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As City Hall plans to introduce new restrictions on what can be built in the city center, Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the State Hermitage Museum has produced a list of some of St. Petersburg's newest buildings that he says should be demolished. |
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Boris Tsepov, the Russian ambassador to Lithuania, is embroiled in a dispute with the foreign ministry of the Baltic State after accusing the Lithuanian media of lying as rumors spread in Vilnius last week that he might resign. |
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Kant's Name Honored KALININGRAD (SPT) - Kaliningrad State University will be named after Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, who lived in Kaliningrad when it was called Koenigsberg, Interfax reported Wednesday. "The idea to name the Kaliningrad University after Immanuel Kant arose last year during events celebrating the 200th anniversary of Kant's death," Interfax cited Andrei Klemeshev, the university dean as saying. |
All photos from issue.
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Luxemburg is the world's safest city, while St. Petersburg ranks 175th in a list of the comparative safety of 215 cities, according to a survey published this month by Mercer Human Resource Consulting of London. The researchers evaluated crime rates, the general level of stability in a country, and several aspects of external-relation policies, including visa regimes. |
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MOSCOW - The Kremlin hopes to dent the popularity of Ekho Moskvy radio, the country's last national independent broadcaster, through a new news radio station that could offer pro-government coverage, Ekho Moskvy chief editor Alexei Venediktov said. |
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Scientist Goes to Court ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Court hearings on a lawsuit filed by St. Petersburg-based sociologist Olga Tsepilova against Komsomolskaya Pravda started Monday, Interfax reported this week. The sociologist complained about an article that suggested her research plans were probably linked to espionage when she had attempted last year to conduct a survey in a radiation-contaminated area near the Mayak storage facility for plutonium and weapons-grade uranium in the Chelyabinsk region. |
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MOSCOW - The Kremlin's plan to merge Gazprom and Rosneft has been agreed on in principle and Yuganskneftegaz will remain a separate state-controlled company, Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref said Wednesday. "In the first half of the year the task is to conclude the merger and the scheme is worked out in principle," Gref told journalists late Wednesday on the sidelines of a Moscow business conference. |
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Siemens Gets Arctic Gas MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - Gazprom and Siemens, Germany's biggest engineering company, will expand their cooperation to work on developing an Arctic gas field and a pipeline across the Baltic Sea to expand Russia's gas exports to Europe. |
 St. Petersburg vodka company Veda plans to launch an initial public offering (IPO) on the Russian stock market as soon as it fulfils the necessary transparency requirements, the company said Tuesday. The transformation of the country's second-largest vodka producer is part of a number of structural changes it announced at a news conference two months after the tragic death of Veda's founder and State Duma deputy Kirill Ragozin. |
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Finnish construction materials firm Maxit Oy Ab said it cannot trust Russian customs to estimate the correct duties efficiently and honestly, Interfax reported Wednesday. |
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Transneft Ups Capacity LONDON -Transneft, Russia's oil pipeline monopoly, may expand the capacity of its Baltic oil pipeline to the port of Primorsk near St. Petersburg to the planned maximum of 60 million tons a year (1.2 million barrels a day) by April 2006. "Transneft plans to somewhat speed up completion of the project," Chief Executive Semyon Vainshtock said Wednesday in an interview posted on Transneft's web site. The company's board of directors had earlier decided the third stage of expansion should be completed by July 2006, Vainshtock said in the interview. The country's oil output has surged about 50 percent since 1999, straining the capacity of pipelines. |
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 Unimilk, the country's second largest dairy producer, launched Tuesday a new premium class drinking yogurt line in St. Petersburg as part of the company's $15 million investment program. |
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Many see the problem of uniting Russia's democrats as one of future party lists. Ideological issues are either completely ignored or dismissed as obvious. This is dangerous: If democrats do not agree on their ideology beforehand, they risk splintering later, perhaps permanently. |
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Once upon a time there was a newspaper in St. Petersburg. It was respected and successful. Its readers were told dramatic and true stories about the Chechen-Russian war and it covered national and local politics and news events objectively. |
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Presenting new orchestral music while creating new insights into familiar masterpieces at the same concert is a challenging task. But this is exactly the aim of the St. Petersburg Chamber Philharmonic, an orchestra established in the city in 2002 by American conductor and pianist Jeffery Meyer and Singapore-born conductor Darrel Ang. |
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The week's most bizarre event might be Akvarium's performance at what is described as a "supper with candles" at the Casino Club Premier. The formerly underground rock band will follow such people as Soviet-era lounge singer Iosif Kobzon and comedian Mikhail Zhvanetsky in a series of "Star Nights" marking the casino's 10th anniversary. |
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As winter draws to a close and ice on the River Neva starts to melt, Russians have been celebrating Maslenitsa, a week of festivities that concluded last Sunday. The traditional festival, which would probably be called "Pancake Week" in English, corresponds with the Shrovetide festival of the Christian calendar. |
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"Robots," directed by Chris Wedge and Carlos Saldanha, is a new 3-D computer-animated feature from 20th Century Fox's Blue Sky Studios, the outfit that brought us "Ice Age," and like that movie it's a reminder that when it comes to innovative animated entertainment for all ages, there is Pixar, there is Japan and there is everybody else. |
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An updated version of Mariusz Trelinski's internationally acclaimed production of Giacomo Puccini's "Madame Butterfly," originally staged at the Polish National Opera in 1999, premieres at the Mariinsky Theater on Friday. The Warsaw production of "Madame Butterfly," directed by Mariusz Trelinski and with stage designs by Boris Kudlieka, caught the attention of the artistic director of the Washington Opera, Placido Domingo, and was subsequently staged in Washington D.C. as a co-production with the Teatr Wielki-Opera Narodowa in 2001. Puccini's sentimental tragedy about a geisha, Cio-Cio San, who marries Pinkerton, an American naval officer, in early 20th-century Japan was first staged in Milan in 1904 and has been a staple of opera repertoires the world over since. |
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 Culture Minister Alexander Sokolov's suggestion that Russia may hand the silver that belonged to the German Prince of Anhalt over to Germany provoked a storm of protests from the State Hermitage Museum, where the collection has been put on public display this week. |
 Julee Cruise, who first came to fame as an ethereal-voiced roadhouse singer in the television series "Twin Peaks," seems always to have been open to new ideas. A theater and movie personality, solo vocalist, and one-time member of the B-52's, she first toured Russia in 2001 as part of a trio with New York dance artists Khan and Kid Congo Powers. Cruise returns to St. Petersburg this week with a full rock band to promote her most recent work, a collaboration with the German band Pluramon, which was hailed by The Wire as "just about the best avant-pop/noise record to emerge from the independent sector since My Bloody Valentine's 'Isn't Anything. |
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 Tudosok, one of the leading experimental bands from Hungary, has been compared to Captain Beefheart, Pere Ubu, Arto Lindsay, Lounge Lizards, Ne Zhdali and the Contortions. |
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SEOUL (Reuters) - Relations between South Korea and Japan have been "seriously hurt" by a territorial dispute over desolate islands situated between the two countries, the chairman of Seoul's National Security Council said on Thursday. Chung Dong-young also told a news conference South Korea would take steps to increase its presence on the islands called Tokto in Korea and Takeshima in Japan. |
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