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Provider Blocks Sites Of Political Activists
Opposition activists say one of the leading Russian Internet providers is practicing “political censorship” by denying access to oppositional web sites for its clients. Clients of the Internet provider Beeline, the trademark of the Moscow-based VimpelCom group of companies, have been denied access to the web sites of oppositional politician and author Eduard Limonov and his banned National-Bolshevik Party (NBP) since last week. VimpelCom said that the web sites had been blocked by a court order, but the sites in question are not listed as banned in the Ministry of Justice’s Federal Register of Extremist ... |
Yanukovych Retains Lead in Election
 KIEV, Ukraine — International monitors on Monday hailed Ukraine’s presidential election as “professional, transparent and honest,” increasing pressure ... |
Film, Theater Star Samokhina Dies Aged 47
 Anna Samokhina, one of Russia’s most admired film and theater actresses, who was sometimes referred to as the Russian Marilyn Monroe, died of stomach cancer ... |
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Latvian Ghost Town Sold for $3.1 Million
SKRUNDA, Latvia — Latvia sold a deserted town built around a Soviet-era radar station to a Russian investor who bid $3.1 million at an unusual auction ... |
Health Official Fired Over Disagreement
MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin dismissed Nikolai Yurgel, head of the Federal Health and Social Development Inspection Service, from his post on ... |
Lavrov Says NATO, OSCE Are Ineffective
MOSCOW — Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov lambasted the present state of European security on Saturday, calling it ineffective and outdated, but he failed ... |
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Blood on Sofa Proved to Be Pushkin’s
 St. Petersburg’s forensic experts have confirmed that the bloodstains found on the sofa on which the famed 19th-century Russian poet and author Alexander Pushkin is said to have died in 1837 were indeed left by the poet. “The results of our medical research allow us to state that it is the poet’s blood on this historic sofa,” Yury Molin, deputy head of the Leningrad Oblast legal and medical department, said at a press conference in the city’s Pushkin Apartment Museum on Monday. The painstaking year-long research proved firstly that the blood on the sofa was located on the exact spot where Pushkin’s wound would have been bleeding. “For that purpose the researchers put a paper model of Pushkin’s body on the sofa, and then put the waistcoat Pushkin was wearing ... |
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| Russian Orthodox believers pray at Smolenskoye Cemetery on Vasilyevsky Island on Sunday, the day after the saint’s day of Kseniya the Blessed, who is considered to be the patron saint of St. Petersburg. |
Deputy Charged With Sex Crimes
The St. Petersburg prosecutor’s office has opened a criminal investigation into a 50-year-old former history teacher and deputy of the city’s Primorsky district municipal authority suspected of numerous charges of pedophilia. Andrei Smirnov, who also headed a children’s society called Tsarskoye Selo, has been arrested and charged under article 132 part 3 of the Russian Criminal Code (violent actions of a sexual nature committed against an underage person,) according to the web site of the St. Petersburg prosecutor’s investigative department. Smirnov has been charged with ... |
Two Property Officials Arrested
MOSCOW — Two former senior officials with the Federal Property Agency have been arrested on suspicion of extorting a $340,000 bribe from a Moscow university official, the Investigative Committee said Monday. Sergei Korchagin, former head of the agency’s Moscow branch, and Dmitry Knyazev, head of the branch’s property registration department, are suspected of extorting 10.5 million rubles ($344,000) from a deputy dean of the Moscow State Academy of Water Transport in December, the committee said in a statement. The suspects purportedly demanded the money in exchange for registering real estate used by the academy and threatened to confiscate property from the institute if the academy official did not pay the bribe, the Investigative Committee said. |
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Putin Warns United Russia to Hear the People
 MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Friday called on United Russia leaders to stay in touch with the people and warned the party against bamboozling ... |
Pro-Kremlin Spin Doctors Admit to Smear Campaign
MOSCOW — A group of former United Russia political operatives in the Saratov region have claimed responsibility for smear campaigns targeting political enemies of State Duma Deputy Vyacheslav Volodin, a senior party leader. The editors and writers of the web site Conspirology.org told a news conference Thursday that they had been hired by Duma Deputy Nikolai Pankov of United Russia to organize surreptitious media campaigns and stunts to discredit various regional and federal officials at odds with Volodin. On Pankov’s orders, the men behind the web ... |
Police Chief Assassinated in Makhachkala
MOSCOW — The police chief of Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, was shot dead in his car Friday, one of 16 people killed in a string of attacks in the North Caucasus. At least six insurgents and five Russian troops were killed in gunbattles in the mountains of Chechnya, while five people were killed in attacks in Makhachkala, officials said. President Dmitry Medvedev has called the violence Russia’s biggest domestic political problem and last month appointed Krasnoyarsk Governor Alexander Khloponin, a former businessman, as his envoy to the newly ... |
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Developer Accused of Damaging Ecology of Neva Bay
 Local scientists are claiming that the Marine Facade project and other construction on reclaimed land is a threat to the ecological situation in the Neva ... |
Opening of Shtokman Pushed Back by 3 Years
MOSCOW — Gazprom and its partners have delayed the planned start of natural-gas output at the Arctic Shtokman field by three years as global fuel supply outweighs demand. Shtokman Development, the joint venture that operates the first phase of the project, intends to start gas output in 2016 and begin processing the fuel into liquefied natural gas in 2017, the partners said Friday in an e-mailed statement. “Acknowledging changes in the market situation and particularly in the LNG market,” Shtokman Development will make a final investment decision on gas production first ... |
In Brief
Bavarian Business ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The Days of Bavarian Economics in St. Petersburg will take place this week from Wednesday to Friday. A delegation of Bavarian businessmen headed by Martin Zeil, Bavaria’s economics minister and deputy prime minister, will come to the city to forge contacts with local companies and organizations. In a statement, Zeil said that the best opportunities for cooperation are in the automobile industry, energy-efficient construction, the adoption of resource-saving production methods and innovative methods of waste recycling, ... |
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Stocks Fall on Foreign Fears
MOSCOW — World markets took a beating last week as problems in several European economies and U.S. jobs data spooked investors, but despite the bad news ... |
Chigirinsky Loses Moscow Hotel Lawsuit
MOSCOW — The Moscow Arbitration Court on Friday dismissed a lawsuit against City Hall filed by exiled tycoon Shalva Chigirinsky’s ST Development, which ... |
Credit Risks, Bubbles Named as Main Threats
MOSCOW — Russia’s central bank views credit risks and the possibility of an equity market bubble as the main threats to the economy, the central bank’s ... |
 Ruble Hits 7-Week Low Against Dollar on Oil
MOSCOW — The ruble weakened to a seven-week low versus the dollar Monday as oil traded near $71 a barrel. The Russian currency depreciated 0.5 percent to 30.4838 per dollar by 11.15 a.m. in Moscow, heading for its weakest close since Dec. 22. It was little ... |
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 Troika’s Top Economist on What to Expect in 2010
With 2009 — a year of fluctuating currency rates, sagging stock markets and virtually non-existent credit — safely behind us, financial analysts are making predictions for 2010 and even finding a silver lining in the cloud of the global economic crisis. ... |
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The Innovation Myth
The other day my daughter asked me an unexpected question: “What is innovation?” How can we understand this word so often repeated by Russia’s politicians and economists? The innovation economy that they are talking about does not offer solutions to the ... |
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 The Yanukovych Wild Card
Although the official results of the second round of Ukraine’s presidential election have not been announced, it is clear that the country’s next president will be Viktor Yanukovych. Over the past three weeks, Yulia Tymoshenko failed to close the 10-point ... |
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Russia Is No Longer Cool
Four years ago during the 20th Winter Olympics, the Russia House was by far the hottest party venue in Turin. It even had an open-air ice skating rink on the roof, where skaters were treated to free shots of vodka and an unending parade of scantily clad ... |
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Mid-Atlantic Digs Out of Snow, Government Shut
 WASHINGTON — The federal government was shuttered Monday while the Mid-Atlantic region dug out from as much as three feet of snow that left tens of thousands ... |
Iran Says It Will Raise Uranium Enrichment
VIENNA — Iran on Monday told the UN nuclear agency that it will start enriching uranium to higher levels, shrugging off international fears that such a move will bring it closer to being able to make nuclear warheads. Iranian envoy Ali Asghar Soltanieh sought to dispel such concerns. The uranium to be enriched to 20 percent would be used only to make fuel for Tehran’s research reactor, which is expected to use up its present stock within a year, he said. Soltanieh, who represents Iran at the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, also said that IAEA inspectors would be ... |
Space Shuttle Blasts Off on Last Night Flight
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — Endeavour and six astronauts rocketed into orbit Monday on what’s likely the last nighttime launch for the shuttle program, hauling a new room and observation deck for the International Space Station. The space shuttle took flight before dawn, igniting the sky with a brilliant flash seen for miles around. The weather finally cooperated: Thick, low clouds that had delayed a first launch attempt Sunday returned, but then cleared away just in time. “Looks like the weather came together tonight,” launch director Mike Leinbach told the astronauts right before ... |
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17 Soldiers Dead, 53 Rescued In Kashmir Avalanche
SRINAGAR, India — A massive avalanche plowed into an Indian army training center at a ski resort town in Indian-controlled Kashmir on Monday, killing 17 soldiers and critically injuring 17 others. The avalanche slammed into the army’s High Altitude Warfare ... |
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 Afghan Escape Film ‘Kandahar’ Pulls in Crowds
“Kandahar,” a new blockbuster that looks at an almost forgotten escape from captivity in the heart of Afghanistan, is packing in crowds at cinemas all over the country. The film, which stars a trio of the country’s most famous actors, Vladimir Mashkov, ... |
 Historian Robert Service Selects Top 5 Books on Totalitarianism
Robert Service is professor of Russian studies at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. His research interests cover Russian history from the late 19th century to the present day, and he has written numerous books on the subject. He talks about the books that ... |
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 Trail of Shadowy Arms Deal Leads to Kazakhstan
SHYMKENT, Kazakhstan — The trail of the plane busted in Thailand in December 2009 for allegedly smuggling North Korean weapons to Iran leads back to a small airfreight company housed near an old Soviet airfield on the edge of the Kazakh steppe. The aging ... |
