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A criminal case has been initiated against acting Vice Governor Alexander Po tek hin, who heads the City Hall Media Committee, and his deputy, Dmitry Solonnikov, officials from the Northwest District Prosecutor's Office announced this week. Although no charges have been filed, prosecutors said that the two officials would be charged soon on counts of illegal business activity. Federal law bans public officials from engaging in private commercial activity. The investigation was formally initiated on Nov. 21. "We have had some difficulties here linked to the official registration of some necessary documents. As soon as this is completed, we will file charges," said Vladimir Goltsmer, spokesperson for the Northwest District Prosecutor's Office, on Wednesday. |
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 Two-year-old Zhenya sways silently and incessantly back and forth while sitting at a table, a habit he picked up while spending his entire life in a special ward of St. |
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MOSCOW - HIV is spreading faster in the former Soviet bloc than anywhere else in the world, with the numbers in Russia almost doubling annually since 1998, according to a UN report released Wednesday. "The epidemic is still in its early phase in Eastern Europe and it will get worse before it gets better," Peter Piot, executive director of the Joint UN Program on HIV/AIDS, or UNAIDS, said while releasing the report in Moscow. |
All photos from issue.
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 A pro-Kremlin group of representatives in the Federation Council has announced its intention to nominate Sergei Mironov, former vice speaker of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, to succeed the chamber's current speaker, Oryol Region Governor Yegor Stroyev. Although the chamber will vote on the nomination on Dec. 5, Mironov's victory seems likely, since the group that nominated him is made up of 100 of the chamber's 178 senators. |
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 MOSCOW - Embattled Railways Minister Nikolai Aksyonenko was recalled from vacation Wednesday for a one-day cabinet meeting where he was promptly lambasted for his investment plans for the railroad. |
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MOSCOW - Seven United Nations agencies launched a joint appeal to donor countries Tuesday for $32 million to cover UN humanitarian operations in the North Caucasus. Funds raised are to be spent on legal protection, food, health, education, water and sanitation for some 600,000 Chechen refugees, the UN's acting humanitarian-affairs coordinator in Russia, Rosemary McCreery, told journalists Tuesday. |
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NATO Chief in Baltics TALLINN, Estonia (AP) - NATO Secretary General Lord Georege Robertson stopped in Estonia for a brief visit Thursday amid growing optimism that the three Baltic states now have a good chance of entering the alliance. |
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MOSCOW - An independent study released Tuesday warns of the deep-reaching roots feeding corruption at the Central Bank. "The Central Bank as an independent, absolutely opaque and uncontrolled administrative-financial system did not arise by chance or overnight," said the authors of the study - the Mos cow Carnegie Center and Dmitry Vasilyev, former head of the Federal Securities Commission - in a 70-page report. |
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On Dec. 5 Moscow-based Mobile Te le systems (MTS) will begin operating St. Petersburg's long-awaited second GSM-standard cellular-telephone service, and North-West GSM, the already-existing provider, is firing up for the competition. |
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MOSCOW - Michel Camdessus can sleep well now. Shortly after leaving the International Monetary Fund, Camdessus said that during his 13 years as managing director there were only two nights when he did not sleep: before Brazil announced the devaluation of the real in 1999 and the night before Russia defaulted on its debt, Aug. |
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MOSCOW - The draft 2002 budget was scheduled to go to the State Duma for a third reading Friday with crucial support from the Duma Budget Committee and centrist factions, despite fears that weak oil prices could upset spending plans. |
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MOSCOW - Visiting U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham on Wednesday called Russia a key player in world energy markets, capable of helping boost sagging global economic growth. Abraham said Russia's economic influence is both increasing and crucial to establishing a fair price for oil based on true market mechanisms - a key component in the global economy. |
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Unfriendly Skies LONDON (Reuters) - Struggling airline British Airways faces an extra 2.5 million pounds ($3.6 million) in annual interest charges after Standard & Poor's cut its credit rating to junk status on Thursday, an industry source said. |
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RITUALS of patriotism have made quite a comeback in the last couple of months. The New York City Board of Education unanimously passed a resolution last month to require all public schools to lead a daily Pledge of Allegiance each morning and at all school events. |
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OLNEY, Maryland - This column is usually advertised as written from Washington. But technically, I'm usually in the suburbs of Montgomery County, Maryland. |
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THE friendship between presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush has developed against a background of war in central Asia, world economic crisis and deteriorating relations between Russia and other oil producers. In all of these, Russia comes across as a bastion of the Western world, taking a stand against Islamic terrorism, supporting liberal economic principles and getting into an argument with the oil-producing countries of the Third World. |
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PROPONENTS of the Kremlin-backed judicial reform package approved last week by the State Duma have hailed it as the "cornerstone" of a new relationship between the judiciary and the public - long skeptical, and rightfully so, about the courts' impartiality and competence. |
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 Even though the Mariinsky Theater is clearly the heart of the Russian theatrical universe, the troupe's dancers have long dreamt of the chance to perform in tailor-made productions. The country's shortage of innovative native choreographers has been painfully obvious for many years now. Although experts argue about the reason for this, many cite the impact of the collapse of the Iron Curtain, after which the modern-dance achievements of the West provoked confusion and uncertainty in Russian ballet masters. |
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 St. Petersburg traditionalists, brought up on a diet of Verdi and Tchaichovsky, may balk at the presentation of Benjamin Britten's 1954 opera "The Turn of the Screw" in the oppulently traditional surroundings of the Hermitage Theater. |
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Yelena Prokina, one of Valery Gergiev's first discoveries, appeared somewhat unexpectedly in town for a single concert last Tuesday in the Philharmonia's Small Hall. The singer was accompanied by pianist Aleksei Goribol, who was also the artistic director of the tour, which brought Prokina back to her musical homeland with concerts in Moscow and St. |
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Despite the Santana posters plastered all over the city, the great guitarist is not coming to town. This is just another one of those foreign cover bands that Gigant Hall likes to promote. |
 One of the fun (and occasionally, annoying) things about living abroad as a Canadian is explaining to people I meet - and often my friends as well - why I maintain that we are different from Americans. To my Russian friends, I usually bring up the question of the difference between themselves and Ukrainians. |
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N. Korea Against Terror SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - North Korea, eager to get off a U.S. list of countries that sponsor terrorism, signed two UN treaties designed to stem terrorism, South Korean officials said Thursday. The U.S. State Department listed North Korea as a sponsor of terrorism in 1988 because of its alleged involvement in the 1987 bombing of a South Korean airliner in the skies near Myanmar. |
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Good and Bad ZURICH, Switzerland (Reuters) - West Ham United striker Paolo di Canio has won FIFA's Fair Play Award for 2001 after passing up the chance to score against an injured goalkeeper. |
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