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 Alla Manilova, the former editor of Nevskoye Vremya daily, and infamous in the local journalistic community for firing a group of reporters who protested censorship in the paper in 1996, was appointed on Friday head of City Hall's media committee, Interfax reported. "The door to information in Smolny should be wide open," Interfax quoted her as saying Monday. "There won't be any cookies for 'our' media and whips for others. |
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 From the elephant who walked thousands of kilometers to reach Moscow in the 16th century to the elephants who were bribed into entering a new $20 million home in the Moscow Zoo last month, the history of elephants in the capital is colorful and surreal. |
 A Gatchina man wants to charge mobile phone company Siemens $1 for every one of its telephones in Russia, unless an expressive duck graphic that can be sent with SMS messages is removed from the company's phones. The poor duck was brought before the city's Kuibyshev federal court last week as an evidence of inventor Viktor Petrov's claim that Siemens - one of country's biggest cell phone suppliers - had stolen his invention. |
All photos from issue.
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The State Audit Chamber has lifted a demand made in May for the Finance Ministry to stop transferring subsidies for road construction to St. Petersburg from the federal budget, Interfax quoted chamber head Sergei Stepashin as saying Monday. The cancellation of payments was instituted after federal money transferred to the city for its 300th anniversary celebrations was misspent. |
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Five Soldiers Convicted ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) -Five soldiers of railway unit Number 01375 located at Mga station in the Leningrad Oblast were sentenced for up to four years in jail on Thursday for beating up an officer, Interfax quoted the Leningrad region military prosecutor's office as saying on Friday. |
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MOSCOW - Akhmad Kadyrov was inaugurated Sunday as Chechen president, two weeks after winning an election that the Kremlin promoted as a significant step toward stability but that critics denounced as a sham. In a reflection of the violence that continues to plague Chechnya, where the second war in a decade is in its fifth year, the location of the inauguration was not made public ahead of time due to concerns that rebels might try to attack the ceremony. |
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MOSCOW - British police have detained and then released "without further action" two Russian men in an alleged plot to kill President Vladimir Putin, a British newspaper reported Sunday. |
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MOSCOW - Scores of contract soldiers and officers in Chechnya have been discharged for drinking while on duty and other forms of misconduct, Ekho Moskvy radio reported, citing the Defense Ministry. A Defense Ministry commission has inspected the conduct of contract soldiers in Chechnya and found that many of them "morally degenerate" during their tours of duty and end up being fired, the radio station quoted a commission report as saying Sunday. |
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MOSCOW - Speaking to Al-Jazeera in particular and the Arab world in general, President Vladimir Putin on Friday criticized the United States' positions on Chechnya and Iraq and said Russia retains the right to use preemptive strikes if the UN continues to be sidelined in decisions on dealing with a security threat. |
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When choosing a route for exporting oil from Eastern Siberia, Russia will be guided by its own interests as well as economic and environmental motives, President Vladimir Putin said Monday. "What we will bear in mind above all is economic motives," Putin said in an interview with Asian satellite television operator Star TV circulated by the presidential press service. |
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MOSCOW - The benchmark RTS stock index opened at a new all-time high of 649.43 on Monday, up 1.01 percent from Friday's close, and continued to rise, led by utility Unified Energy System and telecom stocks. The index closed up a fraction of a percent on the day to 643. |
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Ilim Modernization ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Leading timber company Ilim Pulp plans to spend more than 70 million euros ($81 million) acquiring modern timber processing equipment over the next four years, Prime-Tass reported the holding's press service as saying Friday. |
 MOSCOW - One by one, prosecutors are closing in on the six billionaires who built their fortunes on the back of Yukos, the nation's biggest oil company. First they arrested Platon Lebedev, who has spent 15 weeks in Lefortovo prison. Then they hauled Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Leonid Nevzlin in for questioning. |
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MOSCOW - The ruble hit a two-year high against the dollar Monday as worsening liquidity before tax payments and end of month book closing pushed it through the psychologically important 30 level, dealers said. |
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MOSCOW - The State Duma on Friday revised the country's 2003 budget to allow for an increase in spending of 68.8 billion rubles ($2.3 billion) before parliamentary elections in December. The bill was approved 326 to 1 with no abstentions and the move was widely seen as a compromise between pro-Kremlin lawmakers and the government to win swift approval of the 2004 budget. |
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MOSCOW - It might have been the big-hitters partying on the Cote d'Azur or the easy access to cordon bleu cooking and fine wine. Whatever it was, between June and August a certain Gallic je ne sais quois lured Russians to ring up $26 million in Visa charges in France, the new destination of choice for the credit carefree. |
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MOSCOW - For the first time since 1998, Moscow is not the worst city in Europe for doing business - it's the third-worst, according to an annual survey of the continent's largest companies. The host of the 2004 Summer Olympics, Athens, edged out pristine Helsinki for that dubious distinction in this year's European Cities Monitor ranking of 30 major municipalities, which was released Thursday. The top five business-friendly cities were unchanged, with London leading the way, followed by Paris, Frankfurt, Brussels and Amsterdam. The survey, which international commercial real estate consultant Cushman & Wakefield Healey & Baker has conducted annually since 1990, queries senior executives on the issues they regard as important when deciding where to do business, including government policies, availability of qualified staff, communications and transport infrastructure, cost of living, quality of life, access to suppliers, the number of languages spoken, pollution and traffic. |
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 Whether she is designing an obstacle course to teach leadership skills or sponsoring a 100-mile wilderness endurance run, general director of Concept Training, Development and Consultancy Services Rachel Shackleton rarely turns down a challenge. |
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Moody's has taken the drastic and unusual step of upgrading Russia's rating by two notches, to Baa3, bringing it up to investment grade for the first time ever. This decision surprised the market, but more in its timing than its actual content, which was already heavily talked about. |
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Last week, the Central Bank reported a record private sector net capital outflow from Russia in the third quarter of 2003. According to the bank's figures, outflow in the three months from July to September totaled $7. |
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Time has revised Kipling's well-known postulate: "East is East and West is West." That dictum once seemed unshakable. But West and East meet now - in Russia. That not a single major global or regional problem can be solved without Russia's active and equal participation is a geopolitical reality. |
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We've just been through the "ten years after" retrospectives of October 1993, and there was little new or startling in them. In particular, there was no answer to a footnote I've carried around ever since: In St. |
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The hackneyed phrase "political circus" came vividly to life here in America a fortnight ago. The national media, hardly sober and substantive at the best of times, were positively drunk with tabloid glee over two lurid spectacles whose simultaneous explosions of sex, blood, celebrity and raw power merged into a single glop of fevered emotionalism, driving the real story deep into the shadows. |
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Blair Has Heart Scare LONDON (AP) - British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has been under increasing political pressure because of the war in Iraq , was hospitalized Sunday with heart palpitations, his office said. Doctors restored Blair's normal heartbeat with electrical stimulation and he was feeling "fine" at home. |
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When State Sports Committee head Vyacheslav Fetisov announced last month during President Vladimir Putin's visit to the United States that the World Series would be shown in Russia for the first time ever this year, the U. |
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Issues Archive