A Russian astrologer took legal action against Nasa for compensation on Monday, claiming that the United States space agency’s bombardment of the Tempel 1 comet will upset her horoscope and violates her spiritual rights. Nasa fired a projectile the size of a fridge at the comet on Monday.
Russia’s Bolshoi theatre will undergo a -million overhaul in the next three years, a day after the last performance took place in the legendary building. The current estimated cost is more than twice the amount spent on a recent renovation of the Kremlin, a sum that itself raised eyebrows among Russian commentators.
Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin’s protection service has demanded that Moscow authorities remove the advertising banners that hang across road routes in the centre of the city, complaining that they ”complicate” the task of protecting the president, Izvestiya newspaper said on Wednesday.
Russian police who smelled something amiss when the owners of a Moscow apartment failed to pay their bills found four mummified corpses and a fridge full of out-of-date food. Investigators established that the bodies were those of four family members, who died at intervals over a five-year period.
Yukos oil founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky was found guilty on Tuesday of fraud and tax evasion and sentenced to nine years in prison after a politically charged trial seen by critics as a Kremlin-driven vendetta against Russia’s once-richest man. Defence lawyers have vowed to file an appeal against the verdict and sentence.
A £2,2-billion pipeline that will deliver a million barrels of crude oil a day to the Mediterranean Sea, and is set to become a vital gateway for central Asian energy resources to the West, opened on Wednesday. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline will run for 1 760km from the Azerbaijani capital through Georgia to the Turkish port, and through two of the most politically turbulent countries in the region.
A massive power outage caused chaos in Moscow on Wednesday, stranding about 20 000 people in underground metro tunnels, disrupting traffic above ground and leaving large sections of the Russian capital without electricity. One report said effects were felt as far as Tula, 300km south of Moscow.
Russia is keen to strengthen its cooperation with Algeria and hopes to step up arms sales to the North African country, Russia’s armed forces chief of staff told his visiting Algerian counterpart on Monday. Algeria, which had strong ties with the former Soviet Union, has continued to purchase arms from Russia after the fall of communism in 1991.
Lawyers representing Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky said on Tuesday it is a foregone conclusion their client will be found guilty as judges continued reading the protracted verdict in the controversial trial. For a third day in a row, the Moscow court’s three-judge panel took turns in reading out the mammoth judgement.
Although the military parade through Red Square commemorating the 60th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany on Monday was awash in Soviet-era symbols — on banners, medals and posters — the city’s most powerful Soviet image was almost in hiding. The Lenin mausoleum was blocked by an elaborate platform.
A man in his 40s armed with a knife burst into a Moscow sex shop and threatened a clerk before making off with an life-size inflatable doll and some sexy lingerie, RIA Novosti news agency said on Thursday. The owner of the shop, located opposite Gorky park, estimated the value of the stolen goods at 300 euros ().
Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to reassure skittish investors on Monday in his annual State of the Nation address that rampant tax probes, greedy bureaucrats and a shifting economic playing field will be made things of the past. However, opposition politicians and economic analysts reacted sceptically to Putin’s promises.
Three astronauts at the International Space Station are scheduled to begin their return to earth late on Sunday, accompanied in the Soyuz spacecraft by about 50 live snails, Russian officials said. The snails went into space for experiments and are not intended as appetizers for the astronauts.
Russia has criticised the UN Security Council approved sanctions against Sudan as being counterproductive. Russia — which abstained along with China and Algeria in Tuesday’s 12-0 Security Council vote in favour of the US-sponsored sanctions — also expressed doubts whether the measures could be effectively monitored.
Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin made his pitch to visiting Olympics officials on Wednesday to choose Moscow as host of the 2012 Games, arguing that Russia has drastically changed since hosting the 1980 Olympics, but is still a world sports power. He reminded the officials that ”Russia is one of the great athletic powers in the world”.
The chiefs of Moscow’s Olympics bid committee expressed confidence on Tuesday that existing sport venues were already capable of hosting world-class events, as representatives from the International Olympic Committee continued to evaluate the Russian capital’s bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games.
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/ 9 February 2005
Russia’s Lower House of Parliament on Wednesday turned down a motion of no confidence in the Cabinet of President Vladimir Putin but many legislators demonstrated their disdain for the government by boycotting the vote. Only 112 deputies of the 450-seat State Duma backed the no-confidence motion. The majority did not cast votes.
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/ 9 February 2005
Seventeen prominent Russian human rights activists called on President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday to take up Chechen rebel leader Aslan Maskhadov’s call for negotiations to bring an end to the fighting that has raged in southern Russia for the better part of the past decade.
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/ 3 February 2005
Chechen rebels called for the first ceasefire of the five-year guerrilla war in Russia’s war-torn republic on Thursday but pro-Moscow officials in Chechnya brushed the move off as a ”bluff” while the Kremlin kept silent over the announcement. ”This is all a bluff,” said the Chechen’s state council chief, Taus Dzhabrailov, of the ceasefire call.
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/ 31 January 2005
Russia pledged its ”active” support on Monday for visiting Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas amid growing signs of a revival in the long-dormant Middle East peace process. Abbas said Moscow will play a decisive role in restarting the Israeli-Palestinian talks.
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/ 28 January 2005
Moscow is to build a giant Disneyland-style theme park, which, at 300ha will be three times as big as Mickey Mouse’s home in Florida, artist and project leader Zurab Tsereteli said in the Russian capital on Friday. The Moscow Wonder Park will take between five and seven years to complete on a peninsula in the River Moscow in the south of the city.
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/ 19 January 2005
A core shareholder in the company that owns about 60% of the shattered oil giant Yukos promised in an interview published on Wednesday to sue Russian authorities for the destruction of what was once the nation’s biggest oil producer. Leonid Nevzlin is also wanted by Russian prosecutors in connection with a murder investigation.
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/ 17 January 2005
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexis II, assured his flock on Friday that new identification documents to be introduced in Russia will not contain the "sign of the Antichrist" despite scare-mongering rumors to the contrary, Itar-Tass reported. The patriarch was speaking ahead of a meeting of clerics in Moscow.
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/ 21 December 2004
The cash-rich oil company Surgutneftegaz is the mystery purchaser of the main assets of Russia’s Yukos empire, auctioned for ,35-billion to a shell company, press reports said on Tuesday. The head of Russia’s big business body criticised the opaque sale and warned it will damage the country’s investment image.
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/ 20 December 2004
Yukos’s jailed founder accused the Russian government of ”destroying” the nation’s top oil group on Monday as mystery surrounded the new owner of its crown jewel, widely seen as linked to state-run gas giant Gazprom. In an auction cloaked in secrecy on Sunday, the Russian authorities sold Yukos’s main subsidiary to an unknown entity.
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/ 17 December 2004
Russia’s embattled Yukos oil giant was satisfied on Friday at a United States Bankruptcy Court ruling that slapped a 10-day halt to a planned sale of Yukos’s core asset, its main oil-pumping division Yuganskneftegaz, Yukos’s spokesperson said. But Russian federal property fund’s officials said the sale will go on as planned.
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/ 10 December 2004
Thieves used a crane, a truck and the cover of pre-dawn darkness to steal a 700kg giant bronze statue of 19th-century Russian author Mikhail Lermontov in the southern Russian city of Vladikavkaz, Itar-Tass news agency said on Friday. The theft occurred from a well-known public square in the city.
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/ 7 December 2004
Russian soldiers in World War II-style uniforms slogged through early winter slush on Tuesday to re-enact the Soviet Union’s defeat of Adolf Hitler’s armies in the Battle of Moscow near the Russian capital 63 years ago. President Vladimir Putin joined elderly survivors of the World War II battle to watch the 90-minute commemoration.
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/ 2 December 2004
Over 100 children have been killed and 600 others were injured by landmines in Russia’s breakaway republic of Chechnya over the past decade, according to the United Nations’ Children’s Fund (Unicef). ”Since 1994 through 2004, 717 children were injured by exploding mines in Chechnya, and 114 of them died,” Unicef spokesperson Anna Chernyakhovskaya was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.
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/ 17 November 2004
President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday that Russia will in the coming years acquire new nuclear weapon systems that other nuclear powers do not yet have and are unlikely to develop in the near future. Putin said Russia still views terrorism as the greatest threat to its national security, but should not forget about the nuclear threat.
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/ 5 November 2004
A reported accident at a nuclear power plant in central Russia spread panic on Friday, as residents rushed to buy radiation antidotes despite official assurances that the malfunction was a minor glitch. Universities in Samara, 300km north-east from the plant, were closed and businesses advised employees to stay home and close the windows.
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/ 28 October 2004
Russia’s Lower House of Parliament has passed legislation that will make it illegal to drink beer in public, news reports said on Thursday. The Bill, which comes in the wake of legislation passed earlier this year that clamps down on beer commercials and advertising, was approved on Wednesday.