|
|
|
|
Local, national and international businesses are poised to sign up to sponsor the city's 2003 tricentennial celebrations, as Governor Vladimir Yakovlev signed a decree this week setting prices for various levels of corporate sponsorship. "Participation in the St. |
|
MOSCOW - The man who brought Jack Nicholson, Sean Penn and Jim Carrey to Moscow this summer has a new project up his sleeve: a Hollywood-made television series about the KGB. |
 Viktor Yurakov, the dynamic and controversial second-ranking leader of the local branch of the pro-Kremlin Unity party, was dismissed from his post this week for what fellow party members claim was his excessive independence and enthusiasm. The head of the local Unity party, Alexander Mikhailushkin, said in an interview Thursday that Yurakov had been removed because "he showed initiative. |
All photos from issue.
|
|
|
|
 Local environmentalists sent an open letter this week to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, as well as to Baltic-region governments, appealing to them not to support additional projects at the Leningrad Nuclear Energy Station, LAES, in Sosnovy Bor. |
|
A group of veteran submarine commanders said Tuesday that current plans to raise the Kursk nuclear submarine are ill-conceived and will reduce the likelihood of ever determining the cause of the disaster that took the lives of all 118 people on board last August. |
|
MOSCOW - Stavropol police stepped up security in the southern Russian region Wednesday, a day after a Chechen gunman held a busload of passengers hostage for 13 hours. Government officials also pledged that further measures would be taken to crack down on lawlessness in the Caucasus, while observers warned that state-sanctioned xenophobia would only increase in the region. Stavropol's police chief, Alexander Sapunov, ordered that more plainclothes police officers be stationed at the region's airports and bus and train stations. He also instructed the police to bring out more bomb-sniffing dogs. Police sources told Interfax that they detained on Wednesday "a considerable number of people from Interpol's and the federal police's most-wanted lists" during a regional sweep operation called Guest. |
|
 MOSCOW - Nizhny Novgorod's former Communist boss Gennady Khodyrev was declared the winner in the region's gubernatorial election Monday, and he promptly announced that he was suspending his membership in the Communist Party. |
|
Bomb Injures Child ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - A small child was hospitalized and her mother and another middle-aged woman were injured after an explosion at 61 Kondratiyevsky Prospect in the Kalinisky District, Interfax reported. According to the agency, the explosion was not an accident, resulting instead from a bomb tossed through the victims' window. |
|
|
|
|
MOSCOW - BP, Alfa Group and Interros announced Thursday that they have struck an agreement that will once and for all close the book on a heated takeover dispute that has captivated investors around the world. According to the agreement, Interros will sell its 44 percent stake in oil company Sidanco to New Petroleum for $640 million, and the Tyumen Oil Co. (TNK) will return oil producer Chernogorneft to Sidanco, company officials said. New Petroleum is a recently formed holding that owns TNK. Its shareholders are Alfa Group, Access and Renova. The deal values Sidanco at $1.5 billion, a far cry from the $5 billion it was valued at in 1997 when BP bought a 10 percent stake for $571 million. |
|
 MOSCOW - The MiG corporation and arms export giant Rosoboronexport are overhauling a French-made jet fighter for South Africa - the first time Russian manufacturers have been contracted to modernize a Western-built plane. |
|
Predictions by telecoms-industry specialists that the arrival of Moscow-based Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) will change St. Petersburg's cellular-communications market appear to be coming true. North-West GSM, the region's only Global Mobile Standard service provider, is continuing to broaden service and tariff options for its subscribers ahead of the arrival of MTS this autumn. |
|
MOSCOW - Russia aims to privatize 300 firms in 2002, including Slavneft oil, and net 18 billion rubles ($614 million) from the sales, the same sum expected from privatization sales this year, a top government official said Thursday. |
 Linda McDonald missed what she calls the "boom" period of Canadian business activity by just under a month, arriving at her post as Canadian consul general in St. Petersburg just three weeks after the August financial crisis of 1998. But, while she says that the Canadian face in business here may be a little harder to identify, the country's involvement in and commitment to economic activity in Russia's Northwest region continues and is growing. |
|
Viktor Cherkesov, governor general of the Northwest Region, has called in St. Petersburg's two major foreign business associations to offer their advice in his effort to revive the region's economy. |
 MOSCOW - The warehouse of the country's sole manufacturer of paper cups has gone up in smoke, leaving companies like PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and McDonald's falling back on reserves of their logo-bearing beverage receptacles. The owner of the warehouse, Polarcup, is a subsidiary of the Finnish holding company Huhtamaki, which posted total revenues last year of $2. |
|
MOSCOW - U.S. company Sawyer Research Products has lost an appeal of the takeover of its facilities at the Gus-Khrustalny Quartz Glass Plant in the Vladimir Region, Sawyer's lawyer said Wednesday. |
|
Oblast Growth ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Investment in the Leningrad Oblast economy for the first six months of 2001 totaled 12 billion rubles (about $409.5 million), a rise of 37 percent over the same period in 2000, according to a report issued by the oblast administration's Economy and Investment Committee on Monday. |
|
|
|
|
THE ideologists of globalization might want to find a new public relations firm. As the street battles from Seattle to Genoa have demonstrated, the message of globalization is not exactly getting through. The biggest surprise of the new millennium has been the rise of an anti-globalist resistance, which is both anonymous and ubiquitous. |
|
AS I contemplate my twilight years, mulling over what to do with myself in my retirement, lurching around the office King Lear-like and screeching at the staff that they no longer respect me, my thoughts turn increasingly to questions of existence and mortality - or rather, immortality. |
|
THE city's 2003 tricentennial celebration is not as far away as some may think and, unfortunately, the process for organizing and funding this landmark event still seems decidedly shaky. Only just this week did Governor Vladimir Yakovlev sign the decree on corporate sponsorship for the event, and no doubt it will still be some time before potential sponsors are presented with a coherent and sensible plan to buy into. |
|
Grapes of Wrath Need to unwind after a long day at the office jabbing cattle prods into the gonads of your political opponents? Then reach for a glass of smooth, mellow "Augusto Pinochet," the latest offering from Chile's famous vineyards. |
|
|
|
 Rock is dead. Music for TV serials, on the other hand, is very much alive. Local guitarist Alexei Zubarev proves this point. After appearing as a member of Pierre Moerlen's Gong at a festival performance in April, Zubarev has put away his concert shoes and is now busy composing and recording music for television. One of Zubarev's projects, called "Law," is a 24-episode serial directed in Moscow by Alexander Veledinsky. |
|
 Barbershop singing is back again in St. Petersburg. The Third International Festival "Barbershop Harmony" kicks off on Aug. 16 at the St. Petersburg State Cappella, with performances by American and Russian quartets and choirs, including New York's Big Apple Chorus. |
|
With nothing of note coming in August (the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra playing The Beatles, and Finnish heavy-metal band Nightwish don't really count), our advice is to save money for September shows by such acts as Depeche Mode, Tom Jones and Robert Plant, should you like any of them. |
|
I lived next door to Korona on Bolshoi Prospect for about six months, but never once dropped in for a visit. As I passed the restaurant every day I would look into the window, getting just a taste of the attractive interior and obviously upper-class clientele. |
|
The name of Alexander Genis is familiar to those in Russia who listened to shortwave radio in the 1980s and 90s. Together with Peter Veil, he covered culture for Radio Liberty, the U.S.-sponsored radio station that broadcast wafts of fresh air into the dying Soviet Union. His style combined subtle humor with deep insight into the cultural affairs of the world. Veil's and Genis' program, a weekly dose of verbal shenanigans with serious subject matter, was as much fun to listen to as "Car Talk" on America's National Public Radio. And where "Car Talk" elevates a mundane interest in auto mechanics to the level of pure improvisational art, Veil and Genis made art criticism fun. |
|
 "Etonne-moi" - astonish me - ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev famously encouraged poet Jean Cocteau, and "Moulin Rouge" follows his advice. |
|
|
|
|
Landslide Kills 35 GUNUNG SITOLI, Indonesia (AP) - Hundreds of people reported missing after floods and landslides killed at least 35 on a remote Indonesian island have turned up safe, officials said Thursday. However, the whereabouts of about 200 villagers in the mountainous interior of Nias Island, off the west coast of Sumatra, were still unknown. |
|
Anna Denies Rumors SAN DIEGO, California (Reuters) - Russian tennis star Anna Kournikova on Wednesday flatly denied reports that she had recently married Detroit Red Wings hockey star Sergei Fedorov. |
Temp: 0°C overcast 
Issues Archive