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The debate over the city's 2003 draft budget, and the deputies' reserve fund in particular, took a new turn on Monday when the Legislative Assembly's Budget and Finance Committee (BFK) decided to exclude the fund from the draft. In its place, the BFK introduced an amendment calling for a fund earmarked for the resurfacing of city roads. |
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GROZNY, Chechnya - Given that Chechnya has suffered three years of conflict and emigration, many here were astounded when the results of the first census since the second Chechen war showed that the population had undergone a miraculous expansion. |
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MOSCOW - A working group of international and Russian health officials agreed on a tuberculosis program Friday that should pave the way for the release of a stalled World Bank loan for fighting the infectious disease. Health Minister Yury Shevchenko is expected to sign off on the program, which is modeled on the World Health Organization's TB strategy, in the next few weeks. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW - A gunman hiding behind a billboard on Novy Arbat in Moscow shot the governor of the gold-rich Magadan region on Friday morning, in one of the country's most brazen assassinations in years. Valentin Tsvetkov, 54, alighted from his Mercedes near his office at 8:50 a.m. and was waiting for his wife, Lyudmila, and aide Pyotr Shapka to get out of the car when the unknown attacker fired a single 9-mm bullet into the back of his head. Tsvetkov died on the spot. The attacker fired a shot at Shapka but missed. He then fled through an archway and jumped into a waiting car. Tsvetkov, who had been governor of the far-eastern Magadan region since 1996, is the highest-ranking government official to be murdered in post-Soviet Russia. |
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 ELISTA, Kalmykia - The presidential election in the southern republic of Kalmykia was forced into a runoff on Monday, after vote counts showed that none of the 11 candidates managed to top the 50-percent mark in Sunday's poll. |
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PSKOV, Western Russia - Despite a noticeable warming in Russia-NATO relations, particularly following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States last year, a meeting of representatives of the two sides at the end of last week showed that a number of the old concerns about the Western military alliance remain for Russians. |
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MANCHESTER, England - After spending three nights in a British jail for refusing to turn off his mobile phone during a flight from London to Manchester, the deputy commercial director of Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works was fined Pound2,500 ($3,875) on Friday and released. |
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MOSCOW - Following almost a decade of steady decline, Russia's birthrate seem to be on the rise this year for a second year in a row, health officials said, while cautioning that the overall state of children's health remains poor. Last year, the birthrate reached 9. |
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Getting Closer MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia hopes to resolve a row with the European Union over its Baltic outpost of Kaliningrad within a few weeks, Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov said on Monday. |
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 MOSCOW - A vodka vendetta over the rights to the best-known brands of Russia's national spirit has spilled over to Germany. A German court has issued an injunction banning sales of Stolichnaya, Moskovskaya and several other trademarks whose international rights are owned by fugitive Russian vodka magnate Yury Shefler's SPI Group. |
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MOSCOW - The State Duma on Friday passed the 2003 draft budget in the crucial second of four readings. After a four-hour debate, the deputies voted 279-122, with one abstention, to approve the budget. |
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MOSCOW - The State Pension Fund plans to invest nearly $5 billion in domestic government bonds next year, fund head Mikhail Zurabov said on Thursday. "In 2003, the total estimated volume of investments will be 140 billion to 150 billion rubles," Zurabov said. |
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MOSCOW - A bureaucratic snafu has foreign airlines feeling extorted and airport officials scratching their heads. Based on an interpretation of a vaguely worded passage in the new Tax Code that nearly everyone involved considers bizarre, the Tax Ministry has taken the unprecedented step of ordering all airports to charge foreign airlines a 20-percent value-added tax on ground handling services - a violation of international agreements Russia is party to. |
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MOSCOW - Senators and industry figures called for a new energy strategy Friday, slamming the present one as unworkable and proposing a greater government role in the development of the sector. "It worries us that both the first energy strategy of 1995 and the second that was approved in 2000 [covering energy sector development until 2020] turned out to be unviable," Interfax quoted Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov as saying at a hearing into problems of energy-sector development. |
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MOSCOW - Power-engineering company Siloviye Mashiny said Thursday that it had reached agreement with Siemens allowing the German electronics and engineering giant to swap a 25-percent stake in a plant partly owned by Siloviye for a direct stake in Siloviye itself. |
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MOSCOW - The world's most influential stock market on Friday praised Russia's securities watchdog for regulating and nurturing the market since the 1998 crisis laid waste to the economy. "I really think the Federal Securities Commission is doing a remarkable job developing the market and protecting investors' rights," said Annemarie Tierney, senior counsel with the New York Stock Exchange and head of its Russia division. |
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THE recent elections in Nizhny Novgorod and Krasnoyarsk, for all their differences, exhibited one principal similarity: "Administrative resources" were split almost evenly between the main candidates. In Nizhny Novgorod, the administrative resources of then-Mayor Yury Lebedev and Volga Federal District presidential envoy Sergei Kiriyenko were evenly matched; while, in Krasnoyarsk, acting Governor Nikolai Ashlapov, Taimyr Governor Alexander Khloponin and Krasnoyarsk Mayor Pyotr Pimashkov all had roughly equal resources. |
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ANALYSTS, the mass media and politics constitute a system of separate, but connected, vessels. Ideas take shape and are tested in a variety of formal and informal forums. |
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Booby PrizeThose merry pranksters at the Nobel Academy kept up their wonted hijinks this month by awarding their Peace Prize to that prime purveyor of former presidential piety, Jimmy Carter. It's the Silly Swedes' best joke since they laid the peace purse on Hank "Hang 'em by Their Gonads and Fling 'em to Their Deaths but Be Sure to Maintain Our Plausible Deniability" Kissinger back in the day. |
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 Russia's Mikhail Yuzhny claimed a notable scalp on the opening day of the eighth St. Petersburg Open on Monday, when he dumped Morocco's Younes El Ayaouni from the tournament in three sets. El Ayaouni, ranked 19th in the ATP Champions Race and the tournament's No. 5 seed, looked set to win when he took the first set, 6-3, but the unseeded Yuzhny, ranked 46th in the Champions Race, recovered to take the next two sets, for a 3-6, 6-4, 6-3 victory. |
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