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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that the Cabinet’s high-tech commission would take on wide-ranging new powers to enforce its modernization agenda, significantly raising the body’s profile on his first day as its chairman. “The scale of the goals to be achieved requires an expansion of its authority,” Putin said while opening the meeting. The body’s decisions will now be binding on other state agencies, he said. The commission — created by President Dmitry Medvedev — had been headed by Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov since its inception last year. Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s first deputy chief of staff, said in an interview last month that “consolidated power is the instrument of modernization” and that Putin would be taking the commission’s helm. On Wednesday, the prime minister said the government would spend more than a tenth of its budget on science and innovation this year, with funding for major scientific projects to be carried out on a competitive basis. “We have assigned about 1.1 trillion rubles [$36.8 billion], or more than 10 percent of the federal budget, for ... |
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FLOWER POWER
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Olga Konysheva, an agronomist, presents flowers grown at the Novaya Gollandiya complex on Thursday. The new $68-million facility, located in Syastroi, 120 kilometers northeast of the city, gave a presentation ahead of International Women’s Day on Monday (March 8). |
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A lenient sentence for a St. Petersburg man convicted of raping his niece during a period of four years starting when she was five provoked an outcry Thursday. The Dzerzhinsky District Court handed down a six-year suspended sentence in the case on Feb. 26, Interfax reported Thursday. Sexual intercourse with a child under 12 carries a maximum of 15 years ...
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MOSCOW — U.S. police have arrested the adoptive parents of a seven-year-old Russian boy for homicide after an autopsy found more than 80 external injuries on his malnourished body, Channel One state television reported Tuesday. The case reignited Russian anger over U.S. adoptions, a delicate issue in ... |
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Yevgeny Plushenko is leaving politics. “I’m seriously considering giving up my seat in the city parliament and going back to sports, simply because I am quite good at it,” the Russian figure skater, who won the Olympic gold in Turin in 2006 and skated to the Olympic silver medal in Vancouver, told reporters at Pulkovo airport on returning to St. Petersburg from what has been described as Russia’s most disappointing Olympics in history. The St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, where Plushenko has a seat representing the Just Russia faction, has shown understanding for the sportsman. Oleg Nilov, head of the Just Russia faction in the St. Petersburg assembly, said that the skater “must devote himself to a very special mission — he must save Russia’s deteriorating sports from further degradation.” “Considering Russia’s rather, to say the least, uncharacteristic performance at the recent Winter Olympics, Yevgeny Plushenko, as a truly outstanding sportsman and one of the ambassadors of the Sochi-2014 Winter Olympic Games, may be required to fully ... |
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HAT TRICKS
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A participant in the Fashion Industry 2010 international exhibition sits by a hat display at the Peterburgsky SKK on Wednesday. The exhibition, which is being run for the 35th time, ends on Saturday. |
 MOSCOW — Russian Olympic Committee chief Leonid Tyagachyov confirmed Thursday that he was resigning and urged Sports, Tourism and Youth Policy Minister Vitaly Mutko to implement reforms after the country’s dismal showing at the Vancouver Winter Olympics. “I have given notice of my decision to resign and am calling for an executive committee meeting,” ...
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Deputy Chief Executive of U.K. Trade and Investment (UKTI) Susan Haird visited St. Petersburg this week to promote trade links between Great Britain and Russia. Of the 96 UKTI offices around the world, Russia was identified in 2004 as one of the most ... |
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MOSCOW — The government intends to pump $6 billion into the domestic auto industry as part of a $60 billion, 10-year strategy aimed at salvaging the faltering ... |
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MOSCOW —President Dmitry Medvedev has decided to remove the article on false entrepreneurship from the Criminal Code, reduce prison terms for money laundering and increase the threshold for economic crimes to be treated as “major” and “massive,” Vedomosti ... |
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MOSCOW — The Central Bank may institute new measures to dampen the inflow of “speculative capital” into the country, it said in a report on its web site. The ... |
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MOSCOW — Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov fought back on Tuesday after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin criticized the owners of power generators for failing to invest in new capacity, saying the prime minister was misinformed. “Incorrect documents concerning ... |
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 MOSCOW — Vasily Astrashabov, a 19-year-old Moscow student, met with friends to go to a movie theater on New Year’s Day but caught the eye of police officers ... |
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 What is the most important source of disagreement today between Russia and the West? It is not the issues most often in the news — Iran or Afghanistan. It is Europe’s contested neighborhood: the future of those countries between the eastern border of ... |
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Why have first deputy chief of staff Vladislav Surkov’s plans to build a Russian Silicon Valley prompted such a large public debate on whether modernization ... |
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LUCKNOW, India — Sixty-three people, all of them women and children, were crushed to death on Thursday in a stampede at a temple in India when a gate collapsed triggering panic among the 10,000-strong crowd. The devotees had gathered in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh to receive food and clothes ... |
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 While Greece battles a severe financial crisis, Russian Greeks in St. Petersburg are developing a youth organization to spark people’s enthusiasm for Greece and Greek culture. Those flying the flag for Greek culture in the city are young, positive people ... |
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Ñîïëè: snot, sniveling, sniffles, schmaltz “Snot” is not a word I use much in English. The sound of it instantly transports me back to junior high school, ... |
 The hippest way to celebrate a special occasion in the city right now is by visiting the culinary workshop of local chef Ilya Lazerson. His welcoming kitchen-workshop hosts birthday celebrations, corporate parties and groups of people who simply want ... |
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When Varvara Dobroselova leaves behind her beloved Makar Devushkin in the slums of 19th-century St. Petersburg in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s first novel “Poor ... |
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