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 SOCHI — As if to show the whole world that Russian mountains are fit for kings, President Vladimir Putin took to the slopes here Tuesday, expertly negotiating powder-packed bumps for cameras, schoolchildren and International Olympic Committee members. |
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MOSCOW — Veterinary workers wearing masks and white protective suits carted off refuse and burned it Tuesday inside the quarantined section of the popular Bird Market as guards patrolled the perimeter. |
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SUKHUMI, Georgia — For sale: Large two-story house w/ garden, Black Sea view and beach access — all for under $50,000. The ideal summer getaway for sun-starved Muscovites? Maybe, but there’s a catch. This property is located in a country that doesn’t officially exist. |
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Rossia airlines issued a statement on Tuesday expressing its disagreement with the verdict of Russia’s Aviation Committee that said human error caused one its planes to crash in eastern Ukraine on Aug. |
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The Federation Council confirmed Wednesday that Russian Football Union president Vitaly Mutko will represent St. Petersburg in the body. Mutko was assigned to be the representative of St. Petersburg’s government in the Federation Council, or the upper chamber of the Russia’s Parliament, on Jan. 30. He was approved by St. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — State news agency RIA-Novosti is financing a remake of the Moscow News in the state’s latest effort to reach out to English speakers. The relaunch of the newspaper, which is to take place early next month, will follow RIA-Novosti’s creation of the Russia Today satellite television channel in late 2005. Earlier that year, it began publishing the Russia Profile journal in conjunction with Independent Media Sanoma Magazines, the parent company of The Moscow Times. The Moscow News has moved into the RIA-Novosti building on Zubovsky Bulvar near the Park Kultury metro station, appointed Anthony Louis as its editor and is hiring more Western reporters, RIA-Novosti deputy editor Leonid Burmistrov said. |
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 A court has rejected a parole request from former Colonel Yury Budanov, convicted in 2003 of kidnapping and murdering a Chechen woman, Interfax reported Tuesday. |
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WARSAW — Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski suggested on Tuesday that Russian opposition to a U.S. proposal to build a missile-defense system in Poland stemmed from Moscow’s hopes to regain influence over its former satellite. Also Tuesday, the Czech Republic said it would not be intimidated by Russia over plans to place parts of the system on Czech territory and said attempts at “blackmail” by Moscow would backfire. |
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Litvinenko Investigation LONDON (AP) — Scotland Yard said police investigators from Russia were in London on Tuesday to discuss the inquiry into the poisoning death last November of Alexander Litvinenko. |
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The world’s leading provider of solutions and technologies for information systems, EMC corporation, will invest $100 million into Russia over the next three to four years, a considerable part of which will go into a new R&D center in St. Petersburg. The company is seeking to take advantage of the emerging Russian IT market. |
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Electric Turnover ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Petersburg Distribution Company increased turnover by 27 percent last year compared to 2005, Prime-Tass reported Wednesday. |
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Tax Boss MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — The deputy chief of Russia’s Federal Tax Service, Mikhail Mokretsov, was named the head of the agency today, state-run news service RIA Novosti reported Wednesday. Mokretsov replaces Anatoly Serdyukov, who was last week named defense minister by President Vladimir Putin. |
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 Last week’s government shuffle and removal of Alu Alkhanov as Chechen president demonstrated yet again the lack of connection between the abilities and accomplishments of government officials, their career-growth paths and appointments to senior government positions. |
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The circumstances of Chechen President Alu Alkhanov’s departure and replacement by Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov, right down to the date, was worked out with President Vladimir Putin in December 2006. |
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 When the television miniseries “Leningrad: City of the Living” was screened for an advance audience this month, there could hardly have been a more appropriate location than St. Petersburg’s Museum of the Siege and Defense of Leningrad. Watching the film surrounded by enormously evocative artifacts from the 1941-44 siege, and by many audience members who had lived through it, proved to be a moving experience indeed. |
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Some things never change. Just as it was in the mid-1990s, there are posters advertizing the Gipsy Kings in the streets of St. Petersburg, and just as then the band is fake. |
 With its first sale last week of modern and contemporary Russian art, which followed a unique sale in Moscow in 1988 that introduced Soviet-era unofficial art to the world, auction house Sotheby’s marked another turning point in the Russian art market. The Feb. 25 sale in London achieved total sales of $5.1 million and beat the $4.0 million record of its legendary Moscow forerunner. “We are thrilled with the results of this landmark sale,” Joanna Vickery, Senior Director and Head of Sotheby’s Russian department said. |
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 British musicians Ian Brown and Brett Anderson are not the type of people who Russian filmmakers typically approach to do their movie soundtracks. But that’s exactly what the creators of “Paragraph 78” did. |
 As the 20th century recedes, it becomes increasingly difficult to explain to younger generations the peculiar combination of idealism, naivete, cynicism and brutality that was the hallmark of that century’s totalitarian states. Ethan Pollock’s “Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars” looks at this phenomenon through the lens of Soviet science policy in the immediate postwar period to explain Josef Stalin’s determination to articulate and demonstrate “the compatibility of its ideology with all fields of knowledge. |
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 This month, Ksenia Sobchak, Russia’s lone It Girl, dipped her polished toe into the world of cinema by voicing Paris Hilton in the silicone-enhanced comedy “National Lampoon’s Pledge This!” Despite going straight to DVD in the United States, the film got a theatrical release over here, and Sobchak has been busy promoting her role. |
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The Oliver Twist 3 Belinskogo Ulitsa. Tel: 272 3361 Open 11 a.m. through 1 a.m. Menu in Russian and English Dinner for four with beer 2,380 rubles ($89) A charming detail on the beer mats at the Oliver Twist, a Russian-owned-and-operated English pub that has been open since July, is an illustration of Dickens’ famous urchin in a cute Chaplinesque pose. Despite the trend away from traditional English pubs in England — and, for that matter, from beer mats themselves after they were declared “unhygenic” by European Union bureaucrats — the St. Petersburg version is going strong. The Oliver Twist follows a pub named after the 19th century author that created him — the Dickens Pub on the Fontanka — and perhaps the city can expect pubs named Martin Chuzzlewit, Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield in the future. |
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 “The Good Shepherd,” a chilly film about a spy trapped in the cold of his own heart, seeks to put a tragic human face on the Central Intelligence Agency, namely that of Matt Damon. |
 The National Center of Photography on Friday opens its new exhibition, “Russian Years — 1995–2005,” featuring the work of the internationally acclaimed contemporary American fashion photographer Deborah Turbeville. A pupil of the legendary Richard Avedon, Turbeville established her reputation in the 1970s and 1980s. |
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SEOUL — South Korea may make farm chemicals less toxic and install more fences on the tops of tall buildings in order to cut down on one of the developed world’s highest suicide rates, a health official said on Tuesday. Having seen its suicide rate double in less than a decade, the country will also set up more counseling centers and try to increase awareness of the risks of depression, which are not widely understood in the country, the official said. |
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ROTTERDAM, Netherlands — The Masters Series will be cut from nine to eight tournaments in 2009, with the end-of-year Masters Cup moving from Asia to Europe. “One of the eight events will be held in China which is a huge market to develop,” ATP president Etienne de Villiers told reporters on Wednesday. |
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MELBOURNE — The International Rugby Board (IRB) will take a hard line on players and coaches criticising officials during the World Cup later this year, the governing body’s referees chief said on Wednesday. |
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DALLAS — Allen Iverson’s return to the lineup failed to spark the Denver Nuggets who lost 95-80 to the San Antonio Spurs on Tuesday. The Spurs dominated early, taking a 31-point lead after three quarters, before emptying their bench in the fourth quarter after allowing Denver just 10 third quarter points. |
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CAIRO — Three men from Canada, Taiwan and the United States have run 7,500 kilometers across the Sahara Desert to draw attention to the lack of access to water in many countries they crossed, one runner said on Wednesday. |
Temp: -2°C moderate or heavy snow showers
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