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The third international LGBT film festival ‘Bok o Bok’ (Side By Side) focusing on homosexual and gender issues will open in St. Petersburg on Friday and run through Oct. 23. The festival’s films are united by the topic of homosexuality in the past, present and future, and by tolerance and homophobia in modern societies around the world. The main message of the movies is the acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people — their relationships, family and way of life. The films being shown at the festival include both new international film festival winners and cult works from the past. The program consists of 34 movies from Canada, Germany, the U. |
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POLE POSITION
Sergei Karpukhin / Reuters
Formula One commercial supremo Bernie Ecclestone (c) meets with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (r) and RusAl CEO Oleg Deripaska (l) at a signing ceremony in Sochi on Thursday. Sochi will host a Russian Formula One Grand Prix from 2014 to 2020 under the new deal. |
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MOSCOW — Instead of alarm clocks, some Russians were woken early Thursday by text messages from the State Statistics Service informing them that a nationwide census — the first since 2002 — is starting. The census will run for two weeks, until Oct. 25. During that time, some 600,000 census takers, many of them students, will be trying to convince every human being in Russia to open the doors of their homes and tell the truth about their nationality, income, language skills, housing facilities and many other personal matters.
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President Dmitry Medvedev made remarks that could be interpreted as swipes at Prime Minister Vladimir Putin while meeting a group of carefully selected Russian rock musicians in Moscow this week. At one point he referred ironically to Putin’s meeting with the artists who participated in a charity show in St. |
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A 28-year-old suspect was beaten to death by local police who were torturing the man to get a confession from him. The identities of the police officers who tortured the man are yet to be established. |
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New Charity Store ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A new charity shop named Khoroshop, which opened in September on 9aya Sovietskaya Ulitsa as part of the organization Nochlezhka that helps the city’s homeless, will hold an auction on Saturday for the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, Nochlezhka said in a press release Thursday. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — Britain and Russia still disagree profoundly on issues like the poisoning of Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko, but despite this both governments will work on improving relations, their foreign ministers said Wednesday. On his first visit to Moscow, British Foreign Minister William Hague said he hoped that cooperation would widen even though controversy remains. |
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MOSCOW — The size of the average bribe has surged by a third as the government’s war on corruption faltered this year, Prosecutor General Yury Chaika said Wednesday. |
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Dozens were arrested outside Governor Valentina Matviyenko’s dacha Tuesday in the village of Komarovo near St. Petersburg when they went there to try and give her a letter asking her to meet with them. The crowd, estimated at between 50 and 80 people, were met by armed guards who pointed firearms at them, Sergei Vesnov, chairman of the Association of Small and Medium Businesses, said Thursday. |
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The problem of lengthy waiting lists for admission to St. Petersburg’s kindergartens is to be solved within the next two years, City Hall announced this week. |
 MOSCOW — California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called President Dmitry Medvedev “a great visionary” and compared Russia to a “gold mine” of business opportunities in comments to a room full of entrepreneurs and journalists in Moscow on Monday. The 63-year-old bodybuilder and Hollywood star came to the capital to lead the 2010 Silicon Valley trade mission to Russia, bringing along senior management from 28 U. |
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City Hall will sell the Astoria Hotel building and the Nikolsky Rynok building — both classified as federal monuments — at auction on Nov. 19 with a starting price of 3 billion rubles ($99.3 million). The starting price for the Astoria property, which comprises a 16,998-square meter edifice and a 3,188-square meter plot of land at Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa 39, was set at 2. |
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MOSCOW — Russians now hold 7,600 percent more Visa cards than they did 10 years ago, a senior Visa executive said Tuesday, a number that shows an explosive growth of the market. |
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MOSCOW — Gennady Onishchenko, chief of the Federal Consumer Protection Service, has accused Procter & Gamble of providing unsafe working conditions. Onishchenko said 51 percent of the company’s employees in Moscow worked in harmful conditions, RIA-Novosti reported Tuesday. |
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MOSCOW — Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez arrived Thursday for a two-day visit, during which the close Russian ally is expected to sign agreements on building social housing in Caracas and to establish a binational bank. |
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ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Ford Motor Company’s local plant expects to double its production volume in 2010 up to 80,000 cars, Interfax reported Thursday, citing Valery Serdyukov, governor of the Leningrad Oblast. In 2011, the plant is set to produce 90,000 vehicles, including the fourth Ford Focus and new Mondeo models, Serdyukov said, adding that the factory is currently looking to recruit 500 workers to fill three shifts. |
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 Every year in October, as the cold, damp weather sets in, it is time for the fall call-up of new draftees. The goal is to conscript 278,000 young men by Dec. 31, but this year the army is supposed to institute new humanitarian measures to make the one-year mandatory service more civilized. |
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A video titled “Primorye Partisan” has been making the rounds on the Internet. It was made by a gang of self-proclaimed guerrillas in the Primorye region that led an armed attack against policemen. |
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 Paris’s Pompidou Center has become the latest guest of honor at the State Hermitage Museum, after an exhibition showing 12 major works of 20th-century French art from the center’s collection opened its doors Wednesday. Along with a contemporary art festival, the exhibition constitutes “The Pompidou Center in the State Hermitage” project, organized in close cooperation between the two cultural institutions as part of the Year of France in Russia. The exhibition starts with Marcel Duchamp’s famous “Bottle Rack,” which the Hermitage’s director Mikhail Piotrovsky described as a “symbol of 20th-century creativity. |
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Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Cartoonists including The St. Petersburg Times’ Viktor Bogorad (2nd l) show off new compilations of their work at Dom Knigi on Monday. |
 A year after St. Petersburg’s museums and theaters joined forces to put on the “Diaghilev. P.S.” festival, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum is hosting the largest exhibition to date dedicated to the Russian maestro’s best-known works. “The V&A is delighted to be showing its unrivalled collection of Diaghilev and Ballet Russes,” said Sir Mark Jones, director of the V&A.
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As we scanned the vast menu at Krasnoye Solntse (Red Sun), our Chinese meal was looking more and more promising. The long list combined the eternal bestsellers with original dishes from the chef, and clearly catered to both the local Chinese community and the largely uninitiated locals. Krasnoye Solntse offers a range of several modestly priced, and apparently popular, business lunches, ranging from 168 ($5. |
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 SAN JOSE MINE, Chile — Chile has completed its flawless rescue of 33 miners trapped for a record 10 weeks, sparking euphoria at home after a 22-hour drama that captivated hundreds of millions around the world. The ascent late Wednesday of the last of the miners, grizzled leader Luis Urzua, capped an against-all-odds operation hailed by Chile’s president as an inspiration to the world. |
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MARGANETS, Ukraine — A bus packed with rush-hour commuters crashed into a train at a level crossing in Ukraine on Tuesday after jumping a red light, killing 43 people and leaving a scene of carnage. |
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BEIJING — China on Thursday denounced the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to dissident Liu Xiaobo as tantamount to “encouraging crime,” as state media said the prize was part of a Western “ideological war” against Beijing. The comments came as China faced fresh pressure, with Norway criticizing Chinese retaliatory steps over the award and Japan’s prime minister saying the jailed peace laureate should be freed. |
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ATHENS — Riot police on Thursday stormed the Acropolis to break up a blockade of Greece’s top monument by protesting culture ministry staff as the government faced fresh opposition to its austerity policies. |
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Issues Archive