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MOSCOW — Investigators said Wednesday that they were focusing on the possibility that ultranationalists bombed a St. Petersburg-bound train earlier this week, injuring 27 people. “Detectives and investigators are working on several angles. The top lead, however, is that representatives of extremist nationalist organizations were involved in this terrorist act,” a source close to the investigation told Interfax. The source said it was also possible that Islamist militants from the North Caucasus organized the attack, which derailed the Moscow-St. Petersburg train and paralyzed railway traffic for hours. |
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BUILDING BRIDGES
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
The Blagoveshensky bridge, formerly the Lieutenant Schmidt, which was reopened on Wednesday after repairs and reconstruction works which began at the end of 2005. |
 MOSCOW — A blast from a bomb planted under the tracks derailed an express train heading from Moscow to St. Petersburg Monday night, injuring more than two dozen people in an attack prosecutors are investigating as a terrorist act. The Nevsky Express jumped the tracks after an explosion at 9:38 p.m. near the city of Novgorod, about 500 kilometers north of Moscow, the Prosecutor General’s Office said in a statement released Tuesday.
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Drowning Dog Saved ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Emergency services carried out a rescue operation on Thursday morning to recover a drowning dog from the Griboedova Canal, Fontanka.ru reported. Staff on duty received a call informing them that there was an animal drowning under the Kharlamovy Bridge. |
All photos from issue.
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A team of mountaineers left St. Petersburg on Thursday for a daring one-week mission to reach the top of the Kyzyl Asker Peak on the southeastern border between Kirghizstan and China. The explorers intend to climb the notoriously steep 5,842-meter ridge amid the impenetrable Kokshaal-Too mountain range and waterlogged terrain by a highly dangerous route that no-one has attempted before. “The challenge is to recapture Russia's international reputation in mountain climbing as one of the world’s leading and strongest schools,” said Alexander Odintsov, a climbing guru, who is leading a five-man team that includes a physician and a film producer. Odintsov and companions Alexander Ruchkin and Mikhail Mikhailov were awarded the prestigious international Piolet d'Or Prize for a triumphal ascent to the summit of a 7,710-meter Himalayan peak Jannu in Nepal in 2004. |
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 Police in the southern republic of Adygeya have detained a university student who admitted to posting a video on the Internet appearing to show the brutal execution of two men from Tajikistan and Dagestan, the Interior Ministry said Wednesday. |
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MOSCOW — City prosecutors Tuesday morning questioned prominent lawyer and media personality Pavel Astakhov over claims by a senior city police official that Astakhov slandered law enforcement officers in a novel he penned recently. Astakhov was questioned by investigators at the Koptevsky District Prosecutor’s Office over claims by Ivan Glukhov, head of city police’s main investigative directorate, that the lawyer’s novel, “Raider,” slandered the country’s law enforcement authorities. |
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 AGRORUS ’07, the International Agro-industrial Fair, will open at Lenexpo exhibition complex Aug. 24, with organizers hoping a number of innovations and special events will make the event more attractive to producers and buyers of agricultural equipment. |
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The city economy experienced steady growth in the first half of 2007, driven mainly by the processing industry, construction and investment, City Hall’s Committee for Economic Development, Industrial Policy and Trade said Tuesday in a statement. |
 MOSCOW — A company that Rosneft recently sold to a U.S. entrepreneur bought Yukos’ international unit at a forced auction Wednesday, as former Yukos managers vowed to pursue a legal challenge to salvage part of what was once the country’s largest oil firm. |
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By Nabi Abdullaev Staff Writer The head of the Unified Aircraft Corporation, a government-controlled holding company that unites all the country’s aviation firms, said Wednesday that the industry planned to produce about 4,500 aircraft worth approximately $250 billion by 2025. |
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VTB Assets ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Bank VTB Northwest increased assets by 18.7 percent up to 175.68 billion rubles ($6.8 billion) in the first half of 2007, Interfax reported Tuesday. The bank’s pre-tax profits increased by 46.5 percent up to 4.27 billion rubles ($165.4 million) and its net profits by 38. |
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 It is true that Russia lacks global competitiveness and suffers low labor productivity. This subject is often presented, however, from a one-sided perspective, and little attention is paid to the contributing factors behind the problem. The problem is that official statistics rely exclusively on output that is officially declared. |
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The Dembsky family of Russia was living illegally in Amiens, France, when police came knocking at their door. The father climbed out a window and escaped unharmed to the street below. |
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 The Open Cinema festival that takes place this week earns its name. The event is open to ideas, open to interpretation — and at least half of it takes place out in the open. Although something of a mixed bag, the organizers have put together a program of short films that divides along genre lines and includes fiction films, video-art/experimental films, non-fiction films and animation. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday these will be screened on the beach of the Peter and Paul Fortress while throughout the rest of the week until Aug. |
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 The Open Cinema festival that takes place this week earns its name. The event is open to ideas, open to interpretation — and at least half of it takes place out in the open. |
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Despite the rumors, Iggy Pop and the Stooges will not perform in St. Petersburg, but are due to appear in Moscow at B1 Maximum Club on Sept. 11. The concert is part of a tour in support of “Weirdness,” the album that Pop and the Stooges released in March to rave reviews. The band’s previous studio album of new material was “Raw Power” in 1973. Widely known as the godfather of punk, Pop was writing and performing punk songs with his band The Stooges a decade before the Sex Pistols or the Clash emerged on the scene in the 1970s. With driving guitar riffs and a frontman (Pop) known for cutting his chest with broken glass and smearing his body with peanut butter during performances, The Stooges soon made a name for themselves on the Detroit rock scene for bringing something entirely new to contemporary music. |
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 Despite being widely dismissed as zholtiye urody, or yellow freaks, and corrupters of children since their arrival in Russia, “The Simpsons” has a strong fan base and the premiere of the movie Thursday is out to Simpsonize the country. |
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Tikhon Khrennikov, a prolific Russian composer and pianist best known in the West as an official Soviet antagonist of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, died Wednesday in Moscow. He was 94. Khrennikov, regarded as a promising young composer in the 1930s, was able to survive in the perilous currents of Soviet politics from the Stalin era on. In 1948 Josef Stalin personally selected him to be the secretary of the composers’ union. He was the only head of a creative union to retain his post until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Khrennikov saw the value of ingratiating himself with Soviet leaders early in his career, when he adopted the optimistic, dramatic and unabashedly lyrical style favored by Soviet leaders. |
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 “We work all over the city, so this is just one of many jobs,” says the worker, leaning on his shovel and taking a long drag from his cigarette. “Of course, this one is special. |
 The master short-story writer Isaac Babel was arrested by the NKVD in May 1939 and executed in January 1940. For a long time, it wasn’t clear when he died: His wife eventually learned of his demise 15 years after the fact. When he was arrested, all his papers were confiscated. His unpublished manuscripts were never found. Travis Holland’s gripping debut novel, “The Archivist’s Story,” summons up this moment in time — the months during which Babel was incarcerated in the Lubyanka security-police headquarters — through the eyes of one of the Lubyanka’s archivists, Pavel Dubrov. |
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 This month, Forbes magazine published its list of the 50 richest Russians in showbusiness and sport, which was a good excuse to put a photo of socialite and reality show presenter Ksenia Sobchak in a slinky dress on the cover. |
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Caravan Restaurant // 46 Voznesensky Prospekt. Tel: 812-310-5678 // Open daily, 12 p.m. – 1 a.m. // Menu in Russian and English. // Major credit cards accepted. // Dinner for two, no alcohol: 1,670 rubles ($65.50). The defining trait of Caravan is presentation. From the dIcor to the service to the dishes themselves, everything in this Uzbek/ Azeri restaurant is meticulously crafted to make diners feel as if they are eating in the palace of an ancient Central Asian khanate. However, like a pretty girl who lacks intelligence, something is missing. The place is safe and toned down – a non-threatening, Russified version of the exotic. Caravan’s prices reflect its somewhat out of the way location. |
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 Last Friday, an exhibition by the Italian sculptor Bruno Liberatore opened in the General Staff Building of the State Hermitage Museum on the Palace Square. |
 That “Hairspray” is good-hearted is no surprise. Adam Shankman’s film, lovingly adapted from the Broadway musical, preserves the inclusive, celebratory spirit of John Waters’s 1988 movie, in which bigger-boned, darker-skinned and otherwise different folk take exuberant revenge on the bigots and the squares who conspire to keep them down. |
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NEW YORK — Tim Donaghy, the former NBA referee at the center of a betting scandal that has rocked professional basketball, pleaded guilty Wednesday to two federal conspiracy charges, acknowledging that he used inside information to predict the winners of NBA games and passed on his picks to a professional gambler in return for cash. |
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NEW YORK — The Baltimore Orioles scored three runs in the top of the 10th inning, after blowing a 3-0 lead in the ninth, to overcome a stubborn New York Yankees 6-3 on Wednesday. |
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CAPE TOWN — Fullback Percy Montgomery scored a South African test record of 35 points as the Springboks romped to a 105-13 win over Namibia in a World Cup warm-up match at Newlands on Wednesday. A suspected rib injury to Jean de Villiers which forced him off the field five minutes from time was the only thing to mar the game for South Africa, however coach Jake White was confident the center would be fit for next month’s World Cup. |
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MELBOURNE — Five-time Olympic swimming champion Ian Thorpe has provided Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority (ASADA) with evidence this week in a bid to clear his name after an alleged doping offence in 2006. |
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LONDON — Sheffield United will sue West Ham United for the cost of relegation from the Premier League last season, a club spokesman said on Thursday. “We are seeking substantial compensation,” he added, with the Yorkshire club estimating the cost of relegation to be more than 30 million pounds. The spokesman said their legal representative Toby Craig had confirmed the action in a statement made public on Thursday. |
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