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Inspired by the success of the southern Russian city of Sochi, which has won the right to host the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, Governor Valentina Matviyenko has announced that St. Petersburg will put itself forward as a candidate city for the 2020 Summer Olympics. Speaking at the Ekho Moskvy radio station, Matviyenko revealed the city had intended to participate in the run for the 2016 Olympics but Sochi’s victory put an end to the ambitious plan. "I am not disappointed for St. Petersburg," Matviyenko said. “It is not only Sochi that is going to benefit from the Olympics. Sochi’s victory is set to give an enormous boost to sport in the country. It will also make sport fashionable and prestigious, which is an especially important factor in getting young people interested.” “Of course, St. |
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SETTING SUN
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Sunset in the Lower Park of Peterhof on Wednesday. As the White Nights season comes to a close, with days growing shorter at a rate of about three to four minutes a day, weather forecasters are predicting sunshine and highs of 23 degrees Celsius over the weekend. |
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MOSCOW — Russia and Britain appeared to be on a diplomatic collision course Wednesday after they traded accusations over the extradition case of former security services officer Andrei Lugovoi. British sources said they expected an outcome to the standoff in the near future and Malcolm Rifkind, a member of parliament and former foreign minister, said the British electorate would be expecting the government to take a tough stand.
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The United Nations’ culture and heritage body UNESCO has asked City Hall to stop any development associated with the building of a skyscraper for energy giant Gazprom until after a new evaluation is made about possible damage to historic monuments in St. |
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MOSCOW — The Federation Council on Wednesday approved a bill requiring senators to have lived 10 years in the regions they represent in order to serve in the upper chamber. |
All photos from issue.
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 MOSCOW — Lyuba was only about four months old when she died on a full stomach. Ten thousand odd years later she is set to become world famous. Scientists have hailed the discovery of the baby woolly mammoth, dubbed Lyuba, as one of the finest examples of preserved mammoths ever discovered after it emerged from the melting permafrost in western Siberia. “There has never been such a find,” Pavel Kosintsev, one of the first scientists to see the mammoth, said in a telephone interview from Yekaterinburg. “The mammoth is an animal that you look at and you see that there is an entire epoch behind it, a huge time period when climate was changing,” said Alexei Tikhonov, deputy director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Zoological Institute in televised comments last week. |
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A ROYAL WELCOME
/ For The St. Petersburg Times
Her Majesty Queen Sirikit of Thailand being greeted by Liam Madden (l) of Kempinski Moika 22 Hotel at the start of her state visit to St. Petersburg earlier this week. |
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MOSCOW — Russia is reopening its doors to foreign adoptions, months after they all but ground to a halt due to bureaucratic barriers. Seven U.S. adoption agencies have recently been reaccredited to work in Russia, Sergei Vitelis, an official at the Education and Science Ministry who deals with children’s issues, confirmed Wednesday. Vitelis said he could not provide further details, and the ministry’s press service did not respond to questions sent by e-mail Wednesday afternoon.
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Endurance Boat Race ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The Sixth Inflatable Boat World Championship, featuring a 24-hour race, is due to be held on Saturday on the River Neva and the Kronverksky canal, Fontanka.ru reported. From 12 a.m. sailors will compete on a 2,750 meter circuit and the competitor that completes the most laps in 24 hours wins the race. |
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Ford is to start production of its Mondeo model at its Leningrad Oblast plant as part of a $100 million upgrade, the company said Tuesday in a statement. The new model will be launched by the end of 2008 with a production line of 25,000 units a year. “The Russian car market has been expanding dramatically over the last few years. |
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The state of the banking industry in the Northwest provoked mixed opinions Thursday at the 12th Northwest Banking Conference. Vladimir Dzikovich, president of the Northwest Association of Banks, took a moderate line, saying that the Northwest may only account for a relatively small share of the country’s banking offices but the region is still attracting renowned foreign capital. |
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A unique cruise ship to operate between St. Petersburg and the island of Valaam in Lake Ladoga is due to set sail for the first time Saturday running three times a week to the end of September. Alien Shipping, in cooperation with Inflot Travel, believe the 4-star ship “Kazan,” is unique. |
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LUXEMBOURG — The European Union’s Court of Justice on Wednesday annulled an EU anti-monopoly decision that had prevented South African giant De Beers from buying rough diamonds from Russian rival Alrosa. |
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Atomic Help MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russia will help Kazakhstan build its first nuclear power plant by 2013 as the countries pool as much as $10 billion of resources to prepare for a global resurgence in atomic power, a Kazakh state official said. Atomniye Stantsii, a joint venture between the two countries, plans to build the first of three medium-sized BVER-300 plants using 300-megawatt fast-neutron reactors, and may subsequently export nuclear fuel. |
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 The event that most caught my attention in the news the other day was the arrest of a top municipal official in the small town of Solnechnogorsk near Moscow. This position is roughly equivalent to serving as the head of a village. And this “village head” was arrested on suspicion of taking a $200,000 bribe for granting permission for the construction of a single apartment building in his jurisdiction. |
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Imagine a situation in which a good acquaintance — but not a close friend — suggests that you start a joint venture that requires you to invest all of your savings. |
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 “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” the fifth movie in the series, begins, as most of the others have, with a spot of unpleasantness at the Dursleys, and ends with Harry facing down Lord Voldemort. The climactic battle between the young wizard (Daniel Radcliffe) and the Dark Lord (Ralph Fiennes) foreshadows the final, potentially fatal showdown we all suspect is coming in Book Seven, which will be published later this month. |
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Art Brut is a sensational last-minute addition to the city’s music activities as concerts begin to die out in mid-summer. The British art-punk band will replace Boy Kill Boy, the initial headlining act for a beer-sponsored beach event this weekend. |
 The Third International Body Navigation Contemporary Arts Festival is underway, continuing its mission to explore the human body and its relationship to the environment around it with a series of events that combine dance, photography and music. Unlike many apparently international festivals held in St. Petersburg, Body Navigation succeeds in bringing an array of artists from numerous countries to present their works and explore its central concept. |
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 Johann Strauss, Jr., the “Waltz King,” spent 11 summers in the mid-1800s entertaining St. Petersburg high society at Pavlovsk’s “musical train station. |
 Local art-rock band Auktyon has achieved something that no other authentic Russian group has of late — it has grabbed the attention of the U.S. media. After performing at the globalFEST music event in New York in January 2006 and a subsequent U.S. tour, and recording an album in a New York studio with American musicians, the St. |
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The tabloid Tvoi Den reported last week that pop singer and one-time Eurovision contestant Alsu formally joined United Russia, along with her businessman husband Yan Abramov. |
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Gouache // 12 Vladimirsky Prospekt. Tel: 575 8852, 575 8847 // Open daily from noon until the last customer leaves // Major credit cards accepted // Menu in English and in Russian // Lunch for two (one alcoholic cocktail included): 2,355 rubles ($92) The street that inspired Dostoevsky to write the first of his depressing novels and was home to Tolstoy’s famous suicidal heroine, Anna Karenina, Vladimirsky Prospekt now has something to smile about. Gouache, a restaurant that opened in January in the building of the Lensoviet Theater, offers extremely good dishes in elegant surroundings. The eatery has two floors. The first floor hosts an Oyster Bar, a place with a modern design and a cheaper menu than that of the restaurant proper, which is on the second floor. |
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 The musical clock was made in 1792 by English craftsman Eardley Norton and the Gravell and Tolkein company by the special command of Catherine the Great, and kept in the storage at the Hermitage until this week. |
 RIO DE JANEIRO — Russia’s most famous clown, Slava Polunin, says the key to his success is not his humor — but his cunning. Dressed in a baggy yellow boilersuit and red shoes, he seems every bit the traditional clown at the start of his surreal production “Slava’s Snowshow” that has been staged in over 25 countries and more than 80 cities. But Polunin takes the art of clowning to a different level as the lights go out, leaving spectators in pitch black until he appears on stage in a blaze of light with deafening, eerie music and huge fans blowing a blizzard of blinding, snow-like paper that engulfs the entire audience. |
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 The moral of “Ratatouille” is delivered by a critic: a gaunt, unsmiling fellow named Anton Ego who composes his acidic notices in a coffin-shaped room and who speaks in the parched baritone of Peter O’Toole. |
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LONDON — Tiger Woods, who will be chasing a hat-trick of British Open victories next week, is praying the Carnoustie venue will be easier than it was eight years ago. With a reputation as the toughest on the British Open rota, the narrow fairways and deep rough on the Scottish course caused the players grief throughout the 1999 edition. Conditions were particularly difficult on the first day when a stiff wind blew and the average score was seven-over-par. “It was really hard,” Woods told reporters at the invitational tournament he hosted in Bethesda, Maryland last week. “I’ve never played a golf course as hard as that course was set up and as unfair as it was set up as well. |
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GAME FOR IT
/ Reuters
Swimmers joke before their training session for the Pan American Games at Maria Lenk Aquatic Center in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on Wednesday. Rio will host the games from July 13 to 29. |
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CASTELLANETA MARINA, Italy — Russia will be missing Maria Sharapova and maybe their coach for this weekend’s Fed Cup semi-final against the United States while defending champions Italy face a daunting task against France. World number two Sharapova has pulled out of the U.S. clash in Stowe, Vermont saying she was not match fit having initially agreed to make her Fed Cup debut in the hardcourt semi.
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MOSCOW — Moscow’s Luzhniki Olympic stadium will stage Russia’s Euro 2008 Group E qualifier against England, the Russian Football Union (RFU) said on Wednesday. “Yes, the match will be played at Luzhniki and it is now 99.9 percent certain that it will be held on a synthetic pitch,” a spokesman for the RFU told Reuters. |
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LONDON — Formula One teams have always kept a close eye on rivals, eager for any gain that might make their cars go quicker, but the current ‘spy’ controversy goes well beyond that. |
Temp: -2°C moderate or heavy snow showers
Issues Archive