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MOSCOW - An outspoken Western investor seeking to replace PricewaterhouseCoopers as the auditor of Gazprom said Monday that he has filed lawsuits asking that PwC's audits of the gas giant be declared "false and misleading." William Browder, CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, a minority Gazprom shareholder, said he also has asked the Finance Ministry to suspend PwC's auditing license in Russia. PwC called the allegations "completely unfounded" and said it would fight them in court. "Our work met all applicable legal and professional standards and we shall be defending the claims vigorously," PwC said in a statement. |
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 Yelena Radchenko, 36, suffered almost total hearing loss at the age of three after taking a strong course of penicillin that was prescribed by her doctor when she had pneumonia. |
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 While space research organizations celebrated Cosmonauts Day on Friday, scientists at Russia's oldest observatory were not in a festive spirit. Much of the 163-year-old Pulkovskaya Observatory on the outskirts of the city near the airport spent the day in darkness after its power was cut off over unpaid electricity bills. |
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MOSCOW - Boris Yeltsin, once reviled as a power-hungry tyrant, says these days he is looking for only one thing - a fountain of youth. Yeltsin, who underwent quintuple heart bypass surgery and suffered bouts of illness during his second term as president, is vacationing with his wife, Naina, in and around the North Caucasus town of Mineralnye Vody. |
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Abkhazia Accusations TBILISI, Georgia (AP) - Georgian and Russian officials traded accusations Monday about the presence of both countries' troops in the disputed Georgian region of Abkhazia, heightening tensions between the two neighbors. Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze accused Russia of trying to destabilize his already volatile country by ferrying about 80 Russian service personnel into the Kodori Gorge region of Abkhazia without prior agreement from Georgian authorities. |
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MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin and Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko met last week to push forward the bid to unify their two countries, signing a raft of economic agreements, presenting the Russia-Belarus Union's first awards and announcing a contest to write an anthem for the union. |
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MOSCOW - Putting a dampener on months of anticipation in the Russian art world, the Culture Ministry whisked a famous painting of a plain black square from under the noses of potential bidders at an auction over the weekend, saying it was too precious to sell. The "Black Square" by Kazimir Malevich, one of the leading avant-garde artists of the last century, was meant to be the star attraction of a sell-off of bankrupted Inkombank's extensive art collection at the Gelos auction house on Saturday. |
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 MOSCOW - Alfa Bank has purchased some 20 percent in Konversbank in its efforts to wrest control of the bank from the MDM Group on behalf of the Nuclear Power Ministry. The ministry-affiliated company TVEL sold an 18.35-percent stake in Konversbank to Alfa Bank for $12 million in an agreement dated March 27, an Alfa Bank official said last week, adding that Alfa is to buy shares from "entities affiliated to the seller" amounting to no more than a 20-percent stake. |
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MOSCOW - The operator of Domodedovo Airport and Boeing Co. signed a protocol Monday to set up a national aircraft-maintenance center, the first of its kind in Russia. |
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MOSCOW - The five-week ban on U.S. poultry was partially lifted Monday, but the resumption of imports remained up in the air after the Agriculture Ministry cancelled all import permits. The ministry said the permits for Russian trading companies that import U. |
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Chamber Cries Foul MOSCOW (SPT) - LUKoil is under fire from the Audit Chamber, which claims that two of the No. 1 oil major's petrochemical subsidiaries have failed to pay some 2. |
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TWO oligarchs have loudly and famously gone into exile, but several others remain on the Forbes list of the world's richest people, and one has even succeeded in changing his image from the quintessence of shadiness to a poster boy for Russian corporate rectitude. It all goes to show, first of all, that President Vladimir Putin's vow to eliminate the oligarchs as a class was, to say the least, overly ambitious, and second, that David Hoffman's new book, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia, remains, to say the least, timely. |
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IF one had hoped that the terrorist attacks against the United States would usher in a new era of strategic cooperation and collaboration in international affairs, the period since Sept. 11 must seem like a historic missed opportunity. Six months after Europeans and Russians rallied behind U. |
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THE April 7 presidential vote in Ingushetia was marred by the latest in a long line of election scandals. Khamzat Gutseriyev - brother of Slavneft president Mikhail Gutseriyev and member of the most power clan in the republic - for whose benefit the elections were essentially organized, was cut from the race at the last minute thanks to the machinations of Viktor Kazantsev, Vladimir Putin's plenipotentiary representative in the Southern Federal District. |
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Springtime for W Death and destruction in the Holy Land. War in the mountains of Aghanistan. Christian armies massing for the doomsday assault on ancient Babylon (now known as Iraq). Anthrax killers still roaming the land. The masterminds of Sept. 11 still free to plot new strikes. Unemployment on the rise. |
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BEIRUT - U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell called, on Monday, for Lebanon and Syria to rein in Hezbollah guerrillas whose recent border attacks against Israel he said threatened to escalate into a regional conflict. Powell made the call after meeting Lebanese President Emile Lahoud in Beirut during a one-day side trip from Jerusalem, where he has so far been stymied in his efforts to broker a cease-fire between Israelis and Palestinians. |
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Afghan Tremors KABUL (Reuters) - Earthquakes rattled Afghanistan, and two people were killed in the northern district of Nahrin where hundreds of people have died in a series of tremors over the last three weeks, local residents said on Monday. |
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CARACAS, Venezuela - Fiery Venezuelan populist Hugo Chavez returned to the presidency in a conciliatory mood on Sunday after a failed military coup, while hundreds of his supporters celebrated by looting shops and attacking an opposition-dominated town hall. |
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New Role for Fetisov ROSTOV-ON-DON, Southern Russia (SPT) - Former ice-hockey star Vyacheslav Fetisov, the Soviet Union's most famous defenseman, is set to be appointed as head of Goskomsport, the State Sports Committee, Interfax reported on Friday. |
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Zenit's disappointing start to the season continued with a 1-0 away defeat at the hands of Krylya Sovyetov Samara on Saturday. Zenit, which had beaten the Samara side just 10 days previously at the quarterfinal stage of the Russian Cup, was sunk by a 12th-minute strike by Krylya Sovyetov's Brazilian striker Rogerio Marcio Gaucho after a buildup involving defender Yevgeny Bushmanov and Gaucho's strike partner Robertas Poshkus. |
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AUGUSTA, Georgia - Defending champion Tiger Woods won his third U.S. Masters title on Sunday, firing a one-under-par 71 in the final round to finish with a 12-under-par on 276, three shots clear of South Africa's Retief Goosen. |
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