Consumer goods giant Unilever aims to invest €100 million (₤68 million) in the next two to four years developing plants in Russia, a company official said on Friday.
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November 24, 2006Russian managing company Start plans to open its first home appliances and construction materials hypermarket in St. Petersburg on 1 December, at an investment of $18 million.
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November 23, 2006Three Russian teenagers were sentenced to brief prison terms for involvement in attacks on foreign nationals in St. Petersburg, the Interfax news agency reports.
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November 15, 2006About 300 people marched Sunday in Russia’s second largest city St. Petersburg to protest the rising tide of xenophobic attacks there and in other major cities, news reports said.
The participants, from liberal and leftist opposition groups and rights organizations, carried portraits of an expert on skinheads, Nikolai Girenko, who was killed in St. Petersburg in June 2004, The Associated Press reported.
Russian state television showed people on the march — which was guarded by police — holding red flags and banners with the slogan: “March against hatred.â€
Some also had portraits of Anna Politkovskaya, the investigative journalist who exposed torture, abductions and other abuses against civilians in Chechnya and was shot dead in an apparent contract killing earlier this month, Ekho Moksvy radio reported.
This is the third year the event has taken place in memory of Girenko, who was killed in what many believe was retaliation for his studies of neo-Nazi and racist groups.
Human rights groups say that the authorities are turning a blind eye to the growing wave of xenophobia and racially motivated attacks in Russia that target dark-skinned foreigners and immigrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus.
This year, 39 people have been killed in apparent hate crimes and a further 308 attacked, according to the Sova rights center which monitors xenophobia. St. Petersburg has seen a wave of racially motivated murders, leading some to dub it “Europe’s racist capital.â€
Russian human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin, who attended the rally, called on the government to do more to halt the growth of xenophobia.
“The crimes taking place in this city are particularly horrible. We have gathered in order to call on the authorities to put up a wall in the way of those lost minds, who are a disgrace to the city and to the country,†he was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.
Next Saturday, far-right groups plan to repeat last year’s ultranationalist march in which thousands of extremists shouting Nazi and nationalist slogans paraded in the center of Moscow.
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October 30, 2006An elderly woman died after setting herself on fire in Russia’s St. Petersburg, news agencies reported.
The woman poured inflammable liquid all over herself and put it on fire. She received burns of 100 percent of skin and could not be saved.
Witnesses said the woman was behaving like a mentally ill person.
The incident took place in Yekaterininsky Prospect.
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An automatic safety system shut down a reactor at a nuclear power plant near St. Petersburg Saturday after a short circuit, The Associated Press reported citing the state-run company overseeing Russia’s nuclear power plants.
Rosenergoatom said there was no radiation leak from the unplanned shutdown at the Leningrad nuclear power plant’s No. 2 unit — the second shutdown to hit the plant in a week.
The company did not say what caused the short circuit. Severe weather in the St. Petersburg area has caused some flooding in the city, and there have been reported power outages throughout the region.
The emergency system stopped two turbine generators due to sludge coming into the condenser’s pipes, before shutting down the reactor altogether, the company said.
Radiation levels around the plant were normal, it said.
Last Friday, the automatic safety system shut down the same reactor for unknown reasons.
The Leningrad plant on the Gulf of Finland has four 1,000-megawatt graphite RBMK reactors — the same as the Chernobyl nuclear plant, whose explosion 20 years ago sent radioactive fallout across northern Europe in the world’s worst civilian nuclear accident.
Russia has 10 nuclear power plants with a total of 31 nuclear reactors.
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