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TNK-BP Chief Hit By New Headaches
 MOSCOW — The Federal Migration Service has until Saturday to decide whether to extend the visa of TNK-BP CEO Robert Dudley, in a key decision in the shareholder ... |
Murder of Last Tsar Marked 90 Years Later
 Russia on Thursday marked the 90th anniversary of the murder of the last tsar, Nicholas II, and his family, a day after investigators announced that DNA ... |
Khodorkovsky Challenges Medvedev Over Parole
MOSCOW — Former Yukos chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky applied for parole on Wednesday in a bid to challenge President Dmitry Medvedev to follow through on promises to build an independent judiciary, his lawyers said. The case could be the first test of Medvedev’s desire to enforce the rule of law in a country that consistently ranks near the bottom of corruption rankings, said Igor Trunov, a high-profile lawyer not connected to the Khodorkovsky case. Medvedev has kicked off his presidency with promises to combat rampant corruption and “legal nihilism,” yet critics remain skeptical as to whether rhetoric will be transformed into ... |
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eXile Returns Online After Paper’s Closure
The defunct alternative Moscow biweekly The eXile has launched a new web site, a month after its investors withdrew funding following a government inspection of its editorial content. The new site, http://exiledonline.com, went up Monday and appears to ... |
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Anti-Skyscraper Movement Collects Petition Signatures
Living City, a pressure group that lobbies for the preservation of St. Petersburg’s historic center and heritage buildings, has collected nearly 2,000 signatures in a petition against skyscraper construction close to the city’s historic center, activist ... |
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Court Rejects Bid to Annul Elections
MOSCOW — The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a request by the Communist Party to have the results of the State Duma elections annulled on the grounds of what the party described as massive electoral violations. Judge Nikolai Tolcheyev issued a short ruling to wrap up the two-day hearing, saying only that the court had decided to dismiss the complaint and that the full ruling would be issued in writing in the coming days. The Communists presented 12,000 documents as evidence of electoral fraud in the Dec. 2 elections, in which they captured 11.6 percent of the vote, far behind the 64 percent garnered by pro-Kremlin party United Russia, which now has a constitutional majority ... |
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| The four-masted Russian tall ship Kruzenshtern enters the Bay of Douarnenez in France on Thursday as part of an armada taking part in the Douarnenez 2008 maritime festival. |
Napolitano Backs New Security Pact
MOSCOW — Italian President Giorgio Napolitano on Wednesday praised Russian proposals for new broad security framework for Europe, saying he would promote ... |
Uncut Text of Solzhenitsyn’s ‘First Circle’ Due in English
NEW YORK — An uncut edition of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “The First Circle,” a highly praised and controversial novel published 40 years ago and heavily edited because of its story of a Soviet prison camp, is coming out in English. “‘The First Circle’ is one of the most important novels of the 20th century, and we are thrilled to be making this masterpiece available in its full glory,” Carrie Kania, senior vice president and publisher of Harper Perennial, said in a statement Tuesday. Harper Perennial, a paperback imprint of HarperCollins, will release “The First Circle” in 2009. Solzhenitsyn, 89, winner in 1970 of the Nobel Prize in literature, returned to Russia in the 1990s and ... |
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German Peace Plan Gets Cool Response
TBILISI — Germany’s foreign minister received a cool response Thursday to a peace plan drawn up in Berlin aimed at ending a dangerous dispute over the separatist Georgian region of Abkhazia. Frank-Walter Steinmeier started a two-day trip in Tbilisi that ... |
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Russia Freezes Foreign Loans for Next Three Years
 The Finance Ministry announced last month that Russia does not intend to take out foreign loans between 2009 and 2011 because the federal budget has enough ... |
Locals Protest Against Second Timber Plant Near Novgorod
The German wood-based panel product manufacturer Pfleiderer laid the first stone for the building of its second plant on Monday near the village of Podberyozie in the Novgorod Oblast, where around 30 locals staged a picket protesting in German against the construction. The protesters believe that the plant, which the company hopes will double its production rates by 2010, may endanger lives and worsen the ecology of the district. Pfleiderer AG is currently being sued by a person who claims that he developed a disease due to the production. Veliky Novgorod City Court has demanded ... |
Mayor’s Wife Denies Buying Mansion
MOSCOW — Yelena Baturina, the country’s wealthiest woman and wife of Mayor Yury Luzhkov, on Wednesday denied a report in a British newspaper that she had bought a luxurious London residence for $100 million. The Daily Mail Online reported that Baturina purchased Witanhurst — the second-largest private estate in London, after Buckingham Palace — for 50 million pounds. A spokeswoman at Inteko, Baturina’s construction and real estate company, denied the purchase and attributed the story to rumors. The 3,700-square-meter mansion, currently with “holes in the ceilings and crumbling ... |
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Building Begins On Biggest Power Plant
SURGUT, Russia — Germany’s E.ON began building two 400 megawatt turbines at a power station in Russia’s oil heartland, which when completed would make ... |
25 SuperJet Orders Taken at Farnborough
FARNBOROUGH, England — Sukhoi Civil Aircraft and Finmeccanica said their SuperJet airliner venture won orders for 25 planes worth about $750 million at ... |
In Brief
Russia Takes the Lead ST. PETERSBURG (Bloomberg) — Russia surpassed Germany as Europe’s biggest auto market in the first half as sales rose 41 percent ... |
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 Moscow’s Creeping Annexation
There is war in the air between Georgia and Russia. Such a war could destabilize a region critical for Western energy supplies and ruin relations between Russia and the West. A conflict over Georgia could become an issue in the U.S. presidential campaign. ... |
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FSB Blues
Things have not been going so well for our siloviki. The BBC ran an interview on July 7 with an anonymous high-ranking agent of Britain’s MI5 counterespionage unit who declared that Russian authorities were behind the poisoning death in London of former ... |
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Colombia Admits Using Red Cross Sign
BOGOTA — Colombia misused the symbol of the Red Cross in this month’s military rescue of politician Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other rebel-held hostages, it said on Wednesday, admitting a possible violation of the rules of war. “We regret that this occurred,” President Alvaro Uribe said in a speech following reports that the Red Cross emblem was displayed on a jersey or T-shirt worn by a Colombian intelligence officer who took part in the rescue mission. Falsely portraying military personnel as Red Cross members is against the Geneva Conventions as it could put humanitarian workers at risk when they are in war zones. Uribe ... |
Pope Speaks Out on Consumption Threat
 SYDNEY — Pope Benedict on Thursday told a huge gathering of young people that they were inheriting a planet whose resources had been scarred and squandered ... |
France Denies Citizenship to Veiled Muslim
PARIS — The case started quietly, when a Muslim woman who sheaths herself in a head-to-toe veil was denied French citizenship because she had not assimilated enough into this society. France’s highest body upheld the decision, and politicians across the spectrum agreed it was the right move. A few dissenting voices, though, are now questioning whether the decision pushed France’s secularist values too far. “Where does it begin or end? What are we calling radical behavior?” asked Mohammed Bechari, president of the National Federation of French Muslims. “Will we see a man refused citizenship because of the length ... |
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S. Korea Markets Cloning of Pets
SEOUL — Two South Korean labs are offering pet owners the chance to clone dogs, but for those looking to bring back a beloved beagle, be ready to wait in line and have plenty of cash on hand. The Seoul-based labs -- one affiliated to RNL Bio Co and the ... |
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Rock and revolution
 The Manic Street Preachers, the seminal British rock band formed in Blackwood, Wales, in 1991, always aimed to bring rock music and revolution together. ... |
Chernov’s
choice
The street cred of Gogol Bordello has been perhaps affected by its Ukraine-born frontman Eugene Hutz’s recent collaborations with Madonna. He appeared with the pop diva to perform “La Isla Bonita / Lela Pala Tute” at the London Live Earth concert in July 2007, and, earlier this year, starred in her directorial debut, the film “Filth and Wisdom.” Whether it has affected the band’s live performances, can be checked out on Wednesday, when Gogol Bordello will make its St. Petersburg debut by taking part in a music event called Afisha’s Music at Lenexpo’s Pavillion 8A. Speaking to The St. Petersburg Times in December 2006, before Gogol Bordello’s first Russian concert in Moscow, Hutz denied he played with the stereotype of a “wild man from the East.” “I don’t play with any stereotype, ... |
Living history
 Veliky Novgorod is a quiet, clean town with green spaces and fresh air 190 kilometers south of St. Petersburg, and a pleasant place to escape to from the ... |
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Close shots
 You would have thought that the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 had been picked over by historians, memoirists, political scientists, filmmakers, conference ... |
The storyteller
I want to hate David Benioff. He’s annoyingly handsome. He’s already written a pair of unputdownable books, one of which was made into Spike Lee’s most heartbreaking film, “The 25th Hour” — for which Benioff was asked to write the screenplay, leading to a second career in Hollywood. (They should just get it over with and put the man in the movies already.) He takes his morning orange juice next to Amanda Peet. And he’s still in his 30s. See what I mean? Benioff’s new novel reveals why there are so many Russians — not oligarchs or prostitutes, but soldiers and old babushkas — in this ... |
And the winner is...
 The British chose Winston Churchill; the Americans chose Ronald Reagan; and the South Africans chose Nelson Mandela. Now Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ... |
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Bastille Day on the beach
 Although France celebrated its national holiday, as always, on July 14 (Monday), St. Petersburg’s traditional Bastille Day celebration will take place ... |
Olympian heights
Sochi Restaurant // 30 Bolshoi Prospekt, Petrograd Side (above Captain Morgan casino). Tel: 230 7230. www.r-sochi.com // Open noon through midnight. Menu in Russian only. Dinner for two 3,210 rubles ($138) Blame it on the International Olympic Committee. By selecting the southern Russian resort of Sochi to host the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, the town, remembered by generations of Russians as a long-gone Soviet idyll for hot and happy childhood holidays, is suddenly fashionable again. Not one but two establishments called Sochi have opened for business in St. Petersburg ... |
Gathering no moss
 As you scrutinize the aging bodies of the Rolling Stones in Martin Scorsese’s rip-roaring concert documentary “Shine a Light,” there is ample evidence ... |
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Tour de France Marred by Series of Dope Scandals
 LAVELANET, France — The Tour de France was rocked by a third positive doping scandal Thursday following the news that Italian Riccardo Ricco tested positive ... |
British Open Marked by Inclement Weather
SOUTHPORT, England — Forget the leaderboard. The whipping wind and soaking rain were getting the best of everyone at Royal Birkdale. The British Open got off to a cold, soggy start Thursday, with storms rolling off the Irish Sea turning the historic links course into a house of horrors. Phil Mickelson lost a ball in the tangly rough. Sandy Lyle quit after 10 holes. Vijay Singh was 10 over through 11 holes. Tiger Woods couldn’t have picked a better time to miss his first major since 1996. He was back home in the States, all warm and comfy as he recovered from knee surgery. Certainly, Kenny Perry must have been chuckling to himself after taking all that grief for deciding to skip the oldest of the majors because he didn’t think it suited his game. “It got to the point where you just ... |
Ronaldinho Arrives in Milan Amid Expectations From Fans and Coach
MILAN — Ronaldinho arrived at AC Milan’s training ground on Wednesday where he was due to undergo a medical and sign a three-year contract. Barcelona agreed late on Tuesday to sell the Brazil forward for an initial fee of 21 million euros ($33.5 million) following two days of talks with Milan chief executive Adriano Galliani. Ronaldinho and Galliani flew into Milan earlier on Wednesday and went straight to the Milanello training ground where the squad was gathering for the first day of pre-season work. Some 4,000 fans were outside the gates to welcome the 28-year-old playmaker, who was FIFA World Player of the Year in 2004 and 2005 but struggled last season with form and fitness. The formalities of the move will be concluded over the next couple of days and he will then be presented ... |
