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 A 23-year-old medical student from Mauritius was beaten to death in a brutal attack on the campus of the Mechnikov State Medical Academy on Saturday. The Interior Ministry says it is launching a special investigation into the murder of Atish Kumar Ramgoolam, but other foreign students at the school are calling for stronger action to combat what they say is a growing number of attacks on visible minorities in the city. |
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St. Petersburg tourism operators were thrown into confusion last week by an announcement by the local branch of the Foreign Ministry to scrap the fast-track 72-hour visas launched last Feb. |
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MOSCOW - The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Europe's top human-rights watchdog, has decided not to send observers to Chechnya for a controversial referendum scheduled for next month, PACE official Lord Frank Judd said in an interview published Monday. Judd caused a stir last week when he announced that he would resign as the PACE rapporteur on Chechnya if Russia refused to postpone the March 23 constitutional referendum. |
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MOSCOW - If the U.S. space-shuttle fleet is grounded throughout 2003 in the wake of Saturday's Columbia crash, the International Space Station will have to be mothballed, unless the 16 countries participating in the $95-billion project do not raise the cash to procure additional Progress-M cargo ships from the Russian space industry, Russian space officials said Monday. Russia planned to send three Progress ships to the orbiting station this year, but at least one more will have to be made and launched if the shuttles do not fly, said Yury Grigoryev, deputy chief of Rocket Space Corporation Energia, which manufactures the cargo ships and the Soyuz-TMA capsules. |
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 MAGADAN, Far East - Magadan's gubernational election went into a runoff between Magadan Mayor Nikolai Karpenko and former Deputy Governor Nikolai Dudov after both failed to gain enough votes for an outright win in Sunday's vote to replace murdered Governor Valentin Tsvetkov. |
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VOLGOGRAD, Southern Russia - Soviet Army veterans watched Sunday while young soldiers marched to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad, a turning point in World War II that is still a powerful source of pride and pain in a country that lost millions of soldiers and civilians. |
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The State Duma's Ethics Commission will consider stripping flamboyant nationallist politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky of his post as a deputy speaker for an obscenity-ridden tirade last year against Washington's plans to invade Iraq. |
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MOSCOW - After four years on the run, Sergei Mavrodi, the fugitive mastermind of the MMM pyramid scheme that scammed millions of people in the early 1990s, was caught in a police raid Friday. Television showed police using a circular saw to cut open the steel door of a rented apartment on Frunzenskaya Naberezhnaya in Moscow at about 5 p. |
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MOSCOW - In a bid to fight cargo fraud and improve cooperation with the State Customs Committee, the Geneva-based International Road Transport Union offered last week to bolster current tracking systems with an additional electronic signal sent to Geneva. |
 MOSCOW - Crippled by a near 60-percent tax burden, ships flying the Russian flag carried only one-twentieth of the cargo that entered and left the country's seaports last year. To address this discrepancy, the Transportation Ministry has proposed a new registration system aimed at stemming the loss of virtually the entire $6-billion per year market to ships - many of them Russian - registered with foreign governments. |
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MOSCOW - A week after shying away from an initial public offering, leading drugstore chain 36.6 marked down its share price and raised $14.4 million, which most analysts labeled a modest success. |
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MOSCOW - With railway reforms promising to spin off a $42-billion chunk of the state monopoly as a commercial enterprise, two ministers Friday painted contrasting views of how to handle what assets would remain in the Railways Ministry. Railways Minister Gennady Fadeyev said that his ministry's role should grow under the reforms, countering speculation that his ministry would be folded into the Transportation Ministry after its commercial assets are reborn as a joint-stock company, Russian Railways Co. |
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MOSCOW - The country's No. 2 cellular-phone operator, Vimpelcom, continued its regional expansion drive with the acquisition of a controlling stake in southern Russia's StavTeleSot for $38. |
 MOSCOW - Domestic carmakers have seen their market share slip away in recent years, edged out by competitively priced foreign cars cruising in at full throttle with the help of cheap consumer loans. Companies - from the United States' Ford and General Motors to Korea's Daewoo and the Czech Republic's Skoda - have taken advantage of Russian consumers' disdain for domestic autos and have made significant inroads on their homegrown competition. |
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IS capital flight a problem for Russia? Most people would say "yes" and would regard the recent reversal of capital flight as a positive sign for the Russian economy. But there is another school of thought that believes that capital movements should be a matter of complete indifference and certainly not the object of government concern. |
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IN streets teeming with blue-jeaned demonstrators and in European Parliament halls filled with blue-suited politicians, men and women wave signs reading "No war for oil," or the snappier "No blood for oil. |
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DOES your company operate within a group? Does your company have significant intra-group payables? In Russia, it is not hard to imagine that there is often a shortage in working capital for continuing activity. But how are those shortages financed in practice? The simplest answer, from many legal and administrative standpoints, is probably a free loan from another group company. |
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RECENT events show that Russia's need for membership of the WTO is rapidly growing. One reason is the structural changes that have taken place in the Russian economy: 90 percent of what the Soviet Union exported to the West was oil and natural gas. |
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SERGEI Ivanenko, a deputy to Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky, announced last month that the party would not unite with the Union of Right Forces, or SPS, in the run-up to parliamentary elections later this year. Ivanenko colorfully likened the SPS to a "viral cell that lives by devouring healthy organs. |
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Kean Insight When George W. Bush's first choice to head an "independent" probe into the Sept. 11 attacks - suspected war criminal Henry Kissinger - went down like a bad pretzel, he quickly plucked another warm body from the stagnant pool of Establishment worthies who are periodically called upon to roll out the whitewash when the big boys screw up. |
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