|
|
|
 The ramshackle kiosks surrounding St. Petersburg's train stations are about to get a facelift, and a boost in rent, courtesy of their new landlords, a little-known organization for retired Federal Security Service agents and overseas operatives. The Regional Fund for the Support of Veterans of the Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Service for External Intelligence (SVR) has just inked a deal with the Oktyabrskaya Railway company, giving the former spies landlord responsibilities for - and carte blanche to bring order to - kiosks surrounding St. |
|
 MOSCOW - Politicians cried foul Monday over the appointment of former Primorye Gov. Yevgeny Nazdratenko as the government's head of the fishing industry, with some accusing the Kremlin of drawing up a deal to prevent Nazdratenko from seeking re-election. |
All photos from issue.
|
|
|
|
|
MOSCOW - In a move further tightening the Kremlin's control over the legislative branch, a group of senators in parliament's upper house has formed an informal caucus whose only stated political goal is to support bills submitted by the president. By the end of last week, the group, which was formed Wednesday, already included around 50 of the Federation Council's 178 senators, Oleg Yevstig ne yev, deputy head of the chamber's press office, said in a telephone interview Friday. |
|
MOSCOW - The Council of Europe's human rights supremo arrived in Russia on Monday to study the situation in war-torn Chechnya amid fresh media reports of atrocities committed in the rebel region by the military. |
|
MOSCOW - Two Audit Chamber investigations into state-controlled television giants ORT and RTR show yet again the double standard used by federal authorities in dealing with state and private media companies. Both ORT and RTR are tax delinquents and guilty of violating the law and misappropriating tens of millions of dollars of government money, according to the summaries of the investigations, copies of which were obtained by The St. |
|
MOSCOW - Siberian metals magnate Mikhail Zhivilo has been detained in Paris on an Interpol warrant accusing him of plotting to assassinate Kemerovo Gov. |
|
CAIRO, Egypt - In an amicable first meeting, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov pledged over the weekend a constructive approach to dealing with Iraq, missile defenses and other points of policy discord. Powell, draping an arm over Ivanov's shoulder, described the first encounter Saturday between the Bush administration and the year-old government of President Vladimir Putin as "very, very excellent. |
|
Gas Blast Kills 1 MOSCOW (AP) - A blast that killed a woman and badly injured 23 others on a collective farm in central Russia was traced to a propane gas cylinder, officials said Sunday. |
|
A container was impounded by customs officials at Yekaterinburg's main airport on Monday because it was emitting radiation well over the accepted safety level. Vladimir Kondukov, a press spokes person for the Sverdlovsk regional branch of the Emergency Situations Ministry, told The St. |
|
SEOUL, South Korea - President Vla dimir Putin arrived in Seoul on Monday, where groups of families from North and South Korea are holding reunions as part of an historic rapprochement that Moscow aims to assist. |
|
|
|
 MOSCOW- A Moscow court Friday officially ended bankruptcy proceedings against the Mil Helicopter Plant, closing the book on years of legal maneuvering and clearing the way for the world-famous aviation company to get back to business. "The Moscow Mil Helicopter Plant is now returning to its normal activity as a joint-stock company," Interfax quoted the plant's current external manager, Leonid Zapolsky, as saying Friday. |
|
 MOSCOW - Want to buy a monk's soul? For just 130 rubles such a seemingly diabolical deed can be carried out at a neighborhood kiosk by buying a bottle of semisweet wine called Soul of a Monk. |
|
MOSCOW - A plan by President Vla di mir Putin to make railway tariffs the same whether cargoes are for domestic use or export won't move Siberian refineries up to the nation's border, but it could lower the cost of exporting. United Financial Group brokerage has calculated that a unified tariff system, proposed by Putin during a visit to Siberia earlier this month, could save the oil industry at least $700 million. |
|
Credit Suisse First Boston has been excommunicated from the planned 6 percent flotation of oil giant LUKoil's stock on the international markets - the biggest privatization of the year. |
|
MOSCOW - If a flurry of government talks pan out, Russian residents may finally be able to legally keep bank accounts abroad, and Russian companies may soon get to retain all of their foreign currency earnings. Those proposals on allowing foreign bank accounts and scrapping the obligatory sale by companies of 75 percent of their export proceeds have been on the table at Cabinet discussions for most of the past week, high-ranking government sources said last week. |
|
Russian communications operators are making moves to generate cash by providing international services. Long-distance telephone monopoly Rostelecom is negotiating with inter-continental operators with the hope of providing them with transit services. |
 MOSCOW - Boris Smirnov hasn't made a bottle of vodka with his family's name on it in months. And he's not happy about it. Boris, who has been prevented from producing the family brand since police raided and sealed his production line in November, has launched his own trading house and brand - Boris Smirnov. |
|
What are being billed as the first television channels in Russia to be transmitted digitally have begun their experimental phase in St. Petersburg, Moscow and Novgorod, but it remains unclear whether Russian viewers will ultimately be able to pick up these signals for free. |
|
MOSCOW - After a two year wait, DEG, a private investment arm of the German government, is testing the waters again. "Most disappointing was the way the authorities handled the [1998 financial] crisis," said Stephan Kinnemann, chief executive with Deutsche Investitions und Entwicklungsgesellschaft, or DEG. |
|
AND so another resident of this fine city has followed the road to Moscow. Sergei Kuznetsov, head of Peterstar, the local fiber-optic telephone network operator, has been made acting general director of national telecoms company Rostelecom, pending almost certain shareholder approval marked for March 11. |
 STUTTGART, Germany - DaimlerChrysler AG said on Monday the restructuring of its ailing U.S. Chrysler unit would cost some $3.64 billion but should drive it back to profits in 2002. The world's third biggest automaker by market value after Toyota and Ford said measures to revamp Chrysler should bring cost savings and extra income of $3 billion in 2001, $4. |
|
ANKARA, Turkey - Price hikes hit Turkey on Monday as the nation trudged wearily back to work after learning once more the lesson drummed in by hard experience over the last few decades - do not trust your own currency. |
|
MOSCOW - A St. Petersburg public relations company dropped a bombshell Monday on the Moscow media community by releasing a list of newspapers that took money for running an advertisement of a fictitious electronics store disguised as a news story. Although the practice of zakazukha is well known among Russian journalists and advertising agencies, the company called Promaco PR/CMA broke ground by giving out for the first time the sums, invoice numbers and photo-copied clips from newspapers that swallowed its bait. |
|
The implementation of an electronic transfer system for paying import and export duties is providing BaltUneximbank with an opportunity to regain some lost cash flow, but this time it appears the St. |
|
|
|
|
OF all the strange sects in Russia today, the Church of Nav - also known as the Society of Nav, or as the Sacred Church of the White Race - is perhaps the strangest. Its founder, Ilya Lazarenko, began his political career in 1990, when at the age of just 16 he joined one of the many splinter groups of Pamyat, the Russian Gathering Pamyat of taxi-driver Igor Shcheglov. |
|
ROBERT Hanssen, the FBI agent accused of spying for the Russians, was an ordinary man gone bad - everybody says so. A Washington Post headline read, "Neighbors Saw Typical Dad. |
|
AMONG the all bad news pouring out of Russia - from heightened military rhetoric and the adoption of the Soviet-style state program for patriotic education to the appointment of notorious former Primorye Governor Yevgeny Nazdratenko as Russia's new chief fisherman (the market price of the position - Head of the State Fisheries Committee - is estimated from $1 million to as much as $10 million) and the anticipated major reshuffling of the federal government - there is little in the way of good news. |
|
NATO Secretary General George Robertson came to Moscow last week to mend fences with Russia and open a new information center. The first NATO office here was closed down after relations were broken off during the 1999 NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. |
|
THERE has been a spate of articles in the Western press in recent weeks concerning the alleged deployment of tactical nuclear weapons by Russia in the Kaliningrad enclave. These reports, which are primarily based on articles by Bill Gertz that appeared in The Washington Times in January and February, have been categorically denied by President Vladimir Putin, Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev and Kaliningrad Gov. |
|
|
|
 For those seeking a happy medium between grim Soviet-style shops and overpriced Western-style supermarkets, there's one alternative that is always guaranteed to deliver the goods. The markets around the city are one constant that can be said to have survived the years, and if you examine documents and photographs from the era, you will find that the Kuznechny Rynok has undergone few major changes since Dostoevsky's time. |
|
Borneo Violence PALANGKARAYA, Indonesia (Reuters) - Indonesia said Monday it would send extra troops into Borneo where it fears the spread of ethnic violence, which has already killed up to 400 people. |
|
DRESDEN, Germany - The East German secret police had a favor to ask of their KGB comrades - could the Soviet Union recruit a man who lived next to a German Communist party guest house in Dresden and ask him to spy on visitors there? "Comrade V. |
|
The first public schools in St. Petersburg were formed by order of Catherine the Great 220 years ago on Feb. 27. The imperial command ordered the formation of six schools in the city, the original keystone to Russia's education system. |
|
St. Petersburg has a selection of cinemas to choose from, ranging from the prehistoric to the super-modern and the super-pricy. There is a large disparity between prices within the cinemas themselves, usually depending on how recent the film is. The newest films, both Russian and foreign, tend to play first at the Avrora, where many of them are premiered. |
|
Monday's ruble/dollar rates in St. Petersburg: Address Buy Sell Alfa Bank 6 Kanal Griboyedova 28.10 28.90 Baltiisky Bank 34 Sadovaya Ulitsa 28. |
 Local authorities frequently cite negative coverage of their city as one of the major reasons behind the fact that St. Petersburg gets less than half as many tourists each year as Prague, or even Warsaw. In an attempt to redress this, a Russian-French humanitarian association has launched a literary competition aiming to draw attention to and encourage fair reporting on events in St. |
|
Forty years of working as an architect have inevitably given me much to say on the subject of architecture. My ideas can perhaps best be illustrated by one particularly enjoyable project. |
|
Bowling has become increasingly popular in St. Petersburg and a number of clubs have opened up, with one of the more interesting gimmicks being disco or "cosmic" bowling: bowling in near-complete darkness with neon balls that glow under black lights as they spin down the lane. |
|
GALLE, Sri Lanka - Sri Lanka's Muttiah Muralitharan and Sanath Jayasuriya sent England spinning to a crushing defeat on the final afternoon of the first test on Monday as the match ended in umpiring controversy. |
 CARDIFF - Liverpool won England's first ever cup final penalty shootout to lift the League Cup for a record sixth time on Sunday, after a pulsating match at the Millennium Stadium against first division Birmingham City ended 1-1 after extra time. Liverpool goalkeeper Sander Westerveld saved penalties from Martin Grainger and, decisively, Andrew Johnson to give Liverpool a 5-4 win in the shootout. |
|
Earnhardt Jr. Crashes ROCKINGHAM, North Carolina (Reuters) - In a haunting reminder of his father's death a week ago, NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. |
|
LONDON - Dwight Yorke scored a 20-minute hat-trick as United crushed its nearest rivals Arsenal to move 16 points clear. Yorke's third treble in the first 20 minutes, plus goals from Roy Keane and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, earned the side a 5-1 halftime lead and substitute Teddy Sheringham completed the rout in the 90th minute. Thierry Henry had earlier cancelled out Yorke's third minute opener, but Arsenal defended poorly to all but hand the title to United for the third consecutive season. On Saturday, Bradford looked way off the premier league pace again with another poor display while West Ham's young midfield again looked full of ideas. Frank Lampard, after a neat backheel by fellow England squad member Joe Cole, gave West Ham a deserved lead in the 18th minute. |
|
 SYDNEY - Sir Donald Bradman, the greatest batsman in test cricket history and Australia's most revered sporting figure, has died in Adelaide. He was 92. |
Temp: 0°C overcast 
Issues Archive