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 MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday described security at Domodedovo Airport as “simply a state of anarchy” and promised to hold airport management responsible for a suicide bombing that killed at least 35 people, including four foreigners. Airport officials denied the accusation, saying the transportation police was in charge of screening people entering the public area of the international arrivals hall. |
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St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Airport has adopted heightened security measures in the wake of the suicide bombing that killed 35 or more at Domodedovo Airport in Moscow on Monday, while local and national officials hurried to express their outrage and announce measures aimed at preventing similar tragedies in the future. |
 The number of St. Petersburg residents among the victims of the bomb attack at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport on Monday is not yet known, nor had anyone claimed responsibility for the atrocity by Tuesday evening. It is unlikely that the latter will provoke much surprise, but in a relatively slow week in St. |
All photos from issue.
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 FIFA President Sepp Blatter said he was certain the 2018 World Cup was in good hands and joined Russian officials in signing a formal declaration Sunday in St. Petersburg that awards the soccer tournament to Russia. “Congratulations to Russia, its government and its nation on having the privilege of organizing the World Cup,” Blatter said at a ceremony in which Russia was conferred the official status of the cup’s host country. |
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Last week City Hall announced that the Greek consortium of Helector, Aktor Concessions and Aktor had won the contract to construct a waste-processing plant in the village of Yanino outside St. |
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Vadim Alexandrov, general director of Metrostroi, the main constructor of metro lines in St. Petersburg, used a press conference last Friday marking the company’s 70th anniversary to highlight the need for greater investment and a massive increase in metro building in the city. Alexandrov estimates that St. Petersburg will require 30 to 40 new metro stations to make underground rail travel convenient for all city residents, but suggested that such an expansion was essential to ease the city’s increasingly acute traffic problems. “Local subway construction lags at least 20 years behind the city’s needs,” said Alexandrov in his speech. “For metro travel to be convenient and accessible to everyone, there should be a metro station within at most 700 meters of any city resident. |
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 Hundreds came Sunday to protest the killing of cats and dogs ordered by City Governor Valentina Matviyenko as part of measures to fight the outbreak of African swine fever (ASF) in Volodarsky, a village to the southwest of St. |
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MOSCOW — A Briton killed in the bombing at Domodedovo Airport was a regular visitor to Russia who was looking forward to getting married in the spring and raising his infant daughter, his brother said Tuesday. Gordon Cousland, 39, was a property consultant with CACI, a British marketing and IT consultancy, and one of 35 people killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up in the airport’s international arrivals hall Monday. |
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MOSCOW — She managed to get a university degree, land a job and become citizen of the year in Norway. But this did not save 25-year-old Maria Amelie — born as Madina Salamova — from being expelled to Russia as an illegal immigrant. |
 MOSCOW — The plea was clear and out of the ordinary. “I’d like to initiate dialogue with the mayor of Moscow as he’s connected at the top,” Canadian businessman John Walmsley wrote in a recent e-mail to The Moscow Times. Walmsley, of Winnipeg-based Biovaildiagnostics, a medical diagnostic research and development, settled on Mayor Sergei Sobyanin as a target because he is a former associate of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. |
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MOSCOW — Russian authorities are considering canceling the adoption of a 7-year-old boy from Magadan whose U.S. parents said they punished him by dousing him with cold water and forcing him to drink spicy Tabasco sauce. |
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MOSCOW — Blue Buckets, a bellicose public group campaigning against abuse of road privileges by officials, confirmed on Sunday that it would stage a rally this week in support of a driver hospitalized after her car collided with that of a Kremlin official. But the group’s head, Alexei Dozorov, conceded in a phone interview that if the fault lies with the official and his driver, it will be hard to prove even if a host of witnesses come forward. Alyona Yarosh, a 23-year-old architecture student, was hospitalized late last Wednesday after her Opel Astra collided with the BMW sedan of Garry Minkh, presidential envoy to the State Duma, on Rublyovskoye Shosse outside Moscow, home to many of the city’s elite. |
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 MINSK — Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko warned Friday that no dissent will be tolerated as he took the oath of office for a fourth time in a ceremony that was boycotted by European Union ambassadors. |
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MOSCOW — A second mass slaughter in less than three months in southern Russia left eight people in the household of a reputed mafia don dead, although the killers missed an 8-year-old boy and a newborn, news reports said. Vladimir Slizayev, 60, nicknamed “Khan,” was killed in his house in the city of Stavropol on Friday along with a daughter, three other relatives, a driver, a babysitter and a dog breeder, Interfax reported, citing the police. |
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 If the results of a celebrity auction at the weekend are any indication, charity is not what is used to be. After raising 81.5 million rubles ($2.7 million) for children’s charity last year, a sixth auction of dignitaries’ artwork on Saturday brought in a scant 31. |
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The St. Petersburg administration passed a resolution Dec. 30 on new regulations concerning decisions to assign city-owned properties to developers. The document appeared on City Hall’s web site Monday, and will be published officially in the next few days, according to a representative of the Construction Committee’s press service. |
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Mortgage Growth ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — In 2010, St. Petersburg banks issued 7,804 mortgage loans at a total value of 14.6 billion rubles ($490 million), according to the St. Petersburg Mortgage Agency — an increase on 2009, but still a long way from the 2008 pre-crisis high of 43. |
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MOSCOW — The government wants the country’s smallest banks to raise their capital to at least 300 million rubles, or $10 million, by 2015 and is looking to increase competition among lenders, Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Monday. |
 MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev will be looking to drum up international financial support for a $15 billion plan to construct a chain of ski resorts in the North Caucasus when he travels to the World Economic Forum later this week. The proposed ski resorts are designed to rival the best that Alpine skiing has to offer and will be completed by 2020. |
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MOSCOW — Mazda plans to begin assembly of its cars in Primorye, the region’s government announced, making it the first foreign car manufacturer to start a production facility after the crisis. |
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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev will gauge foreign interest in the companies that are slated for privatization during his two-day trip to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland this week, his economic aide Arkady Dvorkovich said. Medvedev will join executives from companies such as Deutsche Bank, Novartis, Siemens, PepsiCo and Boeing for a panel session, a closed-door meeting and a private reception at the ski resort of Davos on Wednesday and Thursday. |
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 With great fanfare, President Dmitry Medvedev has announced his intention to slash bureaucracy by 20 percent. It is a bold attempt to deal with an unmanageable government apparatus, perhaps the chief cause of the country’s persistent economic problems. |
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United Russia is apparently planning to solve the problem of Russia’s “brain drain” once and for all. Thanks to its proposed school reforms, there may very well be no more brains to drain from Russia. |
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 Lithuanian director Ionas Vaitkus opted for grotesque theatricality over realism in his new rendition of Anton Chekhov’s drama “The Seagull” that saw its premiere at the Baltiisky Dom theater festival on Friday, Jan. 21. The first performance began with the disappointing announcement that the eminent Lithuanian actor Yuozas Budraitis, who was due to play Pyotr Sorin, had been admitted to hospital with a heart condition. |
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Íå ñòîèò âûåäåííîãî ÿéöà: It’s not worth a plugged nickel ßéöî (egg) is a thing of beauty and the food of the gods. OK, I made up the bit about the gods. |
 Rock and roll is still a form of rebellion for Vadim Kurylyov, the 46-year-old local musician who became famous for his work with Russia’s leading rock band DDT and now leads his own angry, guitar-driven punk band Electric Guerrillas. “They say artists are not obliged to provide answers; artists should pose questions, but I thought, ‘Why can’t an artist sometimes give an answer as well?’” he says. |
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 With the arrival of the New Year, the city’s club map is looking pretty different, for better or worse. There have been some sad losses, but there are also some interesting additions. |
 Mention the words “Soviet architecture” and the cavalcade of buildings that immediately springs to mind is that of hulking brutalism, Stalinist neo-classical kitsch or, the scourge of inner cities everywhere, the pre-cast paneled apartment block. A new book and exhibition project looks set to change all that, however, bringing an overdue appreciation for what can only be called Space Age Modern. The project is the brainchild of Frederic Chaubin, chief editor of the French fashion and lifestyle magazine, Citizen K. |
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 Last week, Vsevolod Chaplin, a top Orthodox Church spokesman, had a go at Russian women for “mistaking the street for a striptease,” saying that women who wore too few clothes and too much makeup would never find Mr. |
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There are less than a handful of Indian restaurants in St. Petersburg, so the idea of serving Indian in a pub is positively avant-garde. It is certainly the main attraction at Baltika Brew, the new brewpub a few steps from the archway of the General Staff Building. Its peerless location and sponsorship from local brewing giant Baltika almost guarantee its longevity, but a recent visit suggested there is still plenty of fine-tuning to be done. |
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 RAMALLAH, West Bank — The Palestinians now have their own version of a WikiLeaks scandal. President Mahmoud Abbas and his aides went on the attack Monday, accusing Al-Jazeera television of lies and distortions in publishing the so-called “Palestine Papers,” which claim that Palestinian negotiators were ready to make significant concessions for a peace deal with Israel. |
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PHOENIX — The 22-year-old man accused in a deadly Arizona rampage that critically wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has made his first public statement regarding his role in the shooting: He’s not guilty. |
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MELBOURNE, Australia — An inland sea of muddy floodwaters swamping southeastern Australia pushed its way toward rural communities Tuesday, threatening homes and businesses as the death toll from the disaster climbed. Emergency services were focusing their efforts on Swan Hill, a town 340 kilometers northwest of the Victorian state capital of Melbourne, where the Loddon and Murray rivers meet. |
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TOKYO — A marauding monkey confined to a zoo after it bit 120 people during a two-month rampage in resort towns of central Japan briefly escaped captivity Tuesday before it was captured again. |
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Issues Archive