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 MOSCOW - Russia officially acknowledged for the first time on Friday that Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Jews from Nazi death camps, was a victim of Stalin's purges and died in a Soviet prison. The Prosecutor General's Office said Wallenberg and his driver Vilmos Langfelder were "unjustifiably arrested by non-judicial bodies and deprived of their freedom for political reasons . |
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Russian environmentalists are crying foul at the rejection of a petition on the issue of spent nuclear fuel, saying that the Central Electoral Committee threw out signatures on the document for trivial technicalities. |
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USPENSKAYA, On the Russian-Ukrainian Border - For eight years, Leonid Dobronogov has crossed the Russian-Ukrainian border a dozen times a day without even leaving his home. Dobronogov has the bad luck to be the owner of a house that has the border running through it. |
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A group of St. Petersburg mining technicians have developed a method they say will help Antarctic researchers overcome international controversy and reach a lake - buried under almost four kilometers and 400,000 years worth of ice -that scientists say is teeming with life. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin sought on Thursday to scotch fears that a wave of anti-Semitism could sweep Russia under his rule, making a high-profile visit to a Jewish center celebrating Judaism's Hanuk kah holiday. Prominent Jewish groups earlier this month accused the Kremlin of doing nothing to end attacks on Jewish targets in a country they said had a history of anti-Semitism. And the prosecution of media mogul Vladimir Gusinsky, a sharp Putin critic and a leading figure in the Russian Jewish community, heightened concerns in some quarters. Gusinsky is currently in Spain fighting his extradition to Russia on fraud charges. But during a stay of more than two hours at a Jewish center, Putin sought to boost his ties with the community, accepting a menorah, the traditional eight-branch candlestick used during the eight days of Hanukkah. |
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 Santa Claus and Ded Moroz may have a helping hand in working miracles for Russian children this Christmas: Harry Potter has arrived. Be it the magic of advertising or Harry's own charisma, "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone," the first official translation of the first book in J. |
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VLADIKAVKAZ, Southern Russia - Liberal legislators said on Sunday that they had signed a protocol with members of rebel Chechnya's parliament that eventually could lead to a negotiated solution to the 15-month war over the republic. There was no response to the initiative from the Russian government, which has insisted that the only settlement it will accept is the surrender of rebel commanders. |
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Nobel Donation ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Zhores Alfyorov, the St. Petersburg scientist who won this year's Nobel Prize for Physics, announced on Thursday that he would created a Foundation for the Support of Science and Education with his Nobel Prize winnings, according to local press reports. |
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MOSCOW - A dissident Russian governor launched a blistering attack on President Vladimir Putin on Sunday, saying he was taking Russia back to the darkest days of Soviet rule. Nikolai Fyodorov assaulted Putin on all fronts for his first year in office in a rare public attack by a serving governor. "We are now on a receding wave taking us back in time," Fyodorov, governor of the central Chuvashiya region, told NTV's analytical Itogi programme. "Some people might not realise it but we are returning to the 1950s or 30s," he said, referring to the time of mass communist repression under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Putin has unnerved local leaders by embarking on a crusade to boost the Kremlin's dominant role in relations with Russia's 89 regions and republics. |
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 Ukraine's embattled President Leonid Kuchma left behind a bitter political crisis at home for a two-day working visit to Moscow and St. Petersburg, in order to tackle the thorny issue of his country's energy debts to Russia. |
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MOSCOW - Russian gubernatorial elections that were held at the weekend resulted in victories for one of the country's most influential businessmen, a hardline army general and a former secret police colleague of President Vladimir Putin. The Central Election Commission said on Monday that Roman Ab ra mo vich, a 34-year-old member of parliament with links to the oil and metals industry, won over 90 percent of votes in the Arctic far eastern Chukotka region, a distance of 10 time zones from the capital Moscow. |
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Lawmakers who had hoped to make a Jan. 1 federal deadline stipulating that all regional legislation be aligned with federal laws ostensibly hit a snag this week when a city court found some of their City Charter amendments to be at variance with Moscow. |
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MADRID - Media magnate Vladimir Gusinsky was resting at his home on the southern coast of Spain on Saturday, awaiting extradition proceedings after being released on bail from a prison in Madrid, his lawyer said. Gusinsky, wanted in Russia on fraud charges, is obliged by judicial authorities to stay inside his house in the luxury resort of Sotogrande after his lawyers posted bail of $5. |
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Taking Soccer to Heart NEW YORK (Reuters) - A new study has found that deaths from heart attacks jumped a whopping 50 percent during a Dutch soccer match in 1996 when the Netherlands lost to France. The researchers attribute the deaths to the increase in stress the men may have experienced. |
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WASHINGTON - The sun is hot right now - spewing electromagnetic radiation in the midst of its most interesting storm season ever, scientists say. But although the plasma and high-energy particles are making the Earth's ionosphere light up, orbiting detectors and other equipment have helped scientists set up an early-warning system that seems to have helped, so far, to keep satellites and power grids safe, the scientists at NASA and other agencies said. |
 GENEVA - The World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday expressed concern about what it called "exposure worldwide" to mad cow disease and its fatal human form, new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD). The United Nations health agency announced it was convening an international meeting of experts and officials from all regions, to be held in Geneva in late spring, on the neurodegenerative diseases affecting cattle and humans. |
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NEW YORK - Beer may not be considered a health food, but it is rich in the nutrients that help make fruit and vegetables good for you. Three new lab and animal studies presented this month at the International Chemical Congress of Pacific Basin Societies in Honolulu confirm that beer - especially darker brew - contains plenty of antioxidants. |
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MOSCOW - With an estimated half of all mobile phones sold in Russia thought to be imported illegally, some of the world's largest cellular phone makers have agreed to fight the problem together. At a meeting last week, Motorola, Ericsson, Siemens, Samsung and Philips called with a single voice upon the Communications Ministry, the Customs Committee and the Economic Development and Trade Ministry to tighten import regulations for their products. |
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MOSCOW - Talk about an untapped market: Of the approximately 140 million people living in Russia today, nearly 1.75 million do not receive broadcast signals for a single television channel in their homes. |
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MOSCOW - Prime Minister Mik hail Kasyanov says this year will show record post-Soviet economic growth levels, a huge trade surplus and surging domestic and foreign investment levels. Nevertheless, Kasyanov says, the country still won't be able to pay its debts next year without a restructuring deal. |
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MOSCOW - In a race to beat the State Duma's restrictions on the sale of state-owned enterprises, the government presented its plan Friday to float indirectly a stake in No. |
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MOSCOW - Russia's equity market may be plunging, but its debt market is outpacing the world. Russia's portion of J.P. Morgan's Emerging Markets Bond Index, or EMBI+, was up a hefty 55 percent from January to December, followed by unpredictable Ecuador and Mexico, which are up 50. |
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Budget Hopes Resting on A Strong World Oil Price WITH world oil prices appearing to have passed their peak - although it is too early to discount another price spike - and most observers expecting a sharp fall in the spring, there are valid reasons for concern over the effect such a decline may have on the pace of economic growth in Russia. |
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WASHINGTON - The faster-than-expected sequencing of the human genome - the first step toward unraveling the genetic "book of life" - tops this year's list of biggest scientific achievements, Science magazine says. Genome mappers also pushed out sequences for two favorites of laboratory scientists - the fruit fly and the weed Aradopsis. |
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WASHINGTON - A slowdown in the pace of U.S. expansion was unavoidable but there are sound reasons to expect steady economic growth next year, Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said on Sunday. |
 The United States threatens to retaliate against Russia for arms sales to what it perceives to be hostile nuclear-threshold states. But it could still pay off to ignore looming U.S. sanctions and engage in a brisk trade in conventional weapons. Simon Saradzhyan reports. |
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NEW YORK - Want a gutsy forecast? Look for an after-Christmas shopping spree on Wall Street. For now, many investors are in shock with the overall stock market, on track to post its first down year in a decade. |
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NEW YORK - Stock exchanges promised investors the world as they sought to boost their competitive edge in 2000 but the bourses delivered mostly press releases, and market-watchers expect more of the same next year. The promise of 24-hour global stock trading, courtesy of tie-ups between exchanges, remains unfulfilled despite furious efforts by markets to court international partners. The reason: global alliances so far have failed to attract enough trading volumes and skepticism abounds on whether future link-ups can generate interest. In addition, myriad government regulations make meaningful alliances a tricky proposition. Even the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the world's biggest stock exchange, which made its international play in June with nine other bourses, said it was difficult to follow through on the promises of global stock trading. |
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 TOKYO - Tokyo stocks ended sharply higher on Monday, on broad-based buying triggered by the U.S. NASDAQ market's gain on Friday. The fact U.S. markets were closed on Monday for the Christmas holiday also prompted buying by investors, including investment trusts, brokers said. |
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BEIJING - China will slash Internet and long-distance telephone fees by over 50 percent from next month to lure more people onto the Web and help assuage popular outrage at exorbitant phone bills, state media said on Monday. The step could complicate the planned overseas listing of state giant China Telecom, since it holds a franchise on fixed-line phone service in China and makes much of its money from long-distance calls. |
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RUSSIA'S chief crony capitalist, Boris Berezovsky, has refashioned himself as a Soviet-style dissident. In September he addressed the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations in New York. President Vladimir Putin, the tycoon argued, was betraying the ideals of the Yeltsin era and returning Russia to its authoritarian past. |
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Bureaucracy Has Beaten Democracy "WE don't make the rules - we just follow them," was a Central Electoral Committee spokeswoman's response to why 600,000 signatures were rejected on a petition organized by environmentalists across the country. |
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Nothing Will Be Left After The Battle THE tax inspectorate of the central district of Moscow has filed a suit calling for the liquidation of NTV in connection with its bankruptcy. Now, before I go further, I want to point out what it clearly says at the end of this column: My television program is broadcast on NTV. |
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Hog Heaven Just when we thought we could finally move beyond the bitter partisan rancor that has divided the American body politic for so long, word came this week of yet another red-hot political scandal on the boil. |
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Child Soldiers Killed COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) - Sri Lankan forces raiding a Tamil rebel camp killed 18 fighters, all but four of them girls, in a gunbattle Sunday in the Jaffna Peninsula, an official spokes man said. Child soldiers were leading the fighters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam near the camp in Navatkuli, 19 kilometers north of Jaffna, a Defense Ministry spokesman said. |
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BUKAVU, Congo - Diamonds and gold have long fuelled African conflicts, but in the war-torn east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo another mineral is giving the rebels and their Rwandan allies an incentive to fight. |
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LINCOLN, New Zealand - New Zealand wrested the Cricinfo Women's Cricket World Cup from Australia by four runs on Saturday in a thrilling final at Lincoln, near Christchurch. Off-spinner Clare Nicholson had Australia's No. 10 Charmaine Mason caught behind by Rebecca Rolls with the first ball of the last over to win the game. |
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Brunell's House Burns PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Florida (AP) - The home of Jacksonville Jaguars quarterback Mark Brunell was heavily damaged by a fire possibly sparked when a candle tipped over. |
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LONDON - Ole Gunnar Solskjaer scored two goals against Ipswich Town to allow Manchester United to stretch its English premiership lead to eight points on Saturday. United was given a helping hand by Liverpool, who thrashed second-placed Arsenal 4-0 earlier on Saturday with goals by Steven Gerrard, Michael Owen, Nick Barmby and Robbie Fowler. |
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LONDON - U.S. sprinter Marion Jones, who won three gold medals at the Sydney Olympics but failed in her quest to secure five, was voted sports woman of the year in a Reuters poll. |
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Issues Archive