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Local harbor pilots brought sea traffic into St. Petersburg's port to a standstill on Wednesday by initiating a work action in protest of a federal government decision to ban private pilot services in three major northern seaports. "We are protesting against the government's intention to destroy the service of private pilots, which has existed successfully for the last 10 years," said Andrei Makeyev, a representative of the St. Petersburg Sea Pilot Association in an interview on Wednesday. "We demand contact with a presidential or government representative to resolve the situation," he said. On Wednesday, more than 100 ships, including 47 oil tankers were stuck on the approach to St. |
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 Eleven-year-old Sasha Baigarin, the youngest son of Kursk submarine officer, Murat Baigarin, doesn't eat fish anymore. "Mama, do you think the fish ate our daddy after the explosion?" he once asked his mother, Svetlana. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW - Commercial secrets will soon be a thing of the past. A financial watchdog with unprecedented powers to force corporations to hand over documents is to be set up to fight money laundering, a senior Finance Ministry official said Tuesday. The new body's creation is part of an anti-money-laundering bill that President Vladimir Putin signed into law Monday and which comes into force in February, Deputy Finance Minister Yury Lvov said at a news conference. |
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MOSCOW - The Interior Ministry on Wednesday named the last of the police chiefs to patrol the country's seven super resgions, completing a week-long process that analysts say is part of a Kremlin drive to reign in the regions. |
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MOSCOW - Russian military prosecutors said Wednesday that they have gathered evidence implicating former Ukrainian deputy prime minister Julia Tymoshenko in a murky financial scam that cost the Defense Ministry nearly half a billion dollars in 1996. Also Wednesday, the Prosecutor General's Office announced that it has sent evidence to Ukraine that Tymoshenko and her husband, Alexander, violated customs regulations in 1995. Julia Tymoshenko, who oversaw Ukraine's energy industry until she was ousted as deputy prime minister earlier this year, denied the allegations. "Russian prosecutors don't have a single piece of evidence against me," Tymoshenko said, according to the Ukrainian news site www. |
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 MOSCOW - A year after a bomb exploded in the underground passageway at Pushkin Square, the place has the feel of an empty gray cement basement. The passages have been renovated but the colorful kiosks have not been allowed to return to the areas damaged by the blast. |
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MOSCOW - The U.S. Embassy in Moscow has set up a toll telephone number for visa inquiries in what it says is a bid to ease the process of applying for American visas. Calls to the number, 258-2525, cost $1.60 a minute and are billed to callers' residential telephones. |
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Russia in NATO? BERLIN (AP) - German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder sees Russia eventually becoming a full NATO member, according to a magazine interview published Wednesday. |
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 MOSCOW - Aeroflot on Wednesday released the list of candidates for its new board of directors, with the surprise inclusion of the FSB's economic- crime chief. The new board is to be elected at an extraordinary shareholders meeting in September, at the request of new shareholders linked to Sibneft owner and Chukotka Governor Roman Abramovich. |
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Having conquered western Russia, the country's largest brewery is looking to the east. Baltika is preparing its invasion of beer markets in the Far East of the country and has no intention of stopping there. |
 MOSCOW - Citing new details from a "financial insider," a group of companies has filed additional charges in New York against Russian Aluminum and its chief executive, Oleg Deripaska, accusing him of fraud, money laundering, extortion and being an accomplice to murder. |
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MOSCOW - A German court has demanded Slavneft pay $2.6 million in loans that it guaranteed to a German bank, but the oil major contends it doesn't have to pay because the guarantee's existence violates Russian law. |
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Radiotelecommunications Company (RTK) is aspiring to become St. Petersburg's fifth cellular-telephone service provider. The company already holds a license and now seems to have found the necessary investment to begin operations. The only thing RTK now lacks is the bandwidth required to run its system. |
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MOSCOW - Trying to catch mobile subscribers outside its home town, Vimpelcom-R, the regional arm of the country's second-leading operator, plans to pour as much as $530 million through 2004 into building a regional network, a company official said Wednesday. |
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Not Interested NEW YORK (AP) - US Airways on Wednesday dismissed a sweetened offer from a New York-based holding company, saying it had no plans to consider the proposal from Global Airlines Corp. Global, which earlier this year tried, but failed to buy Trans World Airlines, said it would pay $2. |
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BUSH administration officials have become fond of describing missile-defense opponents as being unable to escape "Cold War thinking." Yet by pursuing missile defenses so aggressively, President George W. Bush may himself prevent the development of the "new strategic framework" with Russia that he has tried to champion. Rather, he may reinforce a world where relations are defined by the size and sophistication of nuclear arsenals. Despite Bush's stated intention to reduce U.S. nuclear forces to the lowest levels consistent with national security, the nuclear arsenals in both countries are at Cold War levels and postures. Changing this situation is a precondition if the tone captured by Bush and President Vladimir Putin in Genoa is to be translated into real progress on strategic issues. |
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 SINCE retiring as editor of The St. Petersburg Times, I have already held and lost one other job without anybody even knowing about it. I refer to the day when I became Russia's unofficial commissioner for pornography. |
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LIKE anyone with any common sense at all, we fully support efforts to combat money laundering and illegal capital flight. Russia's failure to comply with the international convention against money laundering and its place on the blacklist of "noncooperative" countries are certainly obstacles to economic development and integration into the global economy. |
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Over a Barrel Entertain conjecture of this shocking scenario: A cowed and compliant legislature passes a program that takes more than $30 billion from the country's public treasury and gives it to the wealthiest, most powerful interests in the land. |
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 The Kvadrat Jazz Club, which once again changed its location last year, is now based in the Kirov Palace of Culture, a sinister-looking constructivist building standing in the middle of nowhere. This boat-shaped monstrosity was built in the 1930s by architect Noah Trotsky, who was also responsible for the so-called "Bolshoi Dom," the home of the secret police, on Liteiny Prospect. The atmosphere inside is strikingly different - warm and full of energy. |
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 The Warsaw Station is crowded with trains and steam engines of various ages, designs and colors. The trains all stand still, but there is no strike. The reason behind the colorful sight is that the station that sent the first Russian trains to Europe in 1862 has been turned into a railroad museum. |
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Alhough he died 11 years ago, Kino's mainstay Victor Tsoi is still an idol for teenagers who could hardly even speak when the singer died in a car crash on Aug. 15, 1990. Pilgrims from distant regions come to St. |
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While there is a large number of Italian restaurants in this city, few of them seem particularly concerned at getting the authenticity factor right. It's common enough to find shashlyk, borshch and other such very non-Italian items on the menu. |
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While many great Russian writers of the 19th century had family fortunes to back their literary inclinations, Anton Chekhov had no such luck. In the early 1880s, as a young medical student at Moscow University, he supported himself and his family by writing hundreds of short stories for popular Moscow and St. Petersburg magazines. Continuing the flow of stories for publication, while at the same time as studying medicine and living in cramped conditions with his parents, siblings and lodgers, cannot have been easy. In a letter to his friend Nikolai Leikin, Chekhov complained "Allah alone knows how hard it is to maintain my equilibrium, and how easy to slip and lose my balance. |
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 "It's only a diary," Renée Zellweger's Bridget Jones innocently whines about the red-covered volume she confides her secrets to, but who in the world does she expect to believe her? Starting as a London newspaper column by Helen Fielding and morphing into a novel and a sequel that have together sold 5 million copies and counting in 32 countries, "Bridget Jones's Diary" and its candid and witty tales of a thirtysomething's romantic woes became such a phenomenon that the London Evening Standard grandly announced that its protagonist "is no mere fictional character, she is the Spirit of the Age. |
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Afghan Visas ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (Reuters) - Afghanistan's ruling Taleban said Thursday that entry visas would be granted to foreign diplomats seeking to visit jailed aid workers accused of promoting Christianity. "We will not refuse them visas, we are ready to give them visas,'' the Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) quoted Taleban Deputy Foreign Minister Maulvi Abdul Rahman Zahid as saying. |
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Guerin To Get $5.1M BOSTON (AP) - Boston Bruins forward Bill Guerin was awarded the second-largest amount in NHL arbitration history Wednesday, a one-year, $5. |
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