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MOSCOW - A senior Iranian official said Monday that Tehran has temporarily halted its uranium enrichment program and would allow tougher UN checks of its nuclear sites, fulfilling a promise it made to France, Germany and Britain last month. Speaking at Kremlin talks and just ahead of the release in Vienna of a new report on UN nuclear inspections in Iran, Hassan Rowhani, head of the Supreme National Security Council, said checks by inspectors from the UN International Atomic Energy Agency would confirm that Iran's nuclear program was peaceful. |
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Russia's non-governmental organizations are feeling down and worthless, with many human rights advocates and environmental activists comparing the fruits of their labor to those of Sisyphus. |
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Fill out the forms in full, pay the fees, answer any questions truthfully, allow enough time and show that you will return to Russia after your visit abroad, and most likely you will get a visa. That was the message to Russian citizens wanting to travel abroad from St. Petersburg consular staff representing six countries at a seminar on visas run by the St. Petersburg International Business Association, or SPIBA, on Wednesday. Many myths are about that it is difficult to get a visa, or that certain people, such as young women, are always refused, the diplomats said. But the rate of refusal is under 5 percent for all countries except for the United States, for which more than 20 percent of applications are unsuccessful, they said. |
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 Riga is only 11 hours by train from St. Petersburg, but it might as well be on the other side of the world. With its clean, evenly paved streets, well-restored buildings and smiling, helpful residents, Latvia's capital is a piece of European heaven energized by newfound sovereignty, and it's right around the corner. |
All photos from issue.
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The instinctive reaction of Russian authorities toward nuclear accidents is to cover them up rather than clarify them and is little different to the attitudes of their Soviet predecessors, Norwegian ecological organization Bellona says. To illustrate its argument, Bellona has just made public for the first time on its web site a transcript of a Politburo meeting chaired by Mikhail Gorbachev after the sinking of Soviet nuclear submarine K-219 in the Sargasso Sea on Oct. |
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The state archive of political movements of the Arkhangelsk region has declassified documents about the Solovetsky Islands territorial communist organization from 1920 to 1991, including material on Solovetsky Camp, the nation's first Soviet concentration camp, on the grounds of a former monastery. |
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MOSCOW - Two sore topics for President Vladimir Putin - the Yukos case and Chechnya - hung in the air during his visit to Europe last week for talks with the European Union hosted in Rome by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, whose colorful defense of Putin launched a diplomatic storm of its own. |
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MOSCOW - Camouflage-clad men raided the Moscow offices of U.S. billionaire George Soros' Open Society Institute late Thursday and then barred employees from the building and hauled away equipment and documents by the truckload, a lawyer for the foundation said. |
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MOSCOW - Couples caught kissing on Moscow's metro could be fined under new regulations being considered by city authorities, according to Stolichnaya Vechernyaya Gazeta's web site on Friday. The ban could even extend to a husband embracing his wife, the newspaper said. |
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MOSCOW - The oil giant Yukos, already battered by the jailing of its head amid a politically tinged probe, also faces allegations of letting rabbits mate without supervision and of mistreating pigs, news reports said Thursday. |
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MOSCOW - A federal court in Krasnoyarsk has upheld a request by Moscow prosecutors to strip a key Yukos shareholder of his parliamentary immunity in the latest legal move against the oil giant. The ruling by the court in the Siberian city could now leave Vasily Shakhnovsky open to prosecution for large-scale tax evasion, which he has already been charged with. |
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MOSCOW - Enterprises that privatize the land on which they stand say they can't afford to pay the government's price, although they've had three years to resolve the issue. As the Jan. 1 deadline looms closer, the issue of land registration as set out in the 2001 Land Code has emerged as the $100 billion question to which the government is still working on an answer. The Land Code stipulates that much of the land currently in use by private enterprise must be "re-registered" - that is, purchased or claimed under a long-term lease from the government by Jan. 1, 2004. But the country's biggest business lobby group, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, or RSPP, calculates that the total sum due on New Year's Day adds up to $106 billion, or one quarter of the country's GDP in 2003 - a cost, the RSPP claims, Russian businesses can little afford to pay. |
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 MOSCOW - With the election season officially under way, the co-chairman of the Union of Right Forces, or SPS, has begun the ambitious task of sending a personally signed letter to 30 million households promising to make life cheaper. |
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Floating Reactors? MOSCOW (SPT) - The feasibility study for a project to build a floating low-output nuclear power station in Severodvinsk, Arkhangelsk region, was reviewed by Minatom in late October, Interfax reported deputy atomic minister Vladimir Asmolov as saying at a press conference Monday. |
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During the past few years the investment climate in Russia has been marked by competition among the regions to attract investments, both foreign and Russian. |
 Alexandra Bejarano, founder of Artefakti decorations, seems to contradict all business-related stereotypes. In no way could she be called a down-to-earth person whose feathers are not easily ruffled. With her degree in history and a major in Colonial Latin America, experience teaching English and a deep passion for traveling and culture, she does not fit. |
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LONDON - The Federal Securities Commission plans to extend a probe into bond-price gains that occurred about half an hour before Moody's Investors Service raised the country's credit ratings last month. |
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Despite considerable economic growth over the past year, St. Petersburg is still failing to capitalize on its potential for foreign direct investment in the city. While St. Petersburg does attract much higher levels of foreign investment than the neighboring Leningrad Oblast, a small - and decreasing - amount is in the form of foreign direct investment. |
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The arrest of Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky has hastened serious changes in the balance of power within the Russian political establishment - perhaps the most profound changes since Vladimir Putin became president. |
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Former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky is sitting in Matrosskaya Tishina; prosecutors froze 44 percent of Yukos' shares; Alexander Voloshin, head of the presidential administration, tendered his resignation. Russia is in the midst of a crisis, and all thanks to Khodorkovsky. |
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Russia is full of fear. Businessmen, politicians - all those who stick their heads above the parapet - are afraid of President Vladimir Putin. Everybody understands that after a show trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, heads will roll. |
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Did President Vladimir Putin see the irony in being defended by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi when asked in Rome about the case against Yukos chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky? Like Khodorkovsky, Berlusconi is his country's richest man and, as Khodorkovsky may well attempt to do, he parlayed his fortune into election to its highest office. |
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President George W. Bush last week delivered what was billed as a major presidential address, the theme of which was that there is a democracy deficit in the Middle East. |
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Logical Conclusions
"The president, speaking after attacks on police stations and a Red Cross facility in Iraq killed at least 35 people, said such attacks should be seen as a sign of progress because they show the desperation of those who oppose the U.S.-led occupation. "The more successful we are on the ground, the more these killers will react," Bush said . |
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Emergency Royal Birth LONDON (AP) - The Countess of Wessex, wife of the youngest son of Queen Elizabeth II, has given birth to a girl by emergency Caesarean section, Buckingham Palace said Sunday. The palace said the baby, born just before midnight Saturday several weeks prematurely, weighed 4 lbs 9 oz. |
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Issues Archive