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 MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin, facing the nation Thursday in his annual televised call-in show, said he would run for a second presidential term and, without mentioning the campaign, laid out a no-nonsense pitch for trying to solve the country's social woes. |
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A Catholic charity has started providing a counselling and support service in St. Petersburg to pregnant women who are thinking of having an abortion. The German-funded charity Caritas says it is worried about Russia's demographic decline. |
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Like most Russian cities, St. Petersburg is infamous for all kinds of violations of human rights - from racially motivated murders and government structures silencing newspapers during the gubernatorial campaign to the hazing in its naval college and the sale of outdated milk. |
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On Thursday after President Vladimir Putin answered questions from citizens on national radio and television channels, Irina Titova asked St. |
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Finger Scans for Visas ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Electronic fingerprint scans will be taken as a biometric form of identity from those applying for visas at the U.S. Consulate General in St. Petersburg from the end of February, Interfax reported Thursday. The U.S. Embassy in Moscow began taking fingerprint scans last week and Russia is one of the 32 countries where the method is being introduced, the report said. It will be compulsory for all U.S. visa applicants worldwide from Oct. 26, 2004. The scans will be made at the same time interviews are conducted, the U.S. consul in Moscow James Petitt, was quoted as saying. From Jan. 5 U.S. |
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 The murder of democratic State Duma deputy Galina Starovoitova that shook the nation in November 1998 finally came under scrutiny in a St. Petersburg city court on Wednesday when the first day of a preliminary hearing began. |
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St. Petersburg anti-globalists on Tuesday won a court case against Alexander Malkevich, the former deputy head of the city's media committee, after he refused them permission to hold a public demonstration in May. The Leninsky district court said Malkevich's decision that the anti-globalists' action was "illegal" was itself unlawful. |
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VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) - Impeachment proceedings began Thursday against Lithuanian President Rolandas Paksas amid allegations his office has close links to the Russian mafia. |
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Corporate governance is a concept that can help a company make money... and make it honestly, Matthew Murray, president of Sovereign Ventures, Inc. told participants in a seminar on the topic Wednesday. The title of the seminar "Corporate Governance: Luxury or Necessity" pointed to trade-offs connected with putting business ethics into practice. |
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MOSCOW - The Russian Trading System, Russia's second-largest bourse by volume, may be closed as the securities market watchdog considers banning trading by negotiation to fight stock price manipulation, daily Kommersant reported Thursday. |
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ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Forty successfully completed internships with European Union companies will help St. Petersburg's universities to receive international accreditation. This was one positive outcome of the Young Petersburg joint educational program highlighted at a conference held Thursday at the St. |
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The amount of excise tax collected from city fuel retailers has risen sharply after Governor Valentina Matviyenko announced that no new gas stations would be built by retailers unless they pay the taxes in St. |
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MOSCOW - Policies advocated by the IMF and World Bank in the 1990s and pursued by early reformers such as Anatoly Chubais were destructive and naive, a United Nations think tank said Wednesday. Egged on by Western consultants, early reformers of Soviet bloc economies - especially Russians like Chubais and Yegor Gaidar - rushed too fast to dismantle the communist system, ignoring the long-term consequences of their actions and the more important issue of institution-building, the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economic Research said at a presentation of its new study on Russia's transition to capitalism. "They did things that were stupid and destructive," Robert McIntyre, who directed the WIDER study, told reporters in Moscow. |
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 MOSCOW - With European Union expansion planned in less than six months, the domestic steel industry is fighting to retain its markets in Eastern Europe. |
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MOSCOW - Forget about Russia's troubled bid for membership in the World Trade Organization - the economy is healthy and set to keep on growing next year. That's the message coming from some of the country's leading economists from the Association of Independent Centers for Economic Analysis. "Economic growth has exceeded all our expectations," Yevsei Gurvich, head of the Finance Ministry's Economic Expert Group, said Wednesday. |
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The results of the Dec. 7 State Duma elections can only be assessed as a complete disaster for Union of Right Forces, as well as for Yabloko - not to mention the other smaller democratic parties. In short, we failed to get over the 5 percent threshold for representation in the Duma. |
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Kremlin fears that ratifying the Kyoto Protocol might put a dent - or worse - in economic growth are well-founded, although not necessarily the way presidential economic adviser Andrei Illarionov explains it. |
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I heard some very encouraging words from Governor Valentina Matviyenko this week: she wants to make St. Petersburg a civilized place. "My general policy is to turn St. Petersburg into a city with a European standard of living," she said in an interview published in Profil. And how? Matviyenko wants to create a good investment climate, stop bribery, relocate half a million St. |
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 Bertrand Burgalat, the French musician and producer, described as the "French genius" and the "French Phil Spector" in his native country, will perform a concert in the city backed by a pair of New York musicians. With such bands as Air and Daft Punk, French acts have had an impact on the international charts lately, leading Neil Tennant of The Pet Shop Boys to state that all interesting contemporary music is coming from France rather than from Great Britain when he spoke to The St. |
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 On the 100th anniversary of his birth, works by the internationaly renowned American artist Mark Rothko are being exhibited for the first time in the country of his birth - Russia. |
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Red Club will host a pair of important concerts this weekend again. Spitfire will launch its new album, "Thrills and Kills," its first in four years, there on Friday, while French artist Bertrand Burgalat will play a concert that he describes as a "kind of happening" on Saturday. |
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Vanilla-scented candles creating a dim, intimate atmosphere drew me in to Vanil, a new, slick cafe on Rubenshteina Ulitsa located behind Dostoyevskaya metro station. |
 A concrete power-station tower, overgrown streets and dreary apartment blocks with smashed-in windows - the backdrop of the new computer game "S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Oblivion Lost" may look strangely familiar. But for the game's Ukrainian developers, the setting literally hits home. "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." is set in the nuclear wreckage of Chernobyl, just a couple of hours away from the office of GSC Games World in Kiev. |
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 Among the finned creatures who wriggle and dart through Disney/Pixar's sparkling aquatic fable, "Finding Nemo," the most comically inspired is a great white shark named Bruce (the voice of Barry Humphries), who glides through the ocean flanked by two menacing sidekicks, Anchor (Eric Bana), a hammerhead, and Chum (Bruce Spence), a mako. |
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Writing guidebooks can be tricky. Trying to capture the essence of any city - never mind one as wrapped up in itself and in myth as St. Petersburg - with words, pictures and maps is a daunting task. Nearly all current guidebooks to St. Petersburg in English are written by strangers to the city, who often do not speak much Russian, and none of them succeed fully in providing a satisfactory guide to the city. |
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Pofigist: someone who doesn't give a damn about anything The Duma election is over, but I still have words associated with it in mind. The turnout (yavka) was sufficient to have it declared legitimate (vybory sostoyalis), and the votes are being counted (idyot podschyot golosov). |
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Iran Allows Inspectors VIENNA, Austria (Reuters) - Tehran on Thursday signed a protocol giving the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog the right to conduct snap nuclear inspections across Iran, a gesture one Western diplomat described as "long overdue." Iran's promise to sign the Additional Protocol to the 1968 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT, comes nearly 18 months after an exiled Iranian opposition group sparked a crisis by saying Tehran was hiding several massive nuclear facilities from the U. |
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TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) - Taiwan's first SARS case in five months raised serious questions Wednesday about how carefully laboratories are handling the virus. |
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