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For the first time in St. Petersburg's history, the City Court has thrown out the results in one of the city's electoral district, ruling that Yury Rydnik, a close political ally of Governor Vladimir Yakovlev, broke federal election laws in winning his seat in December's Legislative Assembly elections. Rydnik, the head of the pro-governor United City bloc, garnered 38 percent of the vote in the 41st district, defeating St. Petersburg Audit Chamber chief Dmitry Burenin and Vyacheslav Makarov, a colonel at the Aerospace Military Academy, who polled 15 and 24 percent of the vote, respectively. City Court judge Tatyana Gunko upheld the second part of a complaint filed by Burenin and Makarov. |
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 Six elderly St. Petersburg residents have filed a complaint with the Primorsky District Prosecutor's Office asking for a criminal investigation to be opened into what they say was an attack by police officers at a construction site on Tuesday. |
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MOSCOW - Elections chief Alexander Veshnyakov praised preparations for a constitutional referendum in Chechnya as he visited the region Saturday with a European observer delegation. Veshnyakov, chairperson of the Central Election Commission, said local officials had almost completed preparations for the March 23 plebiscite. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW - The Supreme Court on Friday ordered a retrial for Colonel Yury Budanov, overturning a much-debated lower-court ruling that Budanov could not be held accountable for killing of an 18-year-old Chechen woman because he was mentally ill. Budanov, the highest-ranking military officer to go on trial for civilian abuses in Chechnya, admits to strangling Elza Kungayeva in March 2000 but says he did so in a fit of rage. |
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MOSCOW - Boris Nemtsov, a leader of the Union of Right Forces party, or SPS, met last month with self-exiled tycoon and Kremlin critic Boris Berezovsky, stirring up rumors that his party was searching for new funding ahead of December's parliamentary elections, Vremya Novostei reported on Friday. |
 Although the city government is in the middle of a 250-million-ruble ($8-million) renovation project at the city's zoo, a commission that came to St. Petersburg at the end of January says that conditions at the establishment are poor, and that the renovation may be one of the culprits. |
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Pasko's New Job MOSCOW (SPT) - Grigory Pasko, a navy journalist and environmental whistle-blower who was released in January after serving more than two-thirds of his four-year prison sentence, became an aide to the liberal lawmaker Sergei Yushenkov, Interfax reported Monday. |
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Two of Russia's major publishing companies - Prof-Media, part of Vladimir Potanin's Interros holding, and The St. Petersburg Times' Dutch-controlled parent company, Independent Media - announced on Monday that they have formed a "strategic partnership," with Prof-Media buying a 35-percent stake in Independent Media. |
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MOSCOW - Another hurdle to hiring foreign staff has surfaced in regulations on the new law on foreigners - employers might be asked to provide a copy of a diploma showing that the employee is qualified to do the job. |
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 MOSCOW - Russia's per capita GDP may be dragging behind Costa Rica's, but its head count of billionaires is the fourth highest in the world, according to Forbes magazine's annual rating of the super rich, released late last week. The list of the country's billionaires burgeoned to 17 over the past year - 10 more than in 2002 - thanks to high oil prices, a growing stock market and greater corporate transparency. |
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The volume of consumer credit transactions in St. Petersburg's banking sector shot up by 45 percent in 2002, but market analysts are predicting that the sector's development still has a long way to go. |
 Canada-based company Bombardier on Friday presented a feasibility study for a rapid-transit system to St. Petersburg Governor Vladimir Yakovlev at a press conference held at the Astoria Hotel. Yakovlev said that the construction of the $527-million, fully-automated elevated-train system could begin as early as this year. |
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MOSCOW - Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref proposed Friday that apartment building residents collectively choose contractors to provide utility and building maintenance services, saying that competition would help revitalize the crumbling housing sector. |
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MOSCOW - The board of power utility Unified Energy Systems on Friday decided to liquidate RenTV and approved proposed changes to the company charter that would expand the board's competence to approve or reject sales of UES assets and those of its subsidiaries. Asset sales are a hot issue, as the utility will be broken up in a massive sector restructuring over the coming years, but the board said that the proposed charter change is meant to give shareholders control over restructuring through their board representatives. |
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WE must move beyond the rhetoric that has surrounded energy-sector reforms. What changes are needed, exactly? And along what path will reforms proceed? Unified Energy Systems, the power monopoly itself, was the first to lay out its vision of what reforms should look like. |
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WASHINGTON - The Enron scandal has all but disappeared from view. Let's check in on it, shall we? You remember Enron: It claimed to be making and holding onto lots more money than it really was; it suckered people, including its own employees, into believing it was a success; its top executives paid themselves lavishly and then, when the pyramid shuddered, cashed out early. |
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PRIME Minister Mikhail Kasyanov last month suspended the head of the State Fisheries Committee, Yevgeny Nazdratenko. The official reason was the committee's prolonged failure to approve 2003 fishing-quota allocations proposed by Nazdratenko's successor as governor of Primorye, Sergei Darkin. |
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Editor, More than a century ago, when the young and vigorous United States attacked the decrepit Spanish empire, Lev Tolstoy compared the attack to a young boxer knocking down an old man. |
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EVER since the end of World War II, Britain has played a special role within the Euro-Atlantic community - the trusted mediator between Washington and continental Europe. This was always a challenging balancing act for London. To maintain its position as the vice chair of the Western alliance effectively, the British had to enjoy the confidence of the United States, yet be able to parley with the other members of the coalition. |
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WHAT a difference six months can make. In August, the hot political topic in all of the city's newspapers was Governor Vladimir Yakovlev's plans to have the City Charter ammended so that he could run for a third term and the methods he was going to use to see that this happened. |
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FORBES magazine has given Russian journalists something else to be proud of this year as they celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Russian press. The majority of Russians included in Forbes' list of the world's richest people are media moguls. Judge for yourself. |
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Swing BladesIt's a well-known fact - oft detailed in these pages - that the boys in the Bush Regime swing both ways. At issue here, of course, is their proclivity - their apparently uncontrollable craving - for stuffing their trousers with loot from both sides of whatever war or military crisis is going at the moment. |
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 St. Petersburg, striving to live up to its self-proclaimed title of Russia's cultural capital, is abundant with guides wanting to sell you on the city. Make your way to the center and they are everywhere, but when you actually start listening, their stories and routes tend toward the traditional tourist fare: the State Hermitage Museum, the State Russian Museum, Nevsky Prospekt. More adventurous tourists - or curious locals - have an alternative to standard tours, however, in Peter's Walking Tours, which was officially established last month. |
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 Although Russia grabbed three of the four top spots on offer at the figure-skating Grand Prix Final at the Ice Palace over the weekend, the results were less predictable than they might have seemed beforehand. |
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