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After heavily criticizing the draft city budget for 2004 from the podium of the Legislative Assembly, lawmakers passed it in the first reading Wednesday with 41 votes for, one against and one abstention. The draft estimates 83.9 billion rubles ($2.8 billion) of expenditures and 80.2 billion rubles ($2.6 billion) of revenues, which is 8.8 percent and 6 percent more than for this year, respectively. A deficit, which is estimated at 3.7 billion rubles ($200 million), was put in the budget to keep capital expenditures at a level of 23 percent of the whole budget, or 19 billion rubles ($632 million), Governor Valentina Matviyenko said when lobbying for the draft at the Legislative Assembly session. |
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 One of the most important Russian Orthodox icons, the Virgin of Tikhvin, is to be returned to Russia from the United States next summer. "I hope the return of the icon will become an unforgettable event for Russia's Orthodox people," Interfax quoted Father Yevfimy, a senior priest at the Tikhvin Assumption Monastery, located 218 kilometers east of St. |
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The relentless tax investigation into Yukos veered openly into politics for the first time Thursday as prosecutors raided a public relations agency hired by the Yukos-funded liberal Yabloko party, detaining two of the party's deputies and confiscating $700,000 in cash and five computer servers containing campaign information. |
All photos from issue.
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While the Legislative Assembly has delayed the naming of some members of Governor Valentina Matviyenko's new government as two more readings of a law on forming the city government are passed, at least two names of likely candidates to fill the seven vacant vice governor's positions in City have become public. |
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More Radicals in City ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - St. Petersburg law enforcement bodies are concerned about the growth in the number of young people belonging to informal extreme organizations, Interfax reported Wednesday. |
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Dutch citizen Natalya Zhirova arrived from Amsterdam last October with her husband, Oleg, and 14-year-old son, Dima. Wanting to familiarize her son with his heritage, Zhirova took him one year ago Thursday to watch "Nord Ost," a musical based on her favorite childhood book. Zhirova, 39, was the first victim to be identified after special services pumped a knockout gas into the air ducts of the Dubrovka theater and stormed it three days later, ending a standoff with 41 Chechen rebels who had seized the theater and the 800 people inside. |
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MOSCOW - Eurocopter, the world's leading helicopter company, is in talks with Irkut to assemble its choppers in Russia in order to tap the country's booming oil and gas services market, a Eurocopter spokesman said Thursday. "We are negotiating with Irkut, but nothing is signed yet," the spokesman, Jean-Louis Espes, said by phone from his company's headquarters near Marseille, France. Eurocopter is a subsidiary of European aerospace giant EADS. Alexei Fyodorov, president of the Irkutsk-based Irkut Corp., which makes Sukhoi fighter jets as well as special-mission craft, said Irkut is also interested in eventually producing Eurocopter parts here to save costs. |
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 MOSCOW - The Lithuanian government will not interfere with LUKoil's plans to develop the D-6 offshore oil field on the Baltic Sea shelf, Lithuanian Prime Minister Algirdas Brazauskas told Izvestia in an interview published Tuesday. |
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MOSCOW - Markets tumbled for a second day Wednesday as the nation's largest companies closed ranks in a concerted appeal to President Vladimir Putin to step in and stop prosecutors from "discrediting" Russian businesses. A joint letter signed by representatives of three lobby groups - the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, or RSPP, the OPORA small business union, and Business Russia - slammed the ongoing legal assault on Yukos without naming the company. |
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MOSCOW - It could just be clever accounting. But it might be shrewd investing; or even old-fashioned black-marketeering; or some combination of all three. |
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MINSK, Belarus - Belarus' KGB secret service said Wednesday that it had detained several top managers of the country's biggest mobile operator on charges of embezzlement and abuse of power. The KGB said the probe was aimed at the individuals rather than the company, Mobile Digital Communications, which operates under the Velcom brand and is jointly owned by Belarussian state telecom companies and Cyprus firm SB Telecom. |
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MOSCOW - Some 20 banks have spirited almost $9 billion out of the country this year through fraudulent contracts, mostly for financial services, Central Bank chief Sergei Ignatyev said at a closed meeting Wednesday. |
 MOSCOW - Tired of his face appearing on vodka bottles and in pasta ads, the first and last president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, has finally decided to trademark his famous forehead, name, and nickname (Gorby), his spokesman said Thursday. Vladimir Polyakov, spokesman for the Gorbachev Foundation, declined to go into details about the trademark, saying only that it is applicable "worldwide. |
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At the entrance of the Barclay Hotel in the historic heart of Tartu, the second city of the Baltic republic of Estonia, there is a new plaque made of black marble. Its message is very simple: "The first president of the Chechen republic Ichkeria, General Dzhokhar Dudayev, worked in this house from 1987 to 1991. |
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One year on from the tragic events at the Dubrovka theater, Chechnya has a Moscow-orchestrated constitutional referendum and presidential election behind it, but has anything really been done to tackle the underlying causes of terrorism or to reduce the possibility of another 'Nord Ost" happening? With national elections looming - both parliamentary and presidential - the administration's overriding priority has been to ensure that Chechnya is a "non-issue" and that it does not blow up (literally or figuratively) in President Vladimir Putin's face. |
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Some might say I am biased when I comment on Governor Valentina Matviyenko's appointments to the new city government because 7 years ago I was involved directly in a conflict with one of them, Alla Manilova, head of City Hall's media committee. I can, however, justify what I say when I tell you that the city's new media boss' track record is not about promoting open debate about city concerns, but about serving the interests of the authorities. |
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 Despite being one of Russia's best-selling bands, St. Petersburg-based ska-punk group Leningrad is banned from playing major concerts in Moscow, reportedly because Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov dislikes its explicit lyrics. But, in its first regular release since February 2002, the band shot back with a new album on Tuesday. Entitled "Dlya Millionov" (For Millions), the 15-track album was conceived as a departure from past Leningrad releases, which the band's frontman and songwriter Sergei Shnurov recently described as "anachronisms. |
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 NAIVE, one of Russia's oldest and most notorious punk bands, will play a concert at Stary Dom as part of a Russian tour to showcase its new album, released on A&B Records on Oct. |
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This week brings Joe Zawinul, best-known to an average old rock fan for his work with the influential fusion band Weather Report that he helped to found. As part of Baltic Jazz Festival, Zawinul was to perform at an open-air event at Peter and Paul Fortress this summer, but shortly before the date the festival posters disappeared from the streets. |
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Paper, fireworks, McDonald's; the Chinese invented them all. Well, not McDonald's exactly, but the idea of fast food served in a branded restaurant, instantly recognizable by one and all the world over. |
 The latest exhibition to open at the Anna Akhmatova Museum is merely the most recent example of the important role the institution has played in the city's cultural life since its creation in 1989. Thanks to the energy of its creator and director Nina Popova, the museum has accumulated an important collection of materials devoted to the life and art of poet Anna Akhmatova and her contemporaries. |
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 The Baltic Jazz Festival, bedevilled by problems since its inception earlier this year, will attempt a second coming next week at Yubileiniy Sports Palace with an appearance by Joe Zawinul, one of the most influential figures in jazz of the last forty years. |
 Since making his feature debut in 1992 with the do-it-yourself masterpiece "El Mariachi," Robert Rodriguez has become a mild-mannered, self-effacing darling of Hollywood, an action director whose dexterity in camerawork, editing and even composing music is equaled by his innate sense of what appeals to young viewers. |
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In his latest book, Michael Moore reveals the identity of his favorite political candidate: someone who bracingly advocates "a free country, a safe country, a peaceful country that genuinely shares its riches with the less fortunate around the world, a country that believes in everyone getting a fair shake, and where fear is seen as the only thing we need to fear. |
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Mezhdusoboychik: an event for insiders, an event just between friends; a heart-to-heart talk. Over the years, I've developed a mental list of handy Russian words that express very succinctly a concept that is hard to express in English. Some of them I love, because they put into a Russian nutshell something you can barely fit into an English coconut shell. |
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Loko Shock MOSCOW (Reuters) - Lokomotiv Moscow shattered the 100 percent record of Inter Milan in this season's Champions League on Tuesday with a shock 3-0 victory over the Italians at the Lokomotiv Stadium. Lokomotiv, which had not scored a goal in its opening two Group B matches, produced a superb display against an Inter team still reeling after the sacking of its Argentine coach Hector Cuper on Sunday. |
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