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 Construction work on the Mariinsky Theater’s new building, known as Mariinsky II and planned as an additional, modern theater to run alongside the Mariinsky’s historic venue, will finally begin fully in July as officials gave the go-ahead to the troubled project on Tuesday. |
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Having failed to elect a city ombudsman for nine successive years, St. Petersburg’s Legislative Assembly will make a new attempt on Wednesday. Human rights advocate Yuly Rybakov has received surprise backing from Governor Valentina Matviyenko, a target of Rybakov’s criticism in the past. |
 MENDELEYEVO, Moscow Region — About 100 shabbily dressed men waited patiently in a snaking line to the front door of a peeling wooden shack that serves as a canteen. In a small village, just off Leningradskoye Shosse, and very far from home, lunch was being served at the Morozovka camp for migrant construction workers. |
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SHYMKENT, Kazakhstan — A Kazakh court jailed 17 health workers on Wednesday for infecting dozens of babies with HIV but provoked outrage from parents for sparing four senior officials from incarceration. |
All photos from issue.
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 MOSCOW — Gordon Brown’s appointment as British prime minister Wednesday will do little to thaw frosty political ties with Russia, analysts said. For Russia, the Scot is something of an unknown quantity. The former chancellor of the exchequer is not a Russia expert, and his grounding in economics may act as his political compass. |
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MOSCOW — Mikhail Fridman’s Alfa Bank said it might become a target for state acquisition or liquidation in view of developments surrounding Russneft, Yukos and Sakhalin-2. In a note to investors that accompanied a $500 million Eurobond float offer, the bank said recent state takeovers of private companies was a risk factor that investors face in Russia. |
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LONDON — Two of the world’s biggest music giants and two Russian record labels launched a wholesale digital distribution platform in Russia on Thursday, a market dominated by piracy across the entire entertainment industry. |
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Reserves Rise MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia’s foreign currency and gold reserves rose to a record $406.6 billion in the week ended June 22, after falling in the previous seven days, the central bank said. The reserves, the world’s third biggest, advanced by $1.6 billion, after shrinking by $1.5 billion in the previous week to $405 billion, the bank said in an e-mailed statement Thursday. Dairy Board MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Wimm-Bill-Dann, the Russian dairy group, elected a senior Groupe Danone SA executive to the board after the Paris-based yogurt maker lifted its stake in the company, Interfax reported Thursday. Shareholders voted in Danone Vice President Jacques Vincent at an annual meeting Wednesday, the news service said, citing an unidentified person familiar with the meeting’s results. |
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 MOSCOW — Danish farmers are going to make pigs fly after new European Union rules on animal welfare made it longer and riskier to send them to Russia by truck. |
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 It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone that the lead up to the meeting between President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President George W. Bush beginning July 1 would be spent discussing whether the two would be able to reach agreement related to Moscow’s offer for the joint use of an early warning radar station in Azerbaijan. |
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First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov has compared the country’s nanotechnology program with the Soviet atomic project. Like the atomic project, according to Ivanov, the nanotechnology program will alter the times. |
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 Dennis Hopper, the American actor, director and artist, was in St. Petersburg last week to open an exhibition of his work at the State Hermitage Museum. Known primarily as an actor, Hopper’s biography reads like a catalogue of some of the most celebrated films made in Hollywood in the last 50 years. |
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Polish punk is making itself felt in the city, with 19 Wiosen having arrived in St. Petersburg to perform at Tsokol last Sunday. The band, which has been in Russia for about a month traveling in its van to such places as Volgograd, will perform on Friday at new bar Belgrad. |
 The 8th International KUKART puppetry festival continues this week. Friday, 29 June 5 p.m. “Hell’s Bells & Furtive Folly” Compagnie DRIFT, Zurich, Switzerland Directors — Beatrice Jaccard, Peter Schelling. The Theater of the Young Spectator (TYuZ) 7 p. |
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A U.S. video artist mixes imagery of inert and living objects to question the notion of time in works to be shown this summer. They say repetition is the key to learning, so is it surprising that a college professor should choose it to be the quintessence of his artistic expression? Such is the predominant mechanism that drives the rich and elegant creations of Dr. |
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Red-and-black billboards beside the city’s highways feature a single word: “Gastarbeiter,” or guest worker, a German term now often used by Russians to refer to migrant workers from the C.I.S. and further afield. The hoardings are part of a promotional campaign for a debut novel by young writer Eduard Bagirov, which was published last week with a massive print-run of 100,000 copies. |
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The recipe for an action hero is a well-guarded secret, albeit one that has changed little since the days of Mickey Spillane. A liberal splash of violence, a dash of sex, a pinch of political or underworld intrigue, and voila! — Airport Novel Souffle. |
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Bistro EntrIe // 6 Nikolskaya Ploshchad // Open 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. // Credit cards accepted // Menu in Russian and English // Dinner for two with beer 2080 rubles ($80) Wandering along a picturesque stretch of the Griboyedov canal, the promise of good cooking emerges from trails of broken beer bottles in a neat row of small maroon blinds that adorn the faIade of Bistro EntrIe. It was only the rather clumsy touch of having the bistro’s name emblazoned on every single one of these blinds, about eight in all, that coarsened this beacon of refinement with the inimical pallor of destitution. While it might be easy to dismiss EntrIe as one more example of well-executed contemporary French style lacking in a certain self-assured elegance, we felt no desire to confront the deception here, patent in its smattering of class-conscious clientele and the wide surface of stylized fleur-de-lis (when you can apprehend four different reflections of yourself with an exceedingly minimal shift of the eyes you’ll start to believe any old notion of sophistication). |
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 The gasping, grunting and oozing hard-body slab that muscles, and sometimes crawls, through “Live Free or Die Hard” sure looks like John McClane. Older if apparently no wiser, the blue-collar super-cop from the “Die Hard” franchise has lost his hair, his foul mouth and apparently his nicotine itch, but he still has the same knack for trouble, the adrenaline-pumping, cheerfully anarchic kind that causes cars to ignite, bodies to fly, eardrums to pop and hearts to race and gladden. |
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LONDON — New British Prime Minister Gordon Brown unveiled his senior ministerial team Thursday, appointing a loyal ally as chancellor, the first ever woman home secretary, and the youngest foreign secretary for 30 years. Alistair Darling, 53, succeeds Brown as chancellor of the exchequer, while David Miliband, 41, replaces Margaret Beckett as foreign secretary. He is the youngest person to hold the post since David Owen in 1977. The former environment secretary, tipped as a future Labour Party leader, said he was “tremendously honored and absolutely delighted” to be appointed and pledged to bring leadership and be “patient as well as purposeful”. The announcements came less than 24 hours after Brown replaced Tony Blair as prime minister and both Darling and Miliband’s appointments had been widely expected. |
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GIRL POWER!
Dylan Martinez / Reuters
British girl band The Spice Girls posing at the Royal Observatory in London on Thursday, shortly before announcing that they are reforming for a world tour. |
 CAIRO — Arabs said on Thursday they doubted former British Prime Minister Tony Blair could succeed as Middle East peace envoy because of his unpopularity and because he is too close to Israel and the United States. They said Blair had little credibility in the Middle East because he took part in the invasion of Iraq, opposed a ceasefire in Lebanon last year and failed to follow up on many promises to tackle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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JERUSALEM — Israeli President Moshe Katsav pleaded guilty on Thursday to committing sexual crimes against women employees in a plea bargain that will keep him out of jail, Israel’s attorney-general said. Under the deal, Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz retreated from his stated intention to charge Katsav with rape but said the president, whose term expires next month, would resign and that “shame will accompany him forever. |
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ST. RAPHAEL, France — The sky is the limit for France’s Alain Bernard, who has just burst into the limelight by swimming the second fastest 100 meters freestyle of all time. The 24-year-old clocked 48.12 seconds at this week’s French championships, second only to Pieter van den Hoogenband’s 47. |
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MOSCOW — With banana trees growing in gardens along its Black Sea beachfront, Russia’s summer resort city of Sochi does not fit the usual image of a Winter Olympic Games venue. |
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VALENCIA — A New Zealand protest against Alinghi’s rig dominated the America’s Cup rest day on Thursday as a five-member race jury conducted a closed-door hearing at race headquarters in Valencia. Swiss syndicate Alinghi levelled the best-of-nine series 2-2 on Wednesday, beating the Kiwis by 30 seconds to ensure one of the closest contests in the Cup’s recent history. |
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SEOUL — South Korea's world weightlifting champion Jang Mi-ran has been forced to quit college after her former team invoked a rarely used rule on team registration. |
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Issues Archive