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 Has the death knell sounded for a major emblem of all that is ragged and seedy about St. Petersburg - the kiosks on Sennaya Ploshchad? On Friday, Governor Vladimir Yakovlev announced plans to complete the long-standing project to renovate the square by the end of this summer, and that the 140 kiosks in the area, for long a source of cheap goods with questionable sell-by dates, would have to go for good. |
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 Renowned local political activist and author Viktor Krivulin - who could boast both a tutelage under poet Anna Akhmatova and friendship with the late Nobel laureate and exiled Joseph Brodsky - died Saturday of lung cancer. |
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MOSCOW - The Foreign Ministry said on Monday that it was asking three Bulgarian diplomats to leave the country, two days after Bulgarian authorities took a similar measure. A statement from the Foreign Ministry said that the three diplomats had been "engaged in activities incompatible with their diplomatic status" - which is a standard diplomatic phrase for spying. |
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MOSCOW - The embattled Nuclear Power Ministry, already under investigation for alleged illegal sales of nuclear equipment abroad, came under fresh attack Thursday when environmentalists accused it of cheating taxpayers of billions of dollars. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW - Boris Berezovsky has increased his stake in second-tier television channel TV6 to 75 percent, a TV6 board member said. Badri Patarkatsishvili, who is widely regarded as Berezovsky's right-hand man, made the announcement at a recent board meeting at which he also called for a new board to be confirmed at a shareholders meeting March 29. |
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MOSCOW - Only a few days ago he was an unknown chemist and budding composer from St. Petersburg, and now Igor Sazeyev is a millionaire and old hand at giving media interviews. |
 MOSCOW - While Russia will mark the 10th-year anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union later this year, New Russians could well break out the champagne a little earlier. Their favorite car, the Mercedes 600, turns 10 this month. The number 600 actually indicates only engine capacity, but it is nevertheless the number which is closely associated with Russia's drive toward capitalism. The Mercedes 600 - or more precisely, the S-class model with a W140 body - has become a fixed attribute of Russia's first decade without Communist rule. |
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 MOSCOW - Hundreds of wellwishers buried on Monday the stewardess who was killed in the hijacking of a Russian plane as officials queried whether she may have died from a Saudi rescuer's bullet rather than a hijacker's knife. |
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MOSCOW - Overcome with emotion, passengers who survived a 22-hour ordeal aboard a hijacked Russian jetliner returned home from Saudi Arabia to Moscow and Istanbul over the weekend. Saudi commandos burst through the doors and windows of the Tu-154 on Friday as it sat on the runway in Medina, freeing more than 100 passengers in a dramatic assault that left three people dead: one of the Chechen hijackers, a Russian flight attendant and a Turkish passenger. |
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Chernomyrdin Crash MOSCOW (AP) - Former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin was slightly injured after losing control of his snowmobile during an Arctic expedition. |
 Russia's submariners gathered on Monday to mark two important jubilees, one of them established, and the other a little more recent. Uniformed cadets, teachers and graduates of the St. Petersburg Naval Engineering Institute crowded into the institute's main hall to hear speeches by navy officers and submarine veterans on the past, present and future of the fleet. |
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MOSCOW - A Russian court handed down life sentences on Monday to two men accused of bombing an apartment block in 1999 in the first of a series of attacks that brought on war in rebel Chechnya. |
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 MELBOURNE/LONDON - Australia's largest resources group, BHP Ltd., announced a $28 billion merger with London-listed Billiton Plc on Monday to create the world's second biggest minerals and metals giant. The move comes as BHP chief executive Paul Anderson looks to make BHP big enough to grab international investors' attention and Billiton looks to prevent a takeover by its old South African rival Anglo American. |
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VIENNA - OPEC on Saturday approved new production restraints to defend oil prices against a world economic slowdown. Oil ministers ratified an agreement reducing output by one million barrels a day, four percent, to 24. |
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TOKYO - The Bank of Japan (BOJ) stepped into uncharted territory on Monday, unveiling a radically new monetary policy to try to end two years of falling prices and support the rapidly weakening economy. The BOJ said its Policy Board, which met against a background of intense political pressure for drastic action, would scrap its traditional interest target and aim instead to increase the volume of commercial bank reserves parked at the central bank. |
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American economic weakness appears to be spreading to many of the world's other major economies, making it increasingly unlikely that they - and the United States - can dodge substantial slowdown or recession. |
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The exponential growth of e-commerce has left many companies wondering whether maintaining a Web site on a server can lead to a taxable presence in the country in which the server is located. For quite some time the situation has been governed on a country-by-country basis, with no consensus regarding how to tax profits generated though e-commerce and many countries, Russia included, failing to address the issue in their domestic legislation. |
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Lucent Lands Deal MURRAY HILL, New Jersey (AP) - Lucent Technologies, the huge telecommunications equipment manufacturer, announced Monday that it has received a $5 billion contract to supply the mobile-phone operator Verizon Wireless. |
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A number of oil majors, including LUKoil, have filed suit over last week's anouncement that Severnaya Neft had won an auction for the rights to develop Gamburtsev Val oil fields in the Nenets autonomous district. A few experts gve their opinions on the ultimate outcome of the struggle over the fields. |
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Tatneft To Drill in Iraq MOSCOW (SPT) - Tatneft confirmed Friday that it had received permission from the United Nations to drill for oil in Iraq. Tatneft, Russia's No. |
 MACAE, Brazil - The world's largest offshore oil rig resumed sinking as rough seas impeded efforts to salvage it four days after blasts ripped through the structure, killing 10, the Brazilian owners said on Monday. After stabilizing the 40-story platform for a day and raising hopes it could be saved, the rig sank another 40 centimeters Sunday and keeled over even further, Brazil's state oil giant Petrobras said. |
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NEW YORK - More than 400 Russian market buffs gathered at the Plaza Hotel late last week during one of the worst weeks in Wall Street's history, and many seemed happy to take a day off from watching trading screens light up in red to attend a conference on Russia's investment prospects. |
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MOSCOW - In the first legal decision against the much criticized loans-for-shares program of the mid-'90s, a local court ruled Thursday in favor of a minority shareholder challenging Russia's largest shipping company and the Finance and Property ministries. The Basmanny municipal court in Moscow ruled illegal the 1995 credit agreement between Novorossiisk Shipping Co., known as Novoship, and the Finance and Property ministries. At the time of the company's privatization, 26 percent of voting shares, or a 20 percent stake, were handed over to Novoship in exchange for a loan to the government of $22.65 million, with guarantees provided by the now-defunct Tokobank. |
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 MOSCOW - Nearly everyone agrees that Russia desperately needs a corporate governance code, but the government, lawmakers, business leaders and investors remain divided on exactly how it should be implemented. |
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CHINYA-VORYK, Northwest Russia - Siberian-Urals Aluminum Co. is taking extreme steps to link its mines and smelters by laying a railway in the freezing north, an area known better for gulag prison camps and thick taiga forest. Siberian-Urals Aluminum, or SUAL, the nation's No. |
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MOSCOW - Gazprom, which already supplies Europe with a quarter of its natural gas, is prepared to offer them something else: an extensive, state-of-the-arts telecommunications network. |
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MOSCOW - Russia and the other littoral states should be able to agree on the status of the Caspian Sea before the end of the year, Russian presidential envoy Viktor Kalyuzhny said on Monday. Kalyuzhny, responsible for Caspian energy issues, has just returned from talks with Kazakh Prime Minister Kasymzhomart Tokayev. "We can't drag things out any further because people, states, companies and investors are waiting for decisions," Kaluzhny told Ekho Moskvy radio. The Caspian is landlocked and surrounded by Russia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. Failure to resolve its division has delayed development of its resources. Existing agreements were signed by Iran and the Soviet Union in 1921 and 1940 when they were the only two states vying for Caspian oil and gas. |
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 MOSCOW - Freshly settled into the driver's seat at GAZ, Siberian Aluminum is rolling out a revamp plan for the car maker that will lead to a 10 percent slash in production without denting revenues. |
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MOSCOW - After six months of hesitation, the government is finally moving to protect domestic pipe makers. A government commission chaired by Alexei Kudrin, the finance minister and a deputy prime minister, recommended Friday that Ukrainian exporters be slapped with a 20 percent import tax on pipes not available in Russia and a 40 percent tax on competitive products. |
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LIKE other Irish emigres around the world, I saw this weekend's St Patrick's Day celebrations as an opportunity to reach back into a greener past. With shallow roots in our adopted countries, it is comforting to reaffirm the deeper ones that stretch across seas. |
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AFTER the erratic but generally pro-Western leadership of the Boris Yeltsin era, President Vladimir Putin has brought a more nationalist tone to Russian diplomacy. |
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LAST fall, Moscow scrapped a secret memorandum signed in 1995 by then-Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin and U.S. Vice President Al Gore and announced that it was resuming unrestricted arms sales to Iran. Since then, Washington has been trying to force Moscow to reconsider and not sell modern equipment to a regime that the United States considers to be a "state of concern. |
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DON'T you sometimes just get fed up with politics? Goodness knows, I do. Every once in a while, I shut off my computer and look at my bookshelves, which grow more extensive and heavily laden with each passing year. |
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RUSSIA, it would seem, has dodged a bullet with the resolution of this weekend's hijacking, which, although it left three people dead, could have been far worse. The incident, unfortunately, underscores what a quagmire Chechnya has become for Russia (and, increasingly, for the world) as well as the fact that there is no satisfactory resolution in sight. |
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WHEN it was announced in February that the FSB would be taking charge of the counter-terrorist operation in Chechnya, there was quite a bit of confusion and discussion. |
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Let's talk about commercials ... Oh no, please don't turn the page. I'm not one to sing the old lament of how fed up I am with Tide-washed white blouses, which may not be exactly the height of fashion, or how the Carefree girls constantly ruin my evening tea as I watch "Menty" on Saturdays. This one is a serious talk - if only because I'm old enough to remember how much time it took my mom to boil our bed linen on the kitchen stove, and I'm not even going to mention what life was like before Carefree. Since then, our shopping routines have undoubtedly changed, and rightly so. However, it is not so simple with us shoppers. Have you noticed that one of the teachers who recently marched the country in protest against low salaries now brags about Ariel's washing advantages standing in a bathroom which is twice the size of any of her colleagues' apartments? Isn't it, then, kind of hypocritical for her to say that her paycheck is so small she can seldom afford new clothes to wear? Thanks to Russian advertisers, we have a daily glimpse at an entirely new reality. |
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 Spreading knowledge to the masses was one of the primary goals, and also one of the major achievements, of the Soviet state. Libraries once played an important role in this process, which explains the enormous number of them in Russia's so-called cultural capital. |
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LONDON - It was a good weekend for all but one of the leading sides in Europe's top leagues. Manchester United, Bayern Munich, Lille and PSV Eindhoven all earned victories to stay on course for domestic glory, while AS Roma extended its lead to seven points at the top of Italy's Serie A despite drawing 0-0 at Reggina. |
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PHOENIX - Annika Sorenstam capped her history-making week with a victory Sunday, holding off South Korean Se-Ri Pak in a dramatic head-to-head duel to capture the Standard Register Ping title. |
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Last week's thaw had people out on the streets in huge numbers, perhaps glad that for the first time since December, they could walk down the street without threat of breaking their legs on the ice. However, while the city center no doubt looks cleaner without a layer of brown slush, the palaces surrounding St. |
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What worries do St. Petersburg residents have for their health? Despite the soaring number of HIV cases, Irina Titova found out that the average person on the street is far more concerned about poor air and water quality than the threat of AIDS or the growing tuberculosis problem. |
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March 19 marked the 95th anniversary of the Russian domestic submarine military fleet, which was created in St. Petersburg by order of Nicholas II in 1906. March 20, 321, saw the very first Christian Sunday as instituted by Roman Emperor Constantine the Great. |
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During the last academic year, I dedicated my time to studying for the university entrance exams - yes, I made a bold choice and decided to try for the most prestigious in the city: St. |
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This week, we compare the prices of fast food around town. Prices vary greatly depending on where you go. Despite the hamburger price fluctuations, a more traditional shaverma tends to be sold for an average price of 22 rubs. throughout the city, and Russian hot-dogs (in lavash with a spicy tomato-cream sauce) are a fairly consistent 16 rubs. |
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Farmers Hit Back LONDON (Reuters) - British farmers in areas worst hit by the foot-and-mouth epidemic urged the government Monday to speed up its program of slaughtering and destroying contaminated animals. |
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BRUSSELS - European Union foreign ministers vowed strong political support for Macedonia on Monday as it battles ethnic Albanian guerrillas, but reacted coolly to a suggestion that Western troops should be sent there. Diplomats said the 15 EU foreign ministers had stressed the need for a cease-fire and "in-depth" dialogue between Skopje and ethnic Albanian leaders during talks in Brussels with their Macedonian counterpart, Srgan Kerim. |
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Many veterans of the Russian space program will be sorry to see the 15-year-old Mir space station come crashing down to earth in a fiery ball next week. |
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Monday's ruble/dollar rates in St. Petersburg: Address Buy Sell Alfa Bank 6 Kanal Griboyedova 28.20 28.90 Baltiisky Bank 34 Sadovaya Ul. 28.40 29.14 Bank Sankt Peterburg 108 Ligovsky Prospect 28.30 28.90 Impexbank 58 Nevsky Prospect 28.10 28.90 Inkas Bank 44 Nevsky Prospect 28.10 29. |
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