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MOSCOW - Russia has announced steps to gird itself against the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease spreading through Europe, as some agriculture experts said the country is better prepared to deal with the disease than its Western neighbors. Moscow banned meat imports from eight regions of northwestern France on Wednesday, Interfax reported. |
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MOSCOW - The editor of the Russian version of Playboy magazine, Maxim Maslakov, was shot and wounded Wednesday night by an unknown attacker in the parking lot in front of the magazine's offices in northern Moscow. |
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Former Russian prime minister and Duma deputy, Viktor Chernomyrdin flew to Murmansk Thursday from where he will take part in the first leg of an international round-the-world snowmobile trip that will cover the Great Northern Route expedition, Strana. |
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The night of Feb. 1 began as any other working night for Gennady and Izotas Shidaskas, who earned their money boosting non-ferrous metals that they later resold. |
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Six staff members of St. Petersburg's Young Children's Orphanage No. 10 have quit, and 12 more have tendered their resignations, over a city Health Committee decision to send the facility up to 20 HIV-positive children. The children - aged 1 month to 1 year - were all abandoned at various hospitals throughout the city, mostly by drug-addicted parents, health officials said. |
All photos from issue.
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 RIYADH - A Russian airliner carrying 174 people was hijacked by men claiming to be Chechens after takeoff from Istanbul on Thursday and forced to fly to Saudi Arabia's holy city of Medina. A Saudi official said the hijackers had released women and children and he was confident the drama would end soon. |
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MOSCOW - A Communist no-confidence vote in Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov's government failed by a wide margin in the State Duma on Wednesday. Kasyanov, in office since last May, did not turn up at the session, where many deputies refused to back the Communist motion but still criticized his government. |
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MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin will have the opportunity at an informal European Union-Russia summit next week in Stockholm to resolve a deadlock in plans to raise the Kursk submarine, said the head of the international Kursk Foundation on Wednesday. The fundraising group - comprising the EU countries, Norway, Japan, Canada and the United States - has agreed to pay half of the estimated $70 million salvage but only if Russia agrees to a cleanup of radioactive sites on land and sea around Arkhangelsk and Murmansk. The Russian government has said nothing publicly about the foundation's demand. A statement from Putin expressing support for linking the project of raising the Kursk to the cleanup could break the deadlock, the foundation's Rio Praaning said by telephone from Brussels. |
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 MOSCOW - A Russian official said Thursday that Iran will sign up for a second Russian-built nuclear reactor once the delayed first one, which has already sparked U. |
 MOSCOW - More than two years after it was opened, the Aeroflot fraud case will be sent to court in May, but Boris Berezovsky is not among the four people charged with defrauding the airline of hundreds of millions of dollars, an official at the Prosecutor General's Office said Wednesday by telephone. Berezovsky has been spared, at least temporarily, even though Deputy Prosecutor General Vladimir Kolmogorov issued an official statement in November saying his office planned to bring charges against him. |
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 Two teams of students from St. Petersburg won first and third prize at the Association for Computing Machinery's International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals in Vancouver, Canada, on Saturday. |
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MOSCOW - Gazprom-Media chief Alfred Kokh apparently has not had an easy time of it in the United States, where he has been meeting with various high-ranking officials. Kokh went to Washington last week to convince the Americans that he is not acting on behalf of the Kremlin to suppress media freedom in Russia but is motivated purely by business interests in his dispute with Vladimir Gusinsky's Media-MOST holding, which owes the state-controlled gas giant millions of dollars. |
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NEW YORK - A former Kremlin aide being held in the United States on Swiss money laundering charges has been moved back to jail from a hospital where he was treated for chest pains, his attorney said on Wednesday. |
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Canada Crackdown OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada's Foreign Ministry said Wednesday it had badly mishandled the case of drunk Russian diplomat Andrei Knyazev, whose car struck and killed an Ottawa woman, and vowed to crack down on drunk driving by foreign envoys. |
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MOSCOW - Hundreds of environmental organizations have sent a letter to President Vladimir Putin urging him to veto a bill that allows the import of spent nuclear fuel into the country if it is passed by lawmakers. |
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KIEV, Ukraine - Protesters deposited a glassful of blood outside Ukraine's Interior Ministry on Wednesday, accusing President Leonid Kuchma of having blood on his hands following the murder of reporter Georgy Gongadze. A dozen of the demonstrators helped fill the glass with their own blood, which the leader of the protest then placed outside the ministry's main entrance. |
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MOSCOW - Nuclear Power Minister Yevgeny Adamov said a floating nuclear power plant will be built in the northwestern town of Severodvinsk - a move that was immediately branded by environmentalists Wednesday as a breach of federal laws and a danger for locals. |
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WASHINGTON - The United States wants friendship with Russia, but in disputes such as Russian arms sales to Iran it should take much the same "realistic approach" it did with the Soviet Union, Secretary of State Colin Powell told Congress on Wednesday. "We don't wish an enemy. We want a friend. |
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London-based United Distillers & Vintners (UDV) on Tuesday signed a 5-year deal with LIVIZ distillery to extend the production agreement with the St. Petersburg firm for Smirnoff brand vodka. The deal carries on an arrangement by which LIVIZ had been licensed by UDV to produce Smirnoff vodka to be sold in Russia since 1997. UDV has been selling the Smirnoff brand in Russia for 10 years. The Smirnoff brand was founded in Russia by Pyotr Smirnov during the second half of the 19th century, and became Tsarist Russia's largest vodka producer. But the company was nationalized in 1917 by the new Soviet government. Vledimir Smirnov, one of Pyotr's three sons, emigrated from the Soviet Union and set up production of the brand in Poland in the early 20s. |
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 MOSCOW - Russia will not need cash from the International Monetary Fund in 2001, but still hopes that creditors will ease Moscow's debt burden in peak repayment years, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Wednesday. |
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MOSCOW - Tycoon Oleg Deripaska, who controls the world's second-largest aluminum producer, now wants to control the company that powers a large chunk of that production. And unless the federal government does something in the next 45 days to convince the governor of Irkutsk to cooperate, that company - Irkutskenergo - may end up in the hands of a consortium led by Russian Aluminum, the core unit of which, Siberian Aluminum, is in the hands of Deripaska. |
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MOSCOW - In a show of solidarity, the nation's biggest oil companies teamed up Tuesday to blast the recent auction of the northern Gamburtsev Val oil fields to Severnaya Neft as a rigged sale. |
 St. Petersburg's Ring Road project took another tentative step in its stop-and-go history this month when the Federal Roads Service announced a tender to choose a firm to build the eastern portion of the planned highway around the city. The "Eastern Semicircle," a 70-kilometer stretch of road linking the Vyborg highway with the E95 route to Moscow, is just one part of an ambitious plan to build a highway system that will divert traffic away from the city center, but the project has been beset by administrative and funding difficulties. |
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MOSCOW - Audit Chamber officials told the State Duma on Tuesday that the Railways Ministry is breaking the law and sabotaging its work by refusing to hand over documents. |
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The Leningrad Oblast government held an Internet conference on investment Wednesday evening, giving users worldwide the opportunity to direct questions to a panel of oblast representatives and local businessmen. The panel included deputy governor Grigory Dvas and Chairperson of the Committee for External Economic Relations Sergei Naryshin, both from the oblast, James T. |
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Readers write in on Russia's attitude to Turkey, levels of radiation in a Siberian river, and why liberals got it wrong over the banking system. Older Stereotypes Dear Editor, Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, several prominent Western political theorists (including Brzezinski, Huntington, and Szporluk) have "offered" Russia to follow the example of republican Turkey by constituting a nation-state and renouncing all ambitions on formal imperial territories. |
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It's a case that stinks to high heaven, an abuse of presidential privilege that brings shame on the most exalted office in the land. Just think of it: presidential pardons for terrorists, for drug dealers, for rich party donors with business ties to deadly foes of the United States, pardons involving backdoor dealing by presidential family members, pardons aimed at covering up investigations of the president himself. |
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WHILE less than half the Legislative Assembly turned up this Wednesday, the week's session did provide a chance for the political naturalist to examine further the eccentric voting habits of the deputies. The common or garden lawmaker is equipped with a voting key, looking a little like a bottle opener, which is then affixed to a voting machine, thus activating it and allowing the lawmaker to vote for something, against it, or abstain entirely. |
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AMERICAN economic and security interests in the former Soviet Union are fundamentally linked. An economically stable Russia, integrated into the Western economy, would be far less likely to want to damage Western interests or dominate its neighbors, like Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova. |
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IRAN'S relations with Russia have been improving since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and they bode to become even warmer. This week Iranian President Mohammad Khatami is in Russia, finding common ground with President Vladimir V. Putin in opposing growing U. |
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THE Unity faction announced Tuesday that it would not support a vote of no confidence in Prime Minister Mikhail Kasya nov's government. All last week, this vote, and Unity's wavering stand on it, was Russia's lead news item. |
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DALIAN, China - One evening in this formerly Russian port once known as Port Arthur, I wanted to find a street lined with popular restaurants. I had dismissed my translator, and experience suggested that waving maps in the faces of cab drivers would only baffle them. I recalled that there was a Kentucky Fried Chicken on the street. |
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 March 13 marked the close of eight long days of inspiration - and more than a bit of perspiration - as instructors and students of St. Petersburg's Second International Jazz Dance and Music Festival went all out at the final collaborative gala concert, held Tuesday night at the Theater of Musical Comedy. Jazz artists from all over the world - professionals and amateurs, masters and young students - gathered from March 5-13 for eight days of collaboration, education and performance as part of the festival, which was jointly organized by Kannon Dance School, S'Tantsia Theater, the Fine Arts Institute and the JFC Jazz Club. |
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 Western scholars have long had an inkling that there must be a musicological gold mine hidden in the chaotic archives of the St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Opera. |
 For Meredith Monk, an award-winning U.S. composer, singer, film maker, choreographer and director, the one-off performance in St. Petersburg which she is giving this Saturday is not just another concert, she explained to The St. Petersburg Times by telephone from New York on Wednesday. |
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Gidon Kremer is without doubt one of the cultural heroes of our time. His persistent inclination towards the broadening of academic music genres has finally gained him the glory of a trailblazer. |
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Faculty will be a hot site this weekend with the hip-hop/alternative rock Kirpichi and the "extreme disco" girl group Pep-See. Kirpichi made it big last year with "Kapitalizm OO," one of the year's best Russian albums, despite the sad loss of their drummer, who died in February 2000. |
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Much of the time I spent at Demidov has stayed in the memory only as a blur of whirling skirts, strumming guitars, the clacking and snapping of fingers and the occasional whoop, thanks to the wild gypsy trio with which my dining companion and I became firm friends by the end of the evening. |
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Poaching and pollution are threatening to wipe out Russia's sturgeon - and the luxurious caviar they produce, officials say, admitting that they're failing in a decade-long struggle to save the lucrative fishery. Poorly paid police overlook poachers in exchange for bribes, as the government scrapes for funds to fight the lucrative illegal caviar business. |
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I like Turkish people. This should not, in itself, be such an unusual revelation, but I grew up in a Greek-American community in Virginia where people still refer to Constantinople, not Istanbul. |
 To celebrate its 225th birthday this month, the Bolshoi Theater has brought to the Central Manezh a truly spectacular display of treasures from its archives and workshops. Entitled "Artists of the Bolshoi Theater," the exhibit, which opened Sunday and runs until March 31, puts on view some 1,500 items - paintings and drawings of decor and costumes (see cover: Enar Stenberg's costume sketches for a 1963 production of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's "Spanish Capriccio"), photographs, miniature scale models of stage sets, costumes, props and the enormous backdrops from a dozen Bolshoi productions, both past and present. |
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Byelorussia, winter 1942. Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin), a former partisan and an officer named Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) forage for provisions to feed their unit. |
 In the 2 1/2 years since its debut, MTV Russia has changed the face of Russian music drastically. In the thoroughly corrupt sector of music business, where $40 could put any video on air, the free-to-air, advertiser-supported customized service set a new standard by banning bribes and paid screenings, and made a major breakthrough in forcing Russian acts and producers to compete with the Western standard of quality. |
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 "The Russian music business is dead," was a common phrase in the trade after a financial crisis hit Russia in August 1998, burying many companies and projects. |
 "The Family Man" is an ambitious, carefully crafted Christmas movie that tries to be "It's a Wonderful Life" for the new millennium but lacks the honesty to pull it off. Not even a sincere and heroic effort by Nicolas Cage can redeem the film's essential phoniness. Still, Cage's charisma and a lot of shameless heart-tugging will surely prove a potent lure with many moviegoers. Cage's Jack Campbell, the hard-driving president of a major Wall Street corporation, is on the brink of closing a $130 billion merger deal. |
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 Tamara Gverdtsiteli, a tiny woman with a voice of amazing timbre and range, has graced the stages of prestigious concert halls all over the world, from Moscow's Rossiya to New York's Carnegie Hall. |
 The Coen brothers did not make their reputation by taking things too seriously, and in that sense "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" is of a piece with what's come before. An eccentric, picaresque Southern period comedy, "Bonnie & Clyde" as told by Monty Python, "O Brother" is rife with the kinds of genial madness only writer-director Joel and writer-producer Ethan can come up with. |
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The heavily-wigged intrigue surrounding the death of Peter the Great is the subject of actress-director Svetlana Druzhinina's film, "The Emperor's Last Will and Testament," the first part of a series of Druzhina films entitled "The Secrets of Palace Coups. |
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"Russia is a land of female Homers," Lyudmila Petrushevskaya told her English translator Sally Laird in 1993, a year after her most important work of fiction was published in Moscow. "I'm just a listener among them. But I dare to hope that The Time: Night is a kind of encyclopedia of their lives. |
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Empire, on the cover of Dominic Lieven's new book, is a mammoth octopus, sleepily slipping its tentacles around the countries of Europe. Like "apartheid" or "nationalism," the word symbolizes, near-universally, one of those great misguided human enterprises that casts our ancestors in the roles of criminals. |
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The International Theater Festival of solo performances, "Monocle," recently took place in St. Petersburg for the third time. Held in the Baltiisky Dom Theater on March 1-8, it included the best of European productions, with participants from Italy, Croatia, Lithuania and Finland. Russia was represented mostly by St. |
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 CALCUTTA - India pulled off one of the greatest comebacks in test-match history to end Australia's world-record streak of 16 successive victories by winning the second test by 171 runs on Thursday. It was only the third time that a side following on in a test has won the game. |
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Barkley Coming Back? ATLANTA (AP) - Charles Barkley says he is considering making a comeback next season, perhaps with the Washington Wizards. "I am still thinking about it," Barkley said during halftime of TNT's telecast of the Minnesota-San Antonio game. |
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LONDON - Three English teams qualified for the quarterfinals of the Champions League for the first time on Wednesday when Arsenal joined Manchester United and Leeds United in the last eight. Despite losing 1-0 at Bayern Munich in its final second-phase match, Arsenal narrowly edged Olympique Lyon out of the competition. |
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West Bank Grenade JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Six Pa les tinian children suffered burns on Thursday when Israeli soldiers threw a stun grenade into a West Bank schoolyard during new violence after an Israeli pledge to ease its blockade on Palestinians. |
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LONDON - World governments scrambled to build defenses on Thursday against foot-and-mouth disease that has now spread to livestock in parts of the Middle East and threatens to cripple Europe's meat industry. Britain, where the three-week-old outbreak is now an epidemic, announced a wider slaughter program, while Gulf Arab states erected barriers to halt the spread of the highly infectious disease that officials said was imported. |
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