Thomas Ridge Super-Agency Gets to Work The US Department of Homeland Security officially began work on Monday. The first hundred full-time employees of the new department (a sort of analogue of the KGB in the American style) went to work yesterday in a temporary complex spread over almost 16 hectares in the southwestern part of the capital. The choice of location, as it now turns out, was not without a slight scandal.

Conscripts prefer to serve in the Ministry of Emergency Situations, the fire department and the GUIN Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov sent a letter to the Russian President in which he accused his fellow security officials, in particular the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Emergency Situations, of illegally recruiting young men of military age into the police and fire departments. Moreover, this outflow almost triples every year.

President Putin opened the Year of Russia in Kyiv Vladimir Putin arrived in Kyiv last night. The program of his working visit includes not only participation in an informal meeting of CIS leaders, but also the opening of the Year of Russia in Ukraine. The latter circumstance caused excitement among the opposition, which yesterday brought a thousand of its supporters to the Ukraine Palace, where the presidents of the two countries are today to officially mark the countdown of the “Russian” year.

“Irreversible” premieres tomorrow At the beginning of the film, the credits crawl across the screen upside down and in a mirror image, but the audience whistles, stomps their feet and fires at the projectionist completely in vain. It's not the mechanic's fault, the film was inserted correctly.

Iraq's fate still hangs in the balance In New York yesterday the fate of Iraq was being decided - but not decided. The heads of the international observer missions, Swede Hans Blix and Egyptian Muhammad AlBaradei, presented two reports on the results of inspections in this country to the UN Security Council. The head of the UN Commission on the Disarmament of Iraq, Mr.

The Tverskoy Court of Moscow yesterday sentenced another, already the eighth participant in the mass riots on Manezhnaya Square in the capital, which occurred on June 9 last year after a crowd of fans watched a football match between the Russian and Japanese national teams on a street monitor. 21-year-old Muscovite Valery Seregin was found guilty and received five years in a general regime colony.

Alexey Miller told his subordinates about his correspondence with the president When the resonance caused by publications in connection with the letter regarding the development of the gas market, which Gazprom Chairman of the Board Alexey Miller wrote to Vladimir Putin at the end of last year, subsided, the concern's press service informed the public that Mr. Miller had held a working meeting on this issue.

Forum participants were interested in oil, war and common space The World Economic Forum is ending. Most of all, the minds of the forum participants were occupied by issues that, although they have a noticeable impact on the state of the world economy, are not actually economic. Everyone was interested in a potential military operation in Iraq and the prospects for rising oil prices.

St. Petersburg bankers are playing with taxes In the Vasileostrovsky Court of St. Petersburg, the trial of the former heads of two large financial structures of the city - Petro-Aero-Bank and National Bank - began. They are accused of large-scale scams involving the illegal receipt of compensation from the state for value added tax (VAT) worth $50 million. A witness in the case is the former head of the Ministry of Taxes and the current Minister of Labor, Alexander Pochinok.

The 27-year conflict between Nestle and one of the poorest countries in the world, Ethiopia, ended in favor of the former. Now the government of the African country will be forced to find funds to pay compensation of $1.5 million. The reason for the trial was the illegal nationalization of enterprises during the communist regime in 1975, when almost all foreign companies became state property.

Americans have come up with an original way to get rid of a bad habit The American tobacco company Vector Tobacco has invented a new paradoxical way to conquer the market. The main idea of ​​this company's active PR campaign is that the new brand of Quest cigarettes is not only “safer for health” than most tobacco products, but can also help those who are planning to quit smoking.

The Mobile Telesystems and VimpelCom companies (Bee Line brand) are expanding their partnership with network suppliers of goods and services. As MTS press secretary Eva Prokofieva told the Vremya Novostei newspaper, MTS has signed a preliminary agreement with the United Processing Company (UCS) to accept cash payments for MTS services in a number of retail and service networks.

Church prepares to enter school Orthodoxy and secular school are becoming closer to each other every year. The largest annual theological conference of the Russian Orthodox Church, the Christmas Readings, which started on Sunday in the Kremlin, for the first time announced secular education as the main topic of discussion.

Lukashenko decided to reduce the number of private owners Less than a week after the meeting between Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko, dedicated to the prospects for Russian-Belarusian cooperation, the leader of the fraternal country began to build a state trade vertical. The number of private enterprises engaged in foreign trade operations with highly liquid goods in Belarus will soon decrease.

Limonovites ruined the “room with cake” The calm flow of the operational meeting at the Nizhny Novgorod City Hall, which was held yesterday by the head of Nizhny Novgorod Vadim Bulavinov, was interrupted in the most unexpected way. Right during the report, two young men and a girl burst into the conference room. Scattering leaflets, shouting “No to housing and communal services reform!” they even managed to reach the presidium. And then those present heard strange sounds.