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 MOSCOW - The pro-Kremlin Unity party and Fatherland-All Russia movement, or OVR, announced Thursday they will merge into what would become a new parliamentary powerhouse and the largest faction in the State Duma. The merger would give the as-yet unnamed party 131 votes in the 450-seat Duma, topping the 129 votes controlled by the 85-member Communist Party and their close allies, the Agrarians. |
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At a glance, this week's acquisition of the small Darial TV channel by Sweden's Modern Times Group looks like no big deal: MTG paid up to $10 million for a 75 percent stake in a channel whose only assets are licenses to broadcast in 25 cities. |
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Art experts at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg are ruing the day they hung three paintings by Russian avant-garde painter El Lisitsky, two of which many expert claim are fakes. The paintings were part of an exhibit entitled "The Malevich Circle" that ran in February and March at the museum. |
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MOSCOW - NTV television announced Tuesday that its parent company Media-MOST has filed two lawsuits over Gazprom's takeover of the channel. The suits, filed last Friday, ask the court to declare illegal a controversial shareholders meeting last week that picked a new board and to annul the board's decision to appoint new management to the channel, said NTV spokeswoman Tatyana Blinova. |
All photos from issue.
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Nuclear Vote Delayed MOSCOW (SPT) - Lawmakers on Tuesday delayed for a week a second hearing on a package of controversial bills to import spent nuclear fuel for reprocessing and storage. State Duma deputies, who were supposed to vote on the legislation Thursday, said they wanted to review the bills until Tuesday. The bills were passed during their first reading in December. A public uproar about the plan to bring 20,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel into Russia led the lawmakers to ask for more time to study the bills. They put off a second hearing scheduled for March until this month. Deputies said Tuesday that they wanted to sort out confusion over the feasibility of the project. |
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 MOSCOW - Russia marked the 40th anniversary of the first manned space flight on Thursday with wreath-layings and protests of the nation's diminishing resources for space exploration. |
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ROSTOV-ON-DON, Southern Russia - The first witness, Vissa Kungayev, took the stand Thursday at the trial of Colonel Yury Budanov and testified that the Russian commander raped his 18-year-old daughter Elza before killing her. Budanov is being tried for abducting and murdering Elza in March last year. |
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MOSCOW - Grozny Mayor Bislan Gan tamirov backtracked Wednesday on remarks he made a day earlier about a mass grave found by his staff on the grounds of a police station in the Che chen capital. |
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TEHRAN, Iran - Iran's supreme leader called for more cooperation between Iran, India, Russia and China on Thursday during a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the official IRNA news agency said. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said "colonialist countries" were opposed to such cooperation, making it imperative for Eastern countries to strengthen their ties. |
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He may run the country from the Kremlin - but there's something about St. Petersburg that keeps President Vla di mir Pu tin coming back to this, his home town. |
 MOSCOW - Russia's government is pleased that a Swiss court has granted bail to Russian ex-presidential aide Pavel Borodin, indicted on money-laundering charges, a Russian government official was quoted as saying on Thursday. "We take the position that a Russian citizen whose guilt has not been proven should not be sitting in prison," Interfax quoted Alexei Volin, a key aide to Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, as saying. |
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MOSCOW - Russian and U.S. participants in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis relived the nuclear brink drama at a screening of the U.S. film "Thirteen Days," and joined in urging their countries' leaders to cut post-Cold War arsenals. |
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Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said this week that Germany, Russia's biggest foreign creditor, would help Russia restructure its huge foreign debt if it faced a repayment crunch in the next few years. Schroder and Putin ended a two-day summit Tuesday in St. |
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MOSCOW - Here's the paradox: The more the economy grows, the more energy is consumed and the more strain is put on the fragile and dilapidated national infrastructure. |
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MOSCOW - Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov has signed off on a list of state companies the Cabinet wants privatized in the first half of this year, the Property Ministry said on Monday. Among the chosen are four oil and gas enterprises, including Orenburggeologiya, Nizhnevartovsk nef te gaz and Slavneft-Megionneftegazgeologiya, of which the state hopes to sell, respectively, 15. |
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MOSCOW - The World Customs Organization said Wednesday that it would help Russia clear a major hurdle blocking its accession into the WTO by giving it a hand overhauling its notarious customs regime. |
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Central Bank head Viktor Gera shchen ko said Wednesday he opposed hasty steps to liberalize the foreign exchange market and favored keeping obligatory sales of hard currency. President Vladimir Putin said in his state-of-the-nation address last week that Russia should review foreign currency controls to bring them closer to world standards. |
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NEW YORK - Yahoo, the big but beleaguered Internet service, reported its first quarterly loss in nearly two years yesterday and said it would lay off 12 percent of its work force of 3,510. |
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ANKARA, Turkey - On Saturday Turkey will outline a financial plan it hopes will attract the foreign aid it needs to recover from a devastating crisis, Economics Minister Kemal Dervis said on Thursday. Dervis, a former World Bank official drafted in to pull Turkey's economy out of a nose dive, had previously said the long-awaited program was likely to be announced on Friday. |
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Oil Demand Weaker LONDON (Reuters) - The prospects for growth in the demand for world oil appear to be getting weaker again because of the impact of the economic slowdown in the United States on emerging nations, the International Energy Agency announced on Thursday. |
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MOSCOW - The government wants to turn a profit on the State Pension Fund's money by allowing private and state banks to borrow billions of rubles from the fund at a competitive interest rate. A brainchild of the Labor Ministry, the pilot project will start with an initial tranche of 4 billion rubles ($145 million) that will have a six-month repayment date. |
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FINALLY breaking his puzzling silence regarding the NTV controversy, President Vladimir Putin said Monday that the ultimate resolution to the crisis must come from the courts. Now NTV seems willing to play by these rules, announcing two new lawsuits on Tuesday challenging the April 3 shareholders meeting and its decision to appoint new management at the station. |
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WHAT'S going on with St. Petersburg's unofficial titles? For years and years, this city has been known as the Northern Capital of Russia. But St. Petersburg has had several other names as well, particularly in the post-Soviet era. |
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VLADIVOSTOK, Far East - Early last week, The Japan Times ran a photo on its Web site of a flowering cherry tree on the grounds of the imperial palace in Tokyo. A caption noted that the blossom season so beloved by the Japanese was ending. As I watch Vladivostok's spring creep in - the forests of twiggy poplars that won't bud until May, the sea ice that only a week ago began breaking up into flotillas that melt in ice-creamy smears on the bay - I recall a warning that a fellow Pacific Northwesterner offered me in 1997 during my first January in this harsher climate: In Vladivostok you get a Russian winter, which is then followed by a Seattle winter. |
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THE Russian government's assault against NTV represents the greatest threat to Russian democracy since the coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev. Just like the coup plotters in August 1991, President Vladimir Putin - through his proxy, state-run Gazprom - has used extraordinary means to seize control of the last important bastion of the independent national media. |
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IN terms of natural resources, Russia is the wealthiest country in the world. It has always been clear that if ever Russia were able to develop and exploit its oil, gas and precious metals in a sensible fashion it could become an economic superpower of virtually unlimited potential. |
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Dear Editor, I found the interview with Sebastian FitzLyon in the April 10 issue rather interesting, though a bit puzzling. The segmentation of present-day Russian business seems to be taken from real life. |
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 "As the worst of all we perform the first. Because all the rest are cool bands, while we are crap," said Sergei Shnurov, distinctly pronouncing his trademark four-letter words, before his band Leningrad threw itself into its loud and hilarious routine, opening the fifth Fuzz Awards ceremony and concert last Saturday. |
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Mikhail "Mike" Naumenko, one of the leading forces in the 1980s' Russian rock breakthrough, will be remembered with a concert at the Lensoviet Palace of Culture next week - on the day the late rock musician and songwriter would have turned 46. |
 Vladimir Volkov - widely considered one of the leading double-bass players in Russia - is one of the driving forces behind St. Petersburg's "new music" scene. Volkov is also one of the country's busiest musicians, torn between a variety of diverse projects and outfits, some international and some domestic, which involve a great deal of traveling. |
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For a real family restaurant experience, there can be few places more suitable than the "Plakuchaya Iva," or Weeping Willow, situated across the road from the Vitebsk Station on Zagorodny Prospect. |
 If nothing else, the seventh annual awards ceremony of the Golden Mask theater festival in Moscow cleared up a few questions about outspoken lawmaker Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Prior to helping announce the winners in the musical and operetta category, Zhirinovsky performed in a villain's cape and mask, singing: "Yes, I am a jester. |
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BAY OF PIGS, Cuba - The battle is long over, and now the only "invaders" at Cuba's Bay of Pigs are tourists lolling in the sun, or the millions of crabs crawling daily in and out of the sea during spring mating season. Forty years after President Fidel Castro's troops crushed a U. |
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GUAM - The freed crew of a U.S. spy plane headed for home Thursday and Easter reunions with their families, after a flight to freedom that defused a Sino-American standoff over their detention in China. |
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TV Millionaire NEW YORK (AP) - A Michigan engineer won $2.18 million on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" Tuesday, which ABC claims is the biggest quiz show prize in network television history. Kevin Olmstead of Ann Arbor, Mi chi gan, won the jackpot for correctly identifying Igor Sikorsky as inventor of the first mass-produced helicopter. |
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BERLIN - Stefanie Graf is tired of being called "Steffi." The German tennis great, who won 22 grand slam singles titles and spent a record 378 weeks ranked No. |
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DETROIT - The Detroit Red Wings kept their perfect 2001 home record intact, winning their 12th straight first-round Western Conference playoff game with a 5-3 victory over the Los Angeles Kings on Wednesday. By contrast, the Kings have not been in the postseason since 1993. The Red Wings were without their captain and center Steve Yzerman for the final 40 minutes because of a leg injury, but still equaled Edmonton's record when they swept four straight opening series from 1983-86, when they were best-of-five. |
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