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 KALININGRAD, Western Russia - Each morning after a storm 28-year-old Yury Zamotkin grabs his diving suit and heads for the Svetlogorsk beach to see if the Baltic Sea has coughed up any amber. Not far off shore and dozens of meters down runs a massive vein of the "northern gold" that has been feeding Zamotkin and his family for years. |
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MOSCOW - Top managers of TNT television found themselves facing charges of tax evasion Monday, two days after taking in defiant journalists from NTV television after Gazprom-appointed management finally took total control. |
 MOSCOW - New Atomic Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev committed Russia on Monday to completing work on Iran's Bushehr nuclear power station, but was non-committal on plans to build a second reactor there. The United States, which opposes the sale of nuclear technology to what it considers a "rogue state," had expressed alarm at suggestions that Mos cow could build more reactors for the Islamic republic. |
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Tuesday's edition of the Segodnya daily newspaper, part of Vladimir Gusinsky's Media-MOST empire, was unexpectedly kept from going to press late Monday evening, the paper's editor Mikhail Berger told Ekho Moskvy radio. |
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Journalists from NTV-St. Petersburg have joined their Moscow colleagues and started broadcasting news programs on another channel, after Gaz prom-appointed managers took over operations at NTV in the capital on Saturday morning. As of Monday, the St. Petersburg team - which is legally a separate entity from national NTV - was broadcasting city news bulletins on Russkoye Video-Channel 11, a branch of the TNT network. |
All photos from issue.
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St. Pete Grenade Blast ST. PETERSBURG (AP) - Six people were wounded in St. Petersburg when a quarrel spiraled out of control and one of the men involved threw three grenades, Itar-Tass reported Sunday. The argument broke out Saturday night at a restaurant, the news agency said, citing local police. |
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MOSCOW - Eduard Limonov, an author and head of the National Bolshevik Party, has been arrested on suspicion of participating in the illegal procurement of weapons, according to media reports. |
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MOSCOW - The planned merger of the pro-Kremlin Unity party and Fatherland-All Russia movement may prove to be a mixed bag for President Vla dimir Putin - if indeed the alliance is ever tied up, lawmakers and analysts said. In announcing the alliance Thursday, Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu, who heads Unity, and Fatherland leader and Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov sounded confident that members of their two parties saw eye to eye about the decision and that the factions would be merged by November. |
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President Vladimir Putin paid a lightning trip to Chechnya over the weekend, flying by helicopter to the site of one of the federal forces' heaviest losses to dramatize the Kremlin's commitment to fighting the rebels to the end. |
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MOSCOW - Pavel Borodin arrived back in Moscow in time for Easter and at the first opportunity he thanked President Vladimir Putin for helping to bring him home. The Russian government posted bail of $3 million Thursday to allow Borodin to leave Switzerland, which has accused the former Kremlin property manager of receiving more than $25 million in kickbacks from Swiss construction companies. |
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The judge in a groundbreaking trial in which a pensioner is suing a local tobacco company for damages has said that the court requires additional medical expertise, postponing the trial indefinitely. |
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The government of the city that holds the 1991 world record for length of tram track is about to start ripping up some of those very lines in the city center and suburbs. The goal is to reduce traffic snarls and improve the physical condition of St. |
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A high-ranking Chechen official in the republic's pro-Moscow administration was killed when an explosion ripped through a television studio where he was filming a broadcast, a Kremlin spokes person said. |
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 MOSCOW - The country's struggling space and aviation industry got a big shot in the arm Friday when Boeing and the Russian Aviation and Space Agency announced ambitious plans to jointly develop satellite launches, space modules and a new airliner. "We have begun our journey together with small steps and achieved some very great things," Boeing chairman and chief executive Philip Condit told reporters. |
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MOSCOW - The government and the State Duma continue to be at odds over who should approve the list of state enterprises to be privatized, First Deputy Property Minister Alexander Braverman said Friday. |
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The Northwest Department of the Antimonopoly Ministry has told Petersburg Telephone Network (PTS) that it can no longer require companies to pay to have newly constructed buildings connected to the city's telephone system themselves. And PTS' response? To stop connecting new buildings altogether. |
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MOSCOW - Russia has agreed to restructure about $4 billion in ex-Soviet trade debt under which it will issue about $2 billion of Eurobonds this year, a government official was quoted as saying. |
 MURMANSK, Far North - For most of the 20th century fishing has been the lifeblood of Murmansk, a port city of about 400,000 situated above the Arctic Circle, and local stores and markets were often full of the sea's bountiful harvest. Today, however, the city is perhaps the only European port where almost no fresh fish is on sale. |
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MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin warned Monday that inflation was threatening to ruin the country's economic growth targets, saying that prices grew almost twice as fast as expected in the first three months of the year. |
 MOSCOW - Aluminum tycoon Oleg Deripaska took another step toward building a holding company that will integrate half of the automobile industry of the former Soviet Union. On Friday, Deripaska signed a cooperation agreement on behalf of Siberian Aluminum with Chelyabinsk Governor Pyotr Sumin, who agreed to hand over the UralAZ carmaker in exchange for Siberian Aluminum's promise to invest 500 million rubles ($14. |
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On Saturday, an extraordinary shareholders meeting chose a new general director and board of directors to run St. Petersburg's Krasny Vyborzhets factory comprised primarily of representatives of Interros and Norilsk Nickel. |
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Yahoo Ditches Porn LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Internet media giant Yahoo Inc. reversed course in the face of a barrage of customer criticism on Friday, pledging to remove all pornography from its shopping and auction channels and reject requests for related advertising. |
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TOKYO - The Bank of Japan downgraded its view of the economy for the second straight month on Monday, citing flagging exports and slowing domestic output, as March data showed consumers keeping clear of department stores. |
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BRUSSELS, Belgium - A U.S.-European Union agreement to end an eight-year-old banana war and lift $191 million of U.S. sanctions will boost prospects for a new round of global trade negotiations this year, analysts say. A series of high-profile trade disputes has soured the atmosphere between the giants of world trade in recent years, making it more difficult for them to unite to get a new trade round off the ground. Bickering between the two powers, which together account for 40 percent of global trade, was partly to blame for the World Trade Organization's failure to launch a new round at its 1999 meeting. An agreement in principle to end the long-running dispute over banana trade, surprisingly announced on Wednesday, should improve the climate and lift efforts to launch a trade round at the next WTO ministerial meeting in Qatar in November. |
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 Anna Matveyeva is young, confident and the general director of St. Petersburg's Idealnaya Chashka chain of coffee houses. Staff writer Andrei Musatov spoke with Matveyeva about bringing the coffee-house culture to the city and the future of what has been a fast-growing business. |
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Illarionov on Debt MOSCOW (SPT) - A debt-for-equities scheme proposed by Germany at a summit last week would not benefit Russia, Interfax reported economic adviser Andrei Illarionov as saying on Sunday. "In the proposed scheme, liabilities would be exchanged for assets, while liabilities are usually exchanged for liabilities and assets for assets," Illarionov said. |
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TOGETHER with its blocks of commercials, until it was taken over last weekend, NTV for some time screened a dramatic picture of a masked man forcing the company's familiar symbols out of the way. The purpose of the scene was clear: Freedom of speech may soon be taken from us. |
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TIMOTHY McVeigh, who is scheduled to be executed May 16, has solidified his position as the poster boy of cold-blooded villainy. The Oklahoma City bomber has once again outraged the American public when he described the 19 dead children among his 168 victims as "collateral damage" in an interview. |
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LAST week the liberal Yabloko faction and the Union of Right Forces organized a joint conference in Moscow in an effort to hammer out a common strategy on future Duma legislation that would push reform and "promote civil society" in Russia. Opening the conference, Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky announced that this was the first time in almost 10 years that he was sharing the same stage with SPS leader Boris Nemtsov. |
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JUST a few months ago, Saratov was the scene of a national scandal in which a group of intruders - some say headed by the head of the regional press committee and others say it was just someone who claimed to be the head of the regional press committee - entered the Slovo printing house and made "corrections" to an Izvestia article that was critical of Saratov Governor Dmit ry Ayatskov. |
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On Feb. 15, 2000, Gazprom chairman Rem Vyakhirev unexpectedly began spouting forth to reporters his views on NTV. "As the head of Gazprom and as a citizen," Vyakhirev said, "I do not consider the position of the NTV leadership on the Chechnya problem entirely correct. |
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SO, it has happened. The so-called "tough plan" developed by the Kremlin's top-secret analytical group has been put into action. As opposed to the "mild" one that was in use before, this one envisions the quick silencing of any dissident voices - of course, with the aim of making Russia a paradise of imperial glory. |
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This week sees the birthdays of two of great Russian leaders, one Ukrainian, one German. Nikita Krushchev was born into an illiterate peasant family in the village of Kalinovka near Kursk on April 17, 1894. He trained as a metal fitter in present-day Donetsk and rose through the ranks of the Ukrainian Communist Party against the brutal background of Stalinism and world war. Indeed, his first wife died of starvation and his eldest son was killed at the battle of Stalingrad. Krushchev traded on his peasant roots and practical approach, which won him the enmity of party intellectuals and theorists. Lavrenty Beria called him "the potato politician," while other party leaders called him "comrade lavatory lover," in a somewhat bizarre reference to his insistence that the Moscow metro (of which he oversaw part of the construction in the 1930s) be equipped with the most immaculate toilets imaginable. |
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 From inoculations to operations, steering your way around the maze of health-care options that exist in St. Petersburg can be quite confusing for those not familiar with the range of choices available. |
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It took me nearly a decade of living in Russia before I got up the nerve to visit my local dry cleaner, or khimchistka. My fear of the khimchistka was not completely unfounded. When I first arrived in Russia, I was told that I had to remove all of the pugovitsy i molnii, or buttons and zippers, from each article of clothing before I submitted it to such a rigorous cleansing process. |
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Monday's ruble/dollar rates in St. Petersburg: Address Buy Sell Avto Bank 119 Moskovsky Prospect 28.30 28.95 Alfa Bank 6 Kanal Griboyedova 28. |
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EDMONTON, Alberta - Replacement Benoit Hogue got the Dallas Stars out of a hole when he scored 19:28 into overtime to beat the Edmonton Oilers 3-2 in the third game of their first round Western Conference playoff series on Sunday. Hogue's goal gave the Stars a 2-1 lead in their best-of-seven playoff series. |
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Estrada Free on Bail MANILA, Philippines (Reuters) - A Philippine court ordered the arrest of disgraced former president Joseph Estrada on Monday, took his fingerprints after he surrendered himself to custody and released him on bail ahead of his trial on corruption charges. |
 IMOLA, Italy - Ralf Schumacher seized the first win of his Formula One career at the San Marino Grand Prix Sunday with a commanding drive from start to finish that handed Williams its first victory since 1997. It was a day of contrasting fortunes for the Schumacher family, with older brother Michael retiring his Ferrari to the dismay of the silenced local fans after just 25 laps and losing his outright lead in the championship. |
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The 27th annual "Bolshoi Priz Sankt-Peterburga" got underway at the Yubileiny Sports Palace on the weekend. From Sunday through Thursday, the city will play host to the national youth "B" teams from Russia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Sweden, and St. |
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Henderson Recalled SAN DIEGO (AP) - Rickey Henderson is headed back to the major leagues. The career steals leader was called up by the San Diego Padres after going 2-for-4 with a double Sunday for Triple-A Portland. He hit .275 with five runs, three RBIs and one walk in nine games for the Beavers. The 42-year-old Henderson needs three walks to break Babe Ruth's major league record of 2,062, and 68 runs to break Ty Cobb's record of 2,245. He needs 86 hits to become the 25th player in baseball history to reach 3,000. Hewitt Undergoes Tests SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian tennis star Lleyton Hewitt is to undergo further medical tests this week to diagnose the cause of his continuing breathing difficulties. |
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 TORONTO - This time, Roberto Hernandez held on - barely. Hernandez loaded the bases in the bottom of the ninth inning Sunday but got Alex Gonzalez on a grounder to shortstop for the final out as the Kansas City Royals snapped a five-game losing streak with a 4-2 American League victory over the Toronto Blue Jays. |
 GLASGOW, Scotland - Henrik Larsson's remarkable season continued on Sunday when he scored twice in Celtic's 3-1 Scottish Cup semifinal win over Dundee United. The Swedish striker took his goals tally on the season to 49 as the Scottish champions and League Cup winners moved one match away from completing their first domestic treble in 32 years. Larsson overtook the Celtic post-World War II record of 48 set by Charlie Nicholas in 1982-83. |
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 Cosmonauts' Day, which was celebrated in Russia on April 12, marked forty years since Yury Gagarin's first flight into space. A great deal is known about the world's first man in space, but much less is known about the first female cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, who followed Gagarin into space two years later. |
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