A stunning 121-megapixel snapshot of the Earth was taken by a Russian weather satellite in what is thought to be the highest resolution picture of the planet ever taken from space.
The picture was taken by a camera aboard the Elektro-L, a geostationary satellite that travels at the speed of the Earth's rotation and remains at a fixed point about 36,000 kilometers above the equator.
In contrast to NASA's iconic Blue Marble images, which were created by pasting together several smaller, true-color pictures, the Elektro-L picture is a single shot of the entire globe.
A Siberian man got stuck in a trash chute while trying to hide from his girlfriend, the regional branch of the Emergency Situations Ministry in Tyumen said in a report on their site Thursday.
Payment of wages in cash would be forbidden and stores would be forced to install credit-card terminals if legislation being developed by the Finance Ministry is implemented, Vedomosti reported.
A Finance Ministry working group has now prepared legislation that will require employers and stores to phase out cash transactions. In January, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov proposed to implement the "regulatory legal framework" for noncash payments.
Exceptions would be made in the law for small businesses with less than 35 employees and businesses in remote locations.
Legislation requiring stores to accept credit cards would exclude those that don't use cash registers and those with annual revenues of less than 2 million rubles ($65,000).
There are still more than 104,000 communal apartments in St. Petersburg, with residents of 750 flats being relocated this year at a cost of 1 billion rubles ($33 million), the city's mayor Georgy Poltavchenko said Tuesday.
At the protest camp near Barrikadnaya metro station late Wednesday, police detained around 30 demonstrators for offenses that included slashing the tires of a police vehicle.
Around 1,000 people gathered Wednesday evening on Kudrinskaya Ploshchad, where opposition protesters migrated Wednesday morning after being driven from their weeklong camp site on Chistoprudny Bulvar, Interfax reported.
The head of independent pollster the Levada Center said President Vladimir Putin's attractiveness to the public is not only shrinking, but the damage is irreversible.
It is a bitter truth that while there are many paths that lead to homelessness in Russia, there are no legal ways back, except for — as more cynical officials sometimes suggest to their humble homeless visitors — simply buying themselves a new home. Needless to say, this is hardly an option for someone who has been cheated out of their property by a shady realtor or kicked out by their alcoholic children, or whose uninsured house has burned down or whose apartment was sold by relatives when they were serving a jail sentence.
The key reasons people become homeless in Russia include family problems (35 percent of all homeless people) and economic migration (24 percent), according to the homeless.ru website. People who have recently been released from prison account for 18 percent of the country’s homeless population.
CHESHIRE CAT
ALEXANDER BELENKY / SPT
Award-winning artist Yury Lyukshin is pictured at the opening of his exhibit, ‘Cats for the Increase of Happiness,’ at the History of Religion Museum on Monday.
Cats are revered as sacred animals in many world religions. The museum is one of 74 in the city taking part in this year’s Museum Night
“Occupy St. Isaac’s” — St. Petersburg’s response to continuing protests in Moscow, dubbed after the square in the city center — entered its second week Tuesday, as anti-Putin protesters continued to gather on St. Isaac’s Square, holding debates, lectures, poetry readings and concerts.
The protesters’ main demands are dissolving the “illegitimate” State Duma and dismissing the “illegitimate” president while organizing new elections.
Pulkovo Airport has sold the distinctive Pulkovo-2 airport building to Avia Group Nord.
According to Northern Capital Air Gateway, the consortium that operates the airport, Pulkovo Airport decided to sell the building as it has not been in use for several years.
St. Petersburg’s annual Museum Night will give residents and visitors the chance to check out the city’s cultural hotspots until the small hours of the morning on the night of May 19.
The head of Russia’s navy, Vladimir Vysotsky, has been fired for ignoring orders from General Headquarters and the Ministry of Defense to move navy headquarters from Moscow to St. Petersburg, RIA Novosti news agency reported.
Vysotsky was fired by then-President Dmitry Medvedev on May 6, but will remain in military service, the agency reported.
Three years after it last made the headlines, the town of Pikalyovo in the LenOblast is back in the news.
The St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast Arbitration Court approved the claim of VestPromResurs company last week, recognizing the BaselCement Pikalyovo plant as officially bankrupt, RIA Novosti news agency reported.
City Hall has announced that public transportation ticket prices will increase by two rubles beginning either June 1 or July 1, Fontanka news website reported.
St. Petersburg Governor Georgy Poltavchenko said the rise in prices was made necessary by the 2.
MOSCOW — A week after bloody clashes between radical youths and riot police tarnished the first major protest rally in months, the moderate middle-class opposition appeared to re-assert itself Sunday with an unexpectedly large march of thousands in Moscow led by some of Russia’s most prominent writers.
JAKARTA, Indonesia — Search teams have found some cockpit instruments in the wreckage of a Russian passenger jet that slammed into a cliff atop a dormant Indonesian volcano.
MOSCOW — The co-owner of a Perm nightclub where 156 people died after a pyrotechnic show ignited a bamboo ceiling was sentenced to six and a half years in a prison colony Monday.
MOSCOW — Moscow will send a high-ranking official to the NATO conference in Chicago, Kommersant reported Monday, citing a high-placed Foreign Ministry source.
Zamir Kabulov, the presidential envoy to Afghanistan who also heads a Foreign Ministry department, will most likely be Russia’s pick for the conference, the source said, though the information has not been officially confirmed.
An ongoing spat over missile defense and other questions have cast doubt on Moscow’s participation in the NATO meeting May 20 and 21, where the alliance is set to launch the first phase of a missile shield system that Moscow strongly opposes.
In April, Lavrov warned that he might not accept an invitation to send a representative to Chicago because the alliance won’t let Moscow attend all meetings of nations contributing to ISAF, NATO’s Afghanistan mission.
MOSCOW — Two Russians and an American blasted off in a Soyuz spaceship headed for the International Space Station Tuesday, overcoming more than a month’s delay caused by problems with the Russian spacecraft.
MOSCOW — Attempting to deflect criticism against crackdowns on political protests at home, Russian officials shot back at Western critics Monday, lambasting racism and xenophobia in Europe.
Foreign Ministry and Duma officials joined others in urging European Union representatives present at a round-table discussion not to use Russia’s human rights record as a political tool.
MOSCOW — Russia has been widely touted as the world’s most deadly place to fly after a series of air crashes. The Russian aviation industry faces another pressing issue that may eventually compound safety problems — a shortage of personnel, especially pilots.
MOSCOW — All across Russia, hospitals need doctors. Health and Social Development Minister Tatyana Golikova told a conference last month that the nation lacks almost a million medical professionals.
In just six months, from the end of September to March, Russia was transformed. The state’s gradual decomposition — its degenerate ethos of rent-seeking and appropriation of public goods — finally pushed Russians, especially its young post-Communist middle class, into the streets.
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is a well-meaning yet incompetent man. His recently completed term as president was spent, innocuously enough, tweeting, toying with high-tech gadgets and listening to British rock.
Genesis P-Orridge — of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV fame — will headline SKIF (the Sergei Kuryokhin International Festival), St. Petersburg’s leading experimental and avant-garde music event that will be held this week for the 16th time.
The U.K.-born, U.S.-based musician, who will perform with his/her band PTV3, is perhaps the most experimental artist to appear at SKIF so far. Genesis P-Orridge’s experimentation has involved his/her own body, having dozens of operations, including breast implants, to form a “pandrogynous” entity with his/her now-late wife.
Sixty-two-year-old industrial-rock and electronica pioneer P-Orridge (born Neil Andrew Megson) had problems with the British authorities because of his/her radical art, and declared a “self-imposed exile” to California in the early 1990s.
In 2009, the now-Brooklyn-based P-Orridge announced his/her retirement from touring in “any and all bands” to concentrate on art, writing and music, but lately appears to have had second thoughts.
However, the festival’s organizers warn that “every concert could be the last, and it can’t be excluded that this visit to Russia will be the last in the history of the band.
NINJA TUNE
BRITAIN’S SLUGABED
WILL JOIN A RANGE OF OTHER
EXPERIMENTAL MUSICIANS TO
PERFORM AT THIS YEAR’S SKIF
FESTIVAL.
As the weather gets warmer, it’s nice to go to St. Isaac’s Square, where those who disagree with electoral fraud have set up a round-the-clock protest camp in the small gardens by St. Isaac’s Square.
Apart from discussions, the “Occupy St. Isaac’s” campaign offers a lot of music, sports and fun, with minimum harassment from the police.
As the protesters relax in the gardens amid beautiful architecture, three alleged members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot remain in prison for the eleventh week, facing seven-year sentences on dubious charges.
How can you make a fashionable coat when the only fabric available is a piece of coarse felt used to make military overcoats? A possible solution — accompanied by spirited sewing patterns — can be found in the old, yellowing pages of a fashion magazine published in Russia in the 1920s.
An array of once neglected and forgotten architectural gems from the former imperial estate of Tsarskoye Selo have been brought back to life and will be unveiled to the public this summer.
Local residents and city visitors alike will be able to set foot for the first time ever in the mystical White Tower, a spot once favored for outdoor activities by many members of Russian royalty, including the family of Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II.
Last week, Vladimir Putin invited rapper Timati and lion-taming brothers Edgard and Askold Zapashny to his big day. On the other side of the barricades, it girl and media personality Ksenia Sobchak won the activist’s badge of pride by finally getting arrested.
Brunch is usually not the kind of enterprise that aims to demonstrate the culinary philosophy of a certain chef or dining establishment. Still, with the arrival of Sunday brunch to miX, diners cannot fail to get a fair idea about the art and ideas of the renowned French chef Alain Ducasse, the Michelin-star-studded man behind the restaurant at the city’s W Hotel.
KRASNOYARSK — One of the oldest cities in Siberia, Krasnoyarsk boasts sights like picturesque churches and fountains with dazzling night lighting. But none of them can compare to its main attraction — majestic Siberian nature.
Surrounded by rocky mountains blanketed with deep forest, Krasnoyarsk is spread out on both banks of the Yenisei River.
Writer Viktor Astafyev, a Krasnoyarsk native, once described the Yenisei as “sometimes kind and quiet, broad, sometimes locked in cliffs, sometimes furious, foaming or raging with its white waves in a storm.
Although vegetarianism is not as popular in Russia as in many Western countries and some Russian psychiatrists even consider some of its forms to be indicators of mental illness, the number of Russian vegetarians and vegans continues to grow.
PARIS — Socialist Francois Hollande took over as France’s president Tuesday and jetted off to Berlin hours later for talks on Europe’s debt crisis — only to have his plane struck by lightning. No one was hurt.
It was a startling beginning for a man who promised to be a more “normal” president, and less flashy than his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy, who was ousted by voters after a single term for his handling of a stagnant economy plagued by joblessness.
OSLO, Norway — An unidentified man was seriously injured in a self-immolation Tuesday outside the courthouse where right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik is being tried on terror charges for a bombing and shooting massacre that killed 77 people on July 22.
LONDON — Ex-News of the World editor Rebekah Brooks, her husband and four others were charged Tuesday over alleged attempts to conceal evidence of Britain’s tabloid phone hacking scandal, prosecutors said.
The criminal charges are the first to be filed since police launched a new inquiry into phone hacking in January 2011.
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It is a bitter truth that while there are many paths that lead to homelessness in Russia, there are no legal ways back, except for — as more cynical officials sometimes suggest to their humble homeless visitors — simply buying themselves a new home. Needless to say, this is hardly an option for someone who has been cheated out of their property by a shady realtor or kicked out by their alcoholic children, or whose uninsured house has burned down or whose apartment was sold by relatives when they were serving a jail sentence.Duma to Discuss Housing Homeless
Although vegetarianism is not as popular in Russia as in many Western countries and some Russian psychiatrists even consider some of its forms to be indicators of mental illness, the number of Russian vegetarians and vegans continues to grow.Russia’s Vegetarians Thrive, Despite Prejudice
MOSCOW — Attempting to deflect criticism against crackdowns on political protests at home, Russian officials shot back at Western critics Monday, lambasting racism and xenophobia in Europe.Russia Attempts to Turn Tables On Human Rights
MOSCOW — A week after bloody clashes between radical youths and riot police tarnished the first major protest rally in months, the moderate middle-class opposition appeared to re-assert itself Sunday with an unexpectedly large march of thousands in Moscow led by some of Russia’s most prominent writers.Big-Name Writers Lead Protest Rally of 10,000
MOSCOW — The co-owner of a Perm nightclub where 156 people died after a pyrotechnic show ignited a bamboo ceiling was sentenced to six and a half years in a prison colony Monday.First Sentence Made in Perm Nightclub Fire
MOSCOW — Moscow will send a high-ranking official to the NATO conference in Chicago, Kommersant reported Monday, citing a high-placed Foreign Ministry source.Russia To Visit NATO Conference In Chicago