|
|
|
 MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin announced a sweeping reshuffle of security posts on Tuesday, putting his ally Viktor Cherkesov in charge of a new federal anti-drug agency and strengthening the Federal Security Service by giving it the border guards and communication agency, FAPSI. The changes are largely in line with measures taken by the United States and other Western countries after Sept. 11 to counter the threat of terrorism, analysts said. |
|
 As part of a larger shakeup in the organization of state security agencies on Tuesday, President Vladimir Putin named Viktor Cherkesov, his representative in the Northwest Region, as the head of a new federal anti-drug agency. |
All photos from issue.
|
|
|
|
|
Be Prepared ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - St Petersburg will host an international boy scout convention from July 11 through July 20, Interfax reports. The organizers of the event are the Interregional Association of Scouts and the regional department of the All-Russian National Scouting Organization, Aleksei Kruchinin, the chairperson of the latter group, announced Thursday at a press conference in St. Petersburg. According to Kruchinin, the meeting will draw about 1,000 scouts from countries all over the world. So far, scouting groups from France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy and Poland confirmed that they will participate, Interfax said. |
|
 The European Union has some interesting plans for St. Petersburg's 300th-anniversary celebrations, the most intriguing of which may be to run the majority of its cultural programs connected with the event outside of the official celebration period. |
|
In June, St. Petersburg will welcome twenty-five Nobel Prize laureates from Germany, Japan, England, Switzerland, Taiwan, Belgium and the United States. The driving engine behind the idea for such a meeting - the first of its type in Russian history - is Russian physicist Zhores Alfyorov, the vice president of Russian Academy of Sciences and himself a winner of the prestigious prize. According to Alfyorov, his brainchild is first and foremost a scientific project. Called "The Sciences and Mankind's Progress," the project will consist of a series of meetings, conferences and seminars to be held in the city between June 16 and June 21. |
|
 A news item about a U.K. school banning the story "The Three Little Pigs" for fear of offending Muslim students and the four young women in tight jeans, scanty tops and heavy makeup he invited to drop by for the interview for the story are enough to give you an idea of Dave Francis' idea of a radio show. |
|
ARussian Navy commission opened a three-day investigation into allegations of physical abuse at St. Petersburg's elite Nakhimov Naval Academy on Thursday, after military prosecutors announced last week that the results of a first investigation at the school had turned up evidence to support the claims. |
|
|
|
|
The cabinet on Thursday delayed choosing between rival pipeline projects aimed at supplying energy-starved economic giants Japan and China, saying that it didn't yet have enough information to decide. "The government ordered the [Energy Ministry] and the oil companies to present the most effective route by May 1," Energy Minister Igor Yusufov was quoted by news agencies as saying after the government's weekly session. |
|
MOSCOW - The government has boosted its stake in Gazprom to a controlling 51 percent, the threshold that the Kremlin said it needed before allowing the barriers to foreign ownership in the gas giant to be lowered. |
|
MOSCOW - Russia plans to draw up an austere three-year budget for 2004-2006 based on an average price of $18.5 per barrel of oil, the mainstay of the country's economy, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said on Wednesday. Russia's 2003 budget is based on an average oil price of $21.5 per barrel. "This means making policy more austere and cutting non-interest spending in the federal budget by about 1.4 percent of gross domestic product," Kudrin told a meeting of Finance Ministry officials. Russia would aim to raise the value of a special stabilization fund to the equivalent of 8.7 percent of GDP to provide a cushion should oil prices fall sharply in the future, Kudrin said, adding that a fall in oil price to $12 per barrel would produce an annual budget shortfall of 2. |
|
 MOSCOW - Flagship carrier Aeroflot on Tuesday approved the new corporate colors to grace its aircraft and uniforms, though whether it will shed its hammer and sickle logo remains a subject of internal debate within the company. |
|
MOSCOW - After President Vladimir Putin signed the Tax Police into oblivion Tuesday, businesses big and small are breathing a long sigh of relief at the demise of an organization that they say choked economic growth and, especially of late, was acquiring alarming new powers. |
|
The St. Petersburg alcoholic-drink sector can expect dramatic changes in the coming months, both in terms of prices and market operators, according to a report issued last week. |
|
|
|
|
THE rumors that President Vladimir Putin was planning to form a single super security agency, the Federal Investigations Service, have not come true, at least not yet. Instead, Putin abolished or broke up a number of security agencies on Tuesday: FAPSI, the Federal Border Service and the Tax Police. |
|
ST. Petersburg's police officers are very choosy. It is no secret to the city's residents, and to tourists, that officers are particularly keen on money and cellular phones. |
|
|
|
 "Electric Earth," the exhibition of contemporary British video art that opened at the Marble Palace of the Russian Museum last Thursday, is a significant project for both of its organizers - the Russian Museum, its host, and the British Council, which brought the exhibition to Russia. |
|
The Mariinsky Theater is changing its ticket-sale system, following a conflict with the St. Petersburg Ticket Sales Board, a city-run organization that coordinates the distribution of tickets to performances at local theaters and concert venues through kiosks around the city. |
|
Although St. Petersburg's Irish community is relatively small, St. Patrick's Day is now one of Russia's most popular imported holidays, after Halloween. Apart from the traditional parties at the city's Irish bars, the festivities will include several gigs by local Celtic-tinged bands and the like. |
|
One of the classic dangers while writing a restaurant review is the pitfall of writing most of the piece about the atmosphere and service while generally ignoring the food. |
 The boundaries between art and science are being blurred and, in Russia, it's happening in Kaliningrad. Dmitry Bulatov is one of a small, but growing, number of artists around the world who are using techniques from genetic engineering to create a new form of art known as Ars Chimera (sometimes called transgenic art). The chimera was a creature in ancient Greek mythology that had a lion's head, a goat's body and a dragon's tail. |
|
 IT'S rare to find a picture as exuberant, as shallow - and as exuberant about its shallowness - as the director Rob Marshall's film adaptation of the Broadway musical "Chicago. |
|
Perhaps 30 years ago, there was a vogue for popular "illustrated" histories and biographies. Some were original, others pictorially amplified versions of previously published texts, but all were slightly oversized volumes, roughly the dimensions of a three-ring binder. Over the years, I bought quite a few of these elegant, inviting books: Alan Moorehead's "Darwin and the Beagle," C. |
|
|
|
|
After last year's disastrous Yugoslav experiment, Zenit is hoping that its new Czech formula will provide the recipe for success. Since naming Vlastimil Petrzela as head coach in December, St. Petersburg's only Premier Division soccer club has undergone something of a velvet revolution during the off season that has fans eagerly anticipating Saturday's season opener against Saturn Ramenskoye at the Petrovsky Stadium. |
|
SKA Survives ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - St. Petersburg ice-hockey team SKA guaranteed its place in next season's Superliga, the top division of Russia's Professional Hockey League (PHL), with a 2-0 win over Metallurg Magnitogorsk in front of over 1,800 fans, who filled the team's small stadium to more than capacity. |
Temp: 0°C partly cloudy 
Issues Archive