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MOSCOW - A man showed up at the Russian Embassy in Tbilisi a day before the Moscow metro blast and warned that Chechen rebels planned to carry out a "huge" terrorist attack in the capital on Friday, Georgia's state security minister said Monday. The revelation came as investigators said Friday's explosion bore the trademarks of a train suicide bombing in Stavropol last year and Moscow observed a day of mourning. The blast in the metro tunnel near the Avtozavodskaya station killed at least 39 people. President Vladimir Putin has blamed Chechen rebels. Georgian Security Minister Valery Khaburdzania said the man was recruited by authorities in the breakaway region of Abkhazia who knew of the bombing in advance and plotted to place the blame for the attack on Georgia, Interfax reported. |
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 Never leave your ostriches alone. Never try to get too friendly with them either. And most importantly, never assume that farm work is not important for city folk because even Bill Gates would trade in his computer for some bread if he didn't have any. |
 Pale, shaven-headed teenage boys are shuffling in circles, hunched up, their hands bent behind their back, their faces cheerless. "Listen guys, come on, you really make it look as if you are having stomach cramps," says the man standing in front of them. |
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MOSCOW - Three of the six suspects on trial in the high-profile murder of Liberal Russia co-leader and Deputy Sergey Yushenkov acknowledged in a Moscow court on Monday that they had participated in the killing, Interfax reported. |
All photos from issue.
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 MOSCOW - The mystery shrouding the disappearance of presidential candidate Ivan Rybkin deepened Monday, amid conflicting reports of his whereabouts and the abrupt opening and closing of a murder investigation. Local media reported Monday afternoon that police had located Rybkin, a former State Duma speaker who has been bitingly critical of President Vladimir Putin. |
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The famed St. Petersburg State University, one of the top educational institutions in the country, marked its 280th birthday on Sunday. The main celebration took place in the Mariinsky Theater, with many officials in attendance. |
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St. Petersburg police strengthened security measures in the local metro, and in airports, railway stations and other public areas after the explosion in the Moscow metro on Friday. "All of St. Petersburg's metro stations now have a bigger police presence and are also supplied with police sniffer dogs," said Elmar Shakhirzayev, deputy head of St. |
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Police Detain Offical ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - An anti-corruption unit of the police on Friday detained the deputy head of municipal district No. |
 When a powerful explosion ripped through a metro train at rush hour Friday morning, Dmitry Kuznetsov was riding in the packed third car, standing face-to-face with his best friend Sergei Shvelkov and chatting. The two teenagers, both first-year students at the Moscow State Service Academy, were heading to class and had two more stops to go to change lines when the blast stopped the train between the Avtozavodskaya and Paveletskaya stations. |
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MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin, in accusing Chechen rebels of staging the metro bombing, defiantly reiterated Friday that he will never negotiate with "terrorists. |
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MOSCOW - Shocked reaction to Friday's metro bombing is strengthening voices calling for a crackdown on ethnic minorities in the capital and a toughening of state power as the influence of nationalist and hawkish forces rises. In one of the strongest reactions to the blast, Dmitry Rogozin, co-leader of the populist-nationalist Rodina bloc, called for the declaration of a state of emergency and laid the blame for the attack squarely at the feet of "ethnic crime." "It is clear that this terrorist act was an attempt to undermine the power of the state in the country," Rogozin said Friday, Interfax reported. "This was committed on the eve of the presidential elections and the reaction to it should be the harshest. |
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 Irina Khakamada is running for president but her campaign headquarters are not bustling. Phones aren't ringing off the hook and no one is barking instructions. |
 Tough guys living on a shoestring no longer have to dream of owning a boxy, black Mercedes G-Class jeep. Thanks to three brothers from Karachayevo-Cherkessia, there will soon be the Cowboy, a poor man's version of the muscular jeep. The first cars are expected to roll off the assembly line in Cherkessk in a matter of months. |
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MOSCOW - Two of three young women sent to Moscow to be suicide bombers last summer by Chechnya-based Islamic fundamentalists had been ostracized by their families, one of them said in an interview, published in Isvestia newspaper last week. |
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MOSCOW - Before truck driver Vladimir Chagin gets into his 10-ton KamAZ, he never forgets to go to the toilet. That's because, for the last 13 years, Chagin has been in sub-Saharan Africa every January racing in the grueling Paris-Dakar rally. He has won in the last two years "Water is a serious theme" whenever you are in a race that hurtles you at speeds of up to 170 kilometers per hour in the desert heat, Chagin said. Every day for 18 days, Chagin, along with a navigator and mechanic, are strapped into the KamAZ truck - like spacemen in a rocket - and shook continuously by a vehicle that was not built for comfort on Russian roads - let alone Mauritanian tracks. |
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 MOSCOW - Close your eyes and you hear Vladimir Putin and Vladimir Zhirinovsky bantering back and forth. Zhirinovsky is angry, as usual, and Putin occasionally interjects some German gibberish that he picked up during his days as a KGB spook in East Germany. |
 MOSCOW - A veteran Danish reporter who wrote articles critical of the war in Chechnya and human rights violations has been denied a Russian visa. Danish Prime Minister Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen last week criticized the decision as worrisome, while media watchdog Reporters Without Borders said it was tantamount to censorship. |
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 Why go to Calcutta when you can get all your software outsourcing requirements filled in St. Petersburg, the cultural capital of Russia? The question, put at the Technology Leadership Forum held in St. Petersburg on Wednesday by Andrei Narvsky, co-chair of the American Chamber of Commerce Information Technology Committee, revealed the competitive nature of the outsourcing market. Russia is second to India as a supplier of offshore software programs. |
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 MOSCOW - Going, going ... gone? With the unseemly Intourist already gone and the imposing Moskva going, Mayor Yury Luzkhov is now looking to score an unprecedented hotel-bashing hat trick by bringing down the Rossiya, the biggest eyesore of them all. |
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MOSCOW - The Ministries of Finance and Economic Development and Trade have agreed on proposals to increase the tax burden on the oil sector by roughly $3.5 billion a year, Kommersant reported Friday. The newspaper cited sources in both ministries as saying a compromise was reached that the tax burden should be increased by raising export duties and the mineral extraction tax. Analysts said changes would bite heavily into corporate profits. "If approved, the tax increase would be significant, tugging down oil company valuations by more than 30 percent," said Troika Dialog. The two ministries have yet to reach agreement with the Energy Ministry, which has proposed a much sharper taxation increase of around $6 billion, ahead of a government meeting later this month to discuss ideas for new taxes. |
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 KUBINKA, Moscow Region- Alexander Nachyovkin doesn't exactly turn swords into plowshares, but he has managed to give this drab garrison town hope for a future in the civilian economy. |
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MOSCOW - Already locked in a legal battle over its license to operate in the lucrative Moscow market, national No. 2 cellular operator Vimpelcom is now being investigated for possible tax evasion, according to media reports. Citing an unnamed Communications Ministry official, Vedomosti reported Friday that the Interior Ministry's economic crimes department is probing alleged illegal tax-minimization schemes used by the company and that the Communications Ministry is actively cooperating. |
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Not much time has elapsed since Chapter 30 of the Tax Code "On property tax on organizations" was introduced on Jan. 1, 2004. But thanks to considerable changes in the object of taxation, the tax base and concessions, many taxpayers will need more time to become accustomed to the new law. |
 Henri Everaars, consul general of the Netherlands, knew about St. Petersburg from an early age. After all, everyone in Everaars's hometown of Zaandam knows the story of the confident, eager-eyed Russian youth Peter Mikhailov who came to the town in 1697 to learn the art of shipbuilding. |
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Russia's railways are in the midst of a remarkable transformation. Two years ago, the system was entirely a creature of the Railways Ministry, a "Country within a country," and the enterprise was completely owned, operated, and regulated by the government. |
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Who said the Yukos affair was a threat to the private sector? Two weeks ago we saw solid proof to the contrary: A private company won the right to operate state-owned Sheremetyevo Airport. The tender was won by a subsidiary of Mikhail Fridman's Alfa Group. |
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Two major events that influenced the market last week were the explosion on the Moscow subway, killing 39 people and injuring more than 100, and the growing conflict between the Prosecutor's Office and Vimpelcom. |
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Politics and international relations are hardly exact sciences. But the notion that democracies do not go to war with each other is one of the most widely accepted and empirically verified "laws" that exists in the field of political science. |
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The committee on economic development, industrial policy and trade has recently drafted what is, in essence, Governor Valentina Matviyenko's program for her first term. |
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"Moscow does not negotiate with terrorists - it destroys them." - President Vladimir Putin responding to Friday's terror attack. About this time last year, a group of fifteen armed and masked men - from their accents, Russian soldiers - arrived at the home of a Chechen family and seized two brothers, Kharon and Aslanbek. |
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Team Spirit The confession by the Bush Administration's chief arms investigator that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction before the war has sent a thunderbolt of puzzlement through the pundits and politicians of the Anglo-American elite. |
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Issues Archive