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 As a week-long standoff between a construction company and local residents at Skver Podvodnikov (Submariners’ Garden) continued Monday, a new hot spot emerged in the Moskovsky District in the south of the city where protestors prevented concrete-mixers from accessing an infill construction site between Prospekt Kosmonavtov and Prospekt Yuriya Gagarina. Since Wednesday evening, the Submariners’ Garden group has destroyed a concrete fence erected near the building site earlier last week. By Monday, 18 out of 21 concrete plates of the fence, each weighing two tons, had been pushed down. The residents put up two tents next to the benches blocking the road and are holding a round-the-clock vigil. Police and construction company guards are on the scene most of the time, sitting in cars, often without license plates, at a distance. |
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SKY AT NIGHT
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A hot air balloon taking part in the 8th FAI World Hot Air Airship Championship in St. Petersburg early on Saturday morning. Forecasters are predicting highs of 20 deg. Celsius later in the week. |
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MOSCOW — While it remains unclear whether Dmitry Medvedev or Vladimir Putin is more powerful, many government officials have reached a compromise — at least on what to hang on their walls. The portraits of Putin that dominated government offices during the eight years of his presidency are giving way to photographs of Prime Minister Putin and President Medvedev together.
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As Grigory Yavlinsky, the 56-year-old co-founder of the liberal party Yabloko which he has led for the past 15 years, was replaced as party chairman on Sunday by Sergei Mitrokhin, the party appears to have deflected the threat it would split. Mitrokhin, who heads the Yabloko faction of the Moscow City Duma, received 75 out of 125 votes at the party conference on Sunday. |
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Hearing Postponed MOSCOW (SPT) — A court hearing into the British Council’s lawsuit to win back some of the tax arrears it was charged was postponed to July 3, Kommersant reported Friday. |
All photos from issue.
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Two internationally renowned medics who lived in St. Petersburg died over the weekend. Academician Fyodor Uglov, 103, who claimed to be listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s oldest practicing surgeon, died in St. Petersburg on Monday, while Natalya Bekhtereva, a world-renowned neurologist and neurophysiologist who was the scientific director of the Institute of Human Brain of the Russian Academy of Sciences, died on Sunday at the St. George’s hospital in Hamburg, Germany. She was 82. Bekhtereva’s work revolved around a revolutionary approach to studying the function of the human brain as well as new methods for the study of the mechanisms of thinking, memory, emotion and creativity. In 1990 Bekhtereva and her son, neurophysiologist Svyatoslav Medvedev established the Institute of the Human Brain to implement these methods. |
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WELLY WANGING
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A competitor takes part in a boot throwing competition on Saturday, marking the longest day of the year, in the village of Taitsy. |
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BREST, Belarus — Russian President Dmitry Medvedev condemned on Sunday what he described as attempts to rewrite wartime history — an attack the Kremlin said was aimed at Ukraine and the three Baltic states. In a joint declaration marking the 1941 Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Medvedev and Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko denounced a “politicised approach to history.
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MOSCOW — Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Friday urged the United States to delay deployment of elements of a planned missile-defense system in Europe and called on NATO to halt its eastward expansion. Addressing a conference in Moscow, Lavrov said the United States and its allies risk further damaging their relations with Russia should they choose to ignore Moscow’s objections on the contentious issues. |
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The Sheremetev Palace located at 18 Shpalernaya Ulitsa will shortly be up for sale after Taleon shareholders decided to sell it, it was announced on the company’s official website. The total area of the building, which consists of seven apartments, 10 halls and an inner courtyard, is 4,887 square meters. |
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Car sales in Russia continue to soar, having reached a record 855,000 vehicles so far this year, including both imported and domestically-produced models. |
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YEKATERINBURG — Urals fertilizer billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev is the new owner of Florida’s most expensive house after paying U.S. property tycoon Donald Trump $100 million for the waterfront property. Rybolovlev, whose fortune has soared by $10 billion in the last year on an unprecedented boom in demand for fertilizers, said through a spokesman that the purchase was an investment and that he had no plans to swap Moscow life for the Florida coast. |
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MOSCOW — Summer may have arrived in Moscow, but ongoing gloom on global financial markets just keeps raining on its parade. Analysts from the Royal Bank of Scotland, or RBS, delivered perhaps the darkest news of all, predicting a global stock market crash in the next three months. |
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Retail Sales Rocket Up MOSCOW (Bloomberg) — Russian retail sales growth unexpectedly accelerated to 14.6 percent in May from the slowest pace in almost a year and a half the month before. Sales growth picked up from a revised 13.9 percent in April, the Moscow-based Federal Statistics Service said in an e-mailed statement Monday. |
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MOSCOW — United Company RusAl urged Norilsk Nickel shareholders on Friday to elect two independent directors in a high-stakes June 30 vote for control of the board at the world’s largest nickel miner. |
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TBILISI, Georgia — Tbilisi accused MegaFon of illegally expanding its network into Georgia’s breakaway region of South Ossetia on Friday. Georgia’s National Communications Commission said MegaFon was carrying out illegal activities on its territory and must pay a fine of $3,500 within 30 days. |
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Approximately $33.5 billion is paid annually in bribes by big companies to corrupt officials, while the total amount of funds grafted by officials employed at different levels of the bureaucratic hierarchy is roughly a third of the state budget, or $120 billion, according to reports published at a recent meeting of the Investigation Committee of the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office. |
 MOSCOW — Igor Sechin, the deputy prime minister tasked with overseeing the energy sector, said Friday that he saw an end to the debate over TNK-BP, the British-Russian oil firm mired in an acrimonious shareholder dispute. Also Friday, Moscow prosecutors announced that an investigation into TNK-BP had uncovered two “insignificant” violations of the labor law. “It seems to me that some moves toward a resolution have begun,” Sechin told reporters during a visit to Ivanovo, outside Moscow, Interfax reported. |
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 MOSCOW — Every morning, staff at fashion jewelry chain Diva line up to bring their Australian boss about 500 documents to sign, as he swims against a tide of bureaucracy and corruption. |
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Ïåðååçä: a move For the expat community, summer is the time of moving in and moving out. If you are not moving, it's a great time to snap up some moving sale bargains. If you are moving, it's a great time to buy a case or two of vodka. All Russians appreciate the pain of moving; they only argue about how to quantify it. Some people say: Ïåðååçä — ýòî ñòèõèéíîå áåäñòâèå (A move is a natural disaster). Others say: Îäèí ïåðååçä òð¸ì ïîæàðàì ðàâåí (One move is equal to three fires). Still others maintain that a move is only equal to two fires. I think they are all wrong. I think a move is a natural disaster, fire, bankruptcy and divorce all rolled into one. |
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 So farewell, The eXile. An era has ended, and we shall not see its like again. After over a decade of delivering caustic comment, childish pranks and more information than we perhaps wanted and needed to know about the editors’ sex lives and drug habits, Moscow’s original alternative expat newspaper is finally being shut down. |
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It’s been some time since the name of Che Guevara struck fear into capitalist souls. Now the revolutionary is more of a money-spinner himself — a hip totem used to sell countless numbers of T-shirts and trinkets carrying his iconic bearded visage. But in Azerbaijan, it seems, his spirit still has the power to unsettle. |
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 HARARE — Zimbabwe’s MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai will urge Africa this week to pile pressure on President Robert Mugabe to solve the country’s political crisis after the opposition pulled out of a presidential run-off vote. Tsvangirai withdrew from the June 27 election saying his Movement for Democratic Change supporters would be risking their lives it they cast their votes. MDC spokesman Nelson Chamisa said Tsvangirai would lobby the international community and African countries to put pressure on Mugabe to settle the crisis. |
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 CEBU, Philippines — Rescuers held little hope on Monday of finding some 800 people missing from a capsized ferry in the Philippines, as divers prepared to drill into the ship’s hull in the hope of finding survivors in air pockets. |
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 VIENNA — It was not pretty but Spain finally managed to lay to rest the ghosts of their past failures by edging world champions Italy on penalties and clinching a place in the semifinals of Euro 2008. Connoisseurs of the game will have been disappointed by the quality of football on show in a dour match at the Ernst Happel stadium but for Spain it was not the manner of their victory but the psychological effects that are so important. |
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LONDON — Tennis shops near Wimbledon have done a brisk trade in replicas of Rafael Nadal’s recent vivid green match-winning shirt, testament, perhaps, to his status as a real threat to Roger Federer’s dominance at the championships. |
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MOSCOW — Vast numbers of ecstatic Russians celebrated well into the night after their team reached the Euro 2008 semi-finals on Saturday with a thoroughly deserved 3-1 extra-time win over Netherlands. Hundreds of thousands of Muscovites poured on to the streets within minutes of the final whistle in Basel where Russia, coached by Dutchman Guus Hiddink, stunned their much fancied opponents with a great display of attacking football. |
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MAGNY-COURS, France — Felipe Massa led a Ferrari one-two to win the French Grand Prix on Sunday and take the lead in the Formula One championship for the first time. |
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