - on tax evasion charges. |
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MOSCOW - Three offshore metal trading companies filed a $2.7 billion lawsuit against metals giant Russian Aluminum in New York on Wednesday, accusing it of fraud, money laundering and attempted murder. The lawsuit, filed by Base Metal Trading SA, Base Metals Trading Ltd. and Alucoal Ltd. in the U.S. District Court of New York, accuses Russian Aluminum, its chief executive Oleg Deripaska and his business partner, Mikhail Chyorny, of taking over and monopolizing the Russian aluminum industry. National power grid Unified Energy Systems and its chief Anatoly Chubais are also named in the filing, a copy of which was obtained by The St. Petersburg Times. |
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 MOSCOW - He may have been treated like a son by former President Boris Yeltsin and an economic savior by Western governments, but for 23 leading investors in the Russian economy, national power grid boss Anatoly Chubais is the worst manager in the country. |
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MOSCOW - The upper house of the parliament Wednesday approved the government's budget for 2001 - the first zero-deficit financial plan since Russia emerged as an independent country from the 1991 Soviet collapse. Some members of the Federation Council, which is made up of local governors and heads of regional legislatures, have complained that the budget leaves too little for local government. |
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MOSCOW - The government approved a controversial $33-billion plan Thursday to expand the telecoms industry, aiming to attract investment but proposing limiting foreign stakes in local firms. |
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WASHINGTON - New government figures on Thursday showed U.S. economic growth slowed sharply in the summer to its weakest pace in four years as a political debate about the risks of recession heated up. The U.S. Commerce Department said gross domestic product or GDP, the broadest measure of economic activity within U. |
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MOSCOW - Some 300 engineers and ground technicians for national No. 2 carrier Vnukovo Airlines walked off the job Wednesday over unpaid wages and continued their strike Thursday, vowing to "fight to the end. |
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A Renovation Project Gone Down the Pan THERE is an old joke that explains how plumbers, of all people, were the principal opponents of the old Soviet regime: They were always saying that the entire system needed changing. I was reminded of this last week when in search of a new unitaz, or lavatory, to put in my bathroom at home, and it struck me that, after a decade of political and economical reform, the nation's plumbing is badly in need of an overhaul. |
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Europe's Welcome to President-Elect Bush THE Euro-American summit in Washington this week comes at a defining moment for relations between the European Union (EU) and the United States - just days after the European Council in Nice and a month before the start of a new U. |
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Dear Editor, Re your editorial ["Green Putin? Why Not Start Now?" Dec. 19]. President Putin could very well live his environmentalist dream from where he sits rather than in your suggested little rubber boat. These days, being an environmentalist includes being a fire fighter. |
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Spain Musn't Pander to Rough Justice MEDIA-MOST owner Vladimir Gusinsky sits in a Madrid jail, waiting for a Spanish court to rule on his possible extradition to Russia on embezzlement charges. |
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THREE little-noted recent measures on Afghanistan mark a fundamental shift in U.S. policy not only toward that impoverished land but toward all Central Asia and even the Middle East. Whether it succeeds or fails, the outgoing administration's latest gambit will damage basic U. |
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President Vladimir Putin wound up his visit to Cuba and Canada this week with more efforts to recapture lost Soviet-era glory. Nevertheless, it was a tour that found the Canadians still committed to NATO despite Putin's objections. |
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 M. Night Shyamalan, the talented Philadelphia-based Indian-born film maker who helmed the much talked-about 1999 sleeper hit "The Sixth Sense," returns a year later with a film that is just as good, if not better. His new film "Unbreakable," which opened Thursday in St. Petersburg, is an effective psychological drama and not a thriller in the traditional sense. As with "The Sixth Sense," it is bound to elicit disputes due to its highly unconventional approach, which will put off people expecting a thrilling ride. |
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 When she realized that nobody would create what she wanted to do on stage, dancer Nancy Zendora began to choreograph performances herself. Zendora was 33 when she evolved from a performer into a choreographer, and her first show "The Voice Of Things" saw the stage. |
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When David Thomas founded the avant-garde rock group Pere Ubu some 25 years ago, he can hardly have been expecting mass public attention and adoration. And indeed, the St. Petersburg Estrada Theater (which seats 400) was barely half-full for his Thursday concert as David Thomas and two pale boys. The size of the audience is probably typical for his concerts wherever he plays, however, as he admits: "I am not talented enough to attract many people," and says the reason for giving a concert in St. Petersburg is "life and life only." Certainly, Thomas is hardly your typical rock musician. A very large man, he plays a tiny accordion and wears a red apron, which he explains is "to protect it from the passion that emanates from me during the concert - it's a kind of accordion condom. |
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 To mark the closing of the Bach memorial year in St. Petersburg, the Goethe Institute and the German Embassy in Moscow cooperated to bring conductor Helmut Rilling, his "Moscow Virtuosos" chamber orchestra, the choir of the Moscow Academy of Choral Art and soloists from all over the world to perform in St. |
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Fresh lilies, low lighting and comfortable, candle-lit booths greeted us at Bistro Garcon, a French restaurant that opened earlier this year just off Ploshchad Vosstania. Not so much a theme restaurant as the real McCoy, much of Bistrot Garcon - including its head chef, Patrick Grandgien - comes direct from France, particularly the interior, which is made up of retro-chic advertising boards plundered from 1950s Paris. The staff are painfully polite (something I just can't get used to in Russia) and the pozhaluista count was already off the scale by the time we had ordered. We sat drinking beers ($1.80 each) and devouring baskets of freshly baked baguette while watching our food being prepared through an open hatch - an experience that can be quite off-putting in a stolovaya, but one that is both reassuring and enjoyable in such an obviously professional establishment. |
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 The Christmas Parade winter theater festival opened on Dec. 14 with a new production by Veniamin Filshtinsky at the Priyut Komedianta Theater, the last play of Czech playwright Karel Chapek "Mother, or Unrest of the Dead. |
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 WASHINGTON - U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was on Thursday trying to prod Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to make progress in talks aiming to break the cycle of violence in the Middle East. U.S. President Bill Clinton stepped into the Middle East peacemaking effort Wednesday, meeting with the two sides at the White House. |
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Pinochet Interrogation SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) - Chile's top court dropped homicide and kidnapping charges against Gen. Augusto Pinochet on Wednesday, but left open the possibility of trying the former dictator in the "Caravan of Death" killings of political prisoners. |
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LONDON - Fifty Kurdish protesters hijacked the world's tallest ferris wheel and then threatened to set themselves on fire, but surrendered to British police about five hours later. Riot police on Wednesday persuaded the protesters, who wanted to draw attention to the plight of Kurdish prisoners in Turkey, to leave the London Eye ferris wheel, from which hundreds of tourists had been evacuated earlier. |
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LONDON - Manchester United is five points clear at the top but history suggests the busy holiday program - when clubs can face four games in nine days - could prove a major stumbling block on its march towards a 14th title. |
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Russian Olympic chief Vitaly Smirnov sought to reassure the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on Thursday that Moscow was a safe city despite the latest gun attack on a senior city official. "The federal government will be responsible for all security matters concerning the IOC session and I don't think there should be any doubt in its ability to provide the necessary protection," the president of the Russian Olympic Committee told Reuters. |
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Kemp on a Diet DALLAS (AP) - Shawn Kemp, after being fined by the Portland Trail Blazers for missing a practice, blamed his absence on weariness triggered by his new diet. |
 PHILADELPHIA - Karl Malone and the Utah Jazz responded to their coach's departure a bit better than Allen Iverson and the Philadelphia 76ers responded to their coach's return. Malone scored a season-high 41 points and led a fourth-quarter rally that gave the Jazz a 91-89 National Basketball Association victory over the 76ers, who wasted a season-high 45 points from Allen Iverson. |
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EAST RUTHERFORD, New Jersey - The New Jersey Devils erupted for a four-goal first period Wednesday to thwart any Dallas thoughts of revenge with a 4-1 victory over the Stars in their first meeting since last season's Stanley Cup finals. |
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