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Fierce debate continues over the possible cause of the Nov. 27 deadly crash on the Nevsky Express en route from Moscow to St. Petersburg that claimed 26 lives. According to a new scenario voiced by the Emergency Situations Ministry on Wednesday, a group of terrorists had plotted to hit two trains at the same time. |
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The Russian Museum’s Toropets icon of the Virgin Mary was secretly delivered to a newly built church in an elite gated community in the Moscow Oblast on Thursday, despite strong resistance from a number of the museum’s experts. |
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MOSCOW — The nation’s three top courts hope to build trust in the judicial system through a new agency that will distribute rulings and other legal materials, a top judge said Wednesday. The Constitutional Court, the Supreme Arbitration Court and the Supreme Court will publish the information through the new Russian Agency of Legal and Court Information, or RAPSI, in cooperation with RIA-Novosti, the state-owned news agency, Constitutional Court chief justice Valery Zorkin said. |
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MOSCOW — Georgia on Tuesday denied entry to the head of the Russian State Archive and a Russian analyst as they arrived in Tbilisi to attend a conference, prompting four other Russians from their delegation to pull out of the event in protest. |
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MOSCOW — A car packed with explosives and weapons was intercepted on Thursday near a railway station in Karelia, northwest Russia, a police official said, RIA-Novosti reported. Northwest Russia’s acting police chief Vadim Kashirin said the car was detained near the city of Petrozavodsk by station security. |
All photos from issue.
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Two Constitutional Court judges are stepping down from senior positions after giving interviews that denounced mounting pressure on the country’s judicial system. Judge Anatoly Kononov will resign from the Constitutional Court at the end of this month, while judge Vladimir Yaroslavtsev has handed in his resignation as a member of the country’s Council of Judges, court spokeswoman Yekaterina Sidorenko said Wednesday. |
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The local leg of “Russia Against Terror,” the United Russia state-sanctioned rallies held in Moscow and St. Petersburg on Wednesday in the wake of the Nevsky Express crash, did not live up to its billing, as the party’s leading members failed to appear, the announced LED-screen television link with Moscow was canceled and the whole event lasted only 15 minutes. |
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 MOSCOW — Gazprom-Media has thrown down the gauntlet to Video International, the country’s largest seller of television advertising, accusing it of coordinating its actions with TV channels and limiting competition. The holding filed a complaint with the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service, Sergei Piskarev, the head of Gazprom-Media’s sales house, told Vedomosti. |
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MOSCOW — On orders from the president, the Finance Ministry has proposed changes that would increase oversight of Russian companies’ foreign beneficiaries and significantly limit the use of offshore companies to minimize tax payments. |
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MOSCOW — The number of people who have started their own businesses with the help of the government’s self-employment program will reach 120,000 by the end of this year, Federal Labor and Employment Service chief Yury Gertsy said Wednesday. “As concerns, the self-employment support, there will be, according to preliminary estimates, some 120,000 formerly unemployed by the end of the year who have decided to start their own small business in Russia,” he said, Interfax reported. |
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MOSCOW — The government has approved a plan to send managers from United Russia to work at troubled carmaker AvtoVAZ, but the party is promising that they won’t force out the company’s current executives. |
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MOSCOW — Higher oil prices have prompted the Economic Development Ministry to upgrade its forecasts for economic growth while moderating its planned eurobond issue, the ministry said Tuesday. The economy will likely grow by at least 2.5 percent next year, more than previously expected, Deputy Economic Development Minister Andrei Klepach said. It could grow as much as 3.1 percent at best, he said, bringing the figure in line with the latest estimate by the World Bank. The ministry’s current forecast is for the economy to expand by 1.6 percent. The World Bank said last month that the growth would reach 3.2 percent. Klepach didn’t say why prospects for economic expansion improved, but his slides at a banking conference in London showed that oil prices — a key factor in the resource-based economy — would also climb to levels that exceed previous government expectations. |
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 MOSCOW — Retail chains and their suppliers may be required to publish their prices and markups, according to proposed changes to the bill on trade, which State Duma deputies hope will help stop middlemen from driving up inflation. |
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 Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov in July proposed to Akhmed Zakayev, a leader of the nationalistic and comparatively moderate Chechen opposition, that he return to Chechnya. Kadyrov promised Zakayev amnesty and various positions ranging from director of the local theater to culture minister. |
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On Friday, as more than 650 people —including a significant number of government officials — were traveling to St. Petersburg from Moscow, the Nevsky Express luxury train was bombed, killing 26 people and wounding more than 100. |
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 Vladimir Nabokov’s final, fragmentary novel went on sale Monday in two versions in Russia, more than 30 years after he asked that it be burned upon his death. The emigre Russian wrote “The Original of Laura” on index cards from 1975 to 1977, the last years of his life. |
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By Michele A. Berdy Êîå-, -íèáóäü, -ëèáî, -òî: Prefix and suffixes added to adverbs and pronouns to convey levels of indefiniteness in ways that are universal but highly idiosyncratic, making it almost impossible to categorize them in a meaningful way. |
 Throughout the history of art, the nude has been a universal symbol. Nudity embodies both classicism and scandal, eroticism and innocence, intimacy and histrionics. A new exhibition at the Museum of City Sculpture examines what the modern evolution of this classic subject holds. |
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The popularity in Russia of labeling one’s cafe with the inane “art” prefix is somewhat mystifying, but if forced to come up with an example of what this marker is supposed to convey, one could do worse than the Kipyatok art cafe. |
 Warriors come out of a Trojan horse, carrying the eponymous virus; the construction of a Hadron Collider and work on the production of a “divine molecule” are developing at full throttle in Carthage; the survivors of a clash between two civilizations don space suits and fly to Mars to begin a new life. |
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MOGADISHU, Somalia – A male suicide bomber dressed as a woman attacked a university graduation ceremony Thursday, killing at least 15 people, including three Cabinet ministers and three journalists. The attack raised new questions about the ability of Somalia’s weak government to control even the small area of the capital it holds. |
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