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A container of nitric acid exploded Wednesday evening at the Tekhnolog Plant in the city's Rybatskoye District, releasing a cloud of toxic gas. One plant worker was killed immediately, and nine rescue workers suffered minor respiratory problems. According to Oleg Seminog, head of the press center of the local branch of the Emergency Situations Ministry, the explosion may have been caused by a technical fault that occurred during a chemical process. "A 200-kilogram concrete container of nitric acid exploded and some was released into the atmosphere." Plant worker Lyudmila Ivanova was in the shop at the time of the explosion, which caused the roof of the building to collapse. |
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 Sixty years ago today, Yakov Suk hotin, a 21-year-old officer-in-training, was at a Red Army camp in the countryside about 25 kilometers outside of St. |
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MOSCOW - Contrary to the belief that Josef Stalin was so surprised by Nazi Germany's attack on the Soviet Union that he went into shock for several days, the Soviet leader actually put in a full day's work in the Kremlin and received top government and military officials. |
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The last of the 20 prisoners who escaped from two temporary holding facilities in the Leningrad Oblast last month was recaptured on Monday, police have said. |
All photos from issue.
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Zoo Boss on Sick Leave ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) -Ivan Korneyev, embattled director of the St. Petersburg Zoo, went on sick leave this week and Sergei Yegorov was named his temporary replacement Korneyev, who is involved in a conflict with the city administration, said he was surprised at the Culture Committee's decision to replace him with Yegorov, a former official of the Petrograd District administration. |
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A controversial bill aimed at limiting foreign ownership in Russian media failed to pass a second reading in the State Duma on Thursday, as liberals and Communists - guided by opposite motives - joined forces to vote it down. |
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MOSCOW - The State Duma has passed in the second and crucial reading a new Criminal Procedural Code with the power to revolutionize the Russian legal system by introducing jury trials, curbing the rights of all-powerful prosecutors and protecting suspects in criminal cases from police brutality. But the legislation, which passed on Wednesday with a vote of 290-2, has sharply divided liberal legal experts, with some calling it a success and others branding it an obstacle to real reform. |
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 PARIS - Russia and two other countries agreed Thursday to stop fishing for sturgeon for the rest of this year to protect dwindling stocks of the fish prized for producing caviar. Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan agreed to the freeze at a meeting in Paris of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, a UN-affiliated body that controls trade in endangered species. |
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MOSCOW - An ongoing battle between two major Russian oil companies has gotten caught up in a bigger war raging within the Lithuanian government. At the center of the storm is Mazeikiu Nafta, the largest oil refinery in the Baltics. |
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MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin has berated gas giant Gazprom for misspending "enormous sums" and called on its new boss to sort out its finances and make them more transparent, the Kremlin said Tuesday. But Putin said Gazprom's chief executive Alexei Miller, appointed at the end of May after veteran boss Rem Vyakhirev was ousted, would not be tracking down any wrongdoers, which he said was a job for police and prosecutors. |
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35,000 Millionaires (SPT) - More than 35,000 Russians earned more than 1 million rubles ($34,000) last year, Prime-Tass quoted a Tax Ministry official as saying Thursday. |
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MOSCOW - International Monetary Fund first deputy managing director Stanley Fischer said Wednesday he saw a growing "sense of normalcy and confidence in Russia's economy," but warned against complacency. Fischer, ending a short visit to Moscow as he prepares to leave the fund after seven years, told a news conference that the government seemed to have its economic priorities worked out and the potential to carry them through. |
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MOSCOW - The Economic Development and Trade Ministry, charged with overhauling the national electricity monopoly UES, has accepted some proposals on the carve-up of the national grid, a deputy minister said Tuesday. |
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MOSCOW - Ukraine is likely to ban beef imports from fast-food giant McDonald's Russian meat-processing plant next week over fears of mad cow and foot-and-mouth disease, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian Agriculture Ministry said Wednesday. The spokesperson, Natalya Chereshevskaya, said in an interview from Kiev that the ministry recently inspected the plant, located in Novoperedelkino on the southwest outskirts of Moscow, and determined that it processed meat from Belgium and the Netherlands, two countries on its "suspect beef" list. |
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MOSCOW - The State Statistics Committee this week changed the methodology it uses to measure economic performance - a move that bumped industrial output growth between January and May from 5. |
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ON June 2, the prominent human rights defender and peacemaker Viktor Alekseyevich Popkov died at the Vishnevsky Military Hospital. He was mortally wounded on April 18 in Chechnya, near the village of Alkhan-Kal. He had been sitting in the front of a medical van, and the killer fired at an upward angle. |
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EARLIER this week, local police successfully completed their operation to recapture the last of the 20 prisoners who escaped from oblast jails on May 21. |
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HERE'S a true story. A U.S. naval commander and a Canadian officer had an exchange by radio. The Canadians advised the Americans to change course to avoid collision, but the Americans insisted that the Canadians change course. The Canadians prevailed: They were calling from a lighthouse. |
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Dear Editor, We would like you to know what happened to us on June 8 when we came and tried to enjoy the ballet "La Bayadere" at the Marinsky Theater. |
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Clock Stoppers "Africa is a nation that suffers from incredible disease." - U.S. President George
W. Bush, June 14, 2001. People are dying of AIDS by the millions in Africa. There are drug treatments that could help many of them - the same antiretroviral treatments used successfully in the West - but George W. |
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 The Mariinsky's premiere of Wagner's Die Walküre was far from being a guaranteed success. With the White Nights Festival already well into its third week, an exhausting affair for both orchestra and conductor Valery Gergiev alike, performing a four-hour Wagner opera was hardly going to be easy. |
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"When touching your instruments and singing, try to create a sound which is not mechanical but as close to nature as possible" - this is how Tan Dun, a Chinese-born classical composer now living in New York, started a rehearsal on Tuesday at the Mariinsky Theater. |
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As the city gets ready to throw itself into the arms of the Festival of Festivals, there seems to be at least one music-related event in the program which is both surprising and interesting. Sven Düfer's "Kurt Weill," screening on Monday, will be augmented by a concert that will feature greatly diverse acts from St. Petersburg's Large Synagogue Choir to Tequilajazzz and Volkovtrio, the two latter being a guarantee for some very unusual interpretations. Kurt Weill (1900-1950), the composer who became famous through his work with Bertold Brecht, has been covered by many rock acts, including The Doors and David Bowie - and the film does feature rock musician Blixa Bargeld, who came to St. |
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 Of the many concerts performed by Western acts in the city lately, Tuesday's show by the London-based sextet Tindersticks stands out as special in terms of mood, atmosphere, and quality. |
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If there was an area in St. Petersburg - or anywhere, for the matter - that could compete for the title of most restaurants per square kilometer, the region around the streets of Bolshaya Mor skaya and Malaya Morskaya would surely be high on the list. |
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St. Petersburg's enormously varied tableau of films, the Festival of Festivals, starts this Saturday at eight city theaters. Living up to its name, it is a collection of "greatest hits" culled from recent world film festivals. |
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Berenson To Appeal LIMA, Peru (Reuters) - American Lori Berenson, given a 20-year jail sentence for collaborating with Marxist rebels in Peru, called a recent verdict unjust and pinned her hopes on an appeal to the country's top court. A civilian court convicted her late Wednesday of being a willing collaborator with the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, although not a militant member, and said she should be jailed until Nov. |
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