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 An innovative, Russian-made abrasive substance that could become an alternative to the notorious mixture of sand and salt — the cause of huge puddles of slush on St. Petersburg’s roads and sidewalks — is being tested on local roads. Titled Eco-Khors-2, this new environmentally friendly blend consists of crushed marble sand and dolomite powder and is similar in its ingredients and effects to abrasive mixtures used in Scandinavian countries and neighboring Finland, where a crushed granite sand mix is used. “Our material has already been tested successfully in Novgorod and the village of Razmetelevo in the Vsevolozhsky district of the Leningrad Oblast,” said Maria Guz, chairman of the board of directors of Stone House, the company that produces the innovative material. “We have received an official request from the Novgorod authorities to supply the city with our substance but we are waiting to hear from St. |
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FIGHTING FOR AIR
Dmitry Lovetsky / The Associated Press
In this underwater photo taken on a remote controlled camera, a woman watches fish cluster at an ice hole struggling for air in a pond in Park Pobedy.
Experts say more ice holes need to be made to prevent the fish from dying from lack of oxygen. There is no risk of the ice melting in the near future, with
temperatures forecast to hover around minus 16 degrees Celsius through the weekend. |
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As temperatures dropped below -20 degrees Celsius at the beginning of this week, extreme weather conditions have once again been playing havoc with the plans of St. Petersburgers, even, it would appear, thwarting one local man’s suicide attempt. According to Fontanka.ru, a 34-year-old jumped from a 13th-floor window on Repishchevaya Ulitsa in the Primorsky district on Sunday evening, but found his path to oblivion blocked by a particularly dense pile of snow.
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Seven preservationists face up to 15 days in custody on charges of violating traffic rules and failure to obey a police officer’s orders after they were detained Saturday for blocking trucks near the Literary House at 68 Nevsky Prospekt. They were attempting to draw attention to the demolition of the historic building, which they claim is illegal. |
All photos from issue.
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 A group of British schoolchildren visited St. Petersburg this week to present a book they have compiled devoted to the Siege of Leningrad. Pupils from Calday Grange Grammar School, accompanied by their Russian teacher, went to the city’s Siege Museum on Monday to meet with siege survivors and present the book, titled “The Siege of Leningrad Through the Eyes of a Child. |
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A judge rejected a request from the lawyer of police officer Vadim Boiko, who is on trial for “exceeding authority using police tactical equipment,” to send the case back to the prosecutor’s office for further investigation at the second hearing of the case Tuesday. |
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As the long winter drags on, fish in the ponds of St. Petersburg have become increasingly desperate for oxygen, clustering in vast, thrashing masses at shrinking holes in the ice. Swimmers who brave the frigid temperatures for an invigorating dip find themselves stroking through swarms of fish that flock to the open water. The fish are so dense in number that humans can easily reach out and catch them with their hands. Not only does ice block oxygen that could be diffused into the water from the air, but it also impedes sunlight from reaching oxygen-generating plants and algae in the water. “The only way to help the fish in this situation is to make more holes in the ice,” says Sergei Titov of St. |
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 MOSCOW — New documents confirm that the Kremlin property chief approved construction of a posh seaside palace rumored to be a residence for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, despite his explicit denial of any link to the project, a newspaper said. |
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MOSCOW — New rules supposed to make expatriates’ lives easier are to come into force Tuesday, but experts fear that they will actually produce new headaches. The positive news is that foreigners will no longer be required to de-register when they leave their place of residence for more than three working days. The Border Guard Service will automatically inform the migration authorities when a foreigner is leaving the country, and a local office of the Federal Migration Service will do the same for those who travel domestically, lawyers said Monday. “Basically, de-registering can be deleted from expatriates’ vocabulary,” said Valery Fedoreyev of Baker & McKenzie’s Moscow office. |
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 MOSCOW — The Moscow judge who sentenced ex-Yukos head Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his business partner to jail in December was pressured and did not even write the verdict he read, the judge’s assistant said. |
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 WorldWide Papa’s, the exclusive regional developer of Papa John’s pizza restaurants, is planning to open up to 40 new locations over the next three years in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast. Eventually, the company intends to expand its presence to up to 200 restaurants in the area. |
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The Second EU-Russia Innovation Forum, which will be held in the Finnish town of Lappeenranta on May 25-26, looks set to attract top-flight politicians as well as more than 100 Russian and 200 European companies, representing some of the most important businesses on the continent. |
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Tests have begun on an electronic “guest card” for visitors to St. Petersburg. Since November, the card has been available in kiosks of the City Tourist Information Center, and through the web site of the company Guest Card, said the director of the project, Viktor Kurtyshev. |
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MOSCOW — The Supreme Arbitration Court has ruled that minority shareholders have the right to request any document, including agreements with contractors, from a company they have shares in — but not from its subsidiaries. |
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RusHydro and France’s Alstom signed a deal Friday to build a 500 million euro ($677 million) turbine plant in the republic of Bashkortostan. The two companies will finalize the joint venture before the end of February, the companies’ chief executives said Friday. RusHydro chief Yevgeny Dodd and Alstom head Phillipe Cochet inked the deal at a ceremony attended by President Dmitry Medvedev in the Bashkir capital of Ufa. “Final conditions of the partnership will be agreed by the end of February,” Dodd told reporters Friday. Neither Dodd nor Cochet was prepared to reveal who would take the controlling stake in the new firm when asked by reporters about financing they responded that “each will finance his stake. |
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 While President Dmitry Medvedev is reverently pushing the country toward his sacred goal of “modernization,” the clergy has launched its own quest for new ways to reach the flock — offering believers special cell phone tariffs and Bible quotations via text messages. |
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MOSCOW — Roman Abramovich has sold a 25 percent stake in Channel One television to Yury Kovalchuk, majority shareholder in Bank Rossiya, making the latter a new major player on the Russian media market. The National Media Group, Kovalchuk’s media holding, has completed a deal to purchase a 100 percent stake of RastrKom-2002, which owns 25 percent of Channel One, Bank Rossiya’s press service confirmed in an e-mailed statement to The St. |
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MOSCOW — Steel pipe maker ChelPipe postponed its initial public offering in London last Thursday, making it the second Russian company in the last two weeks to scrap listing plans and further darkening what was expected to be a bright horizon of share offerings this year. |
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 The Education and Science Ministry headed by Andrei Fursenko has a good shot at winning the dubious title of Least-Loved Federal Agency, an honor once incontestably held by the Health and Social Development Ministry when it was headed by Mikhail Zurabov. |
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Olga Pisarenko spends many of her daytime hours in her daughter Natasha’s high school. It’s not that she is over-protective. For Natasha Pisarenko, an eighth-grader in a small town in the Rostov Region, is blind. |
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 While many Russian bands went political last year, PTVP, or Posledniye Tanki v Parizhe (Last Tanks in Paris), one of Russia’s most political bands of the past decade, has come up with what its frontman, Alexei Nikonov, describes as a “pop album.” “In my view, a pop album is simply an album with simple melodies, typical songs, memorable, simple guitar licks and simple words,” said Nikonov, the band’s singer and songwriter, during an interview last weekend. Called “Poryadok Veshchei” (The Way Things Are), the ten-track album is the band’s tenth, and the first made entirely by the band itself. |
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Bi-2, arguably Russia's best known rock band outside the CIS, will perform at Zal Ozhidaniya at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 19. |
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Yury Shevchuk has been in the limelight this week. But the frontman of the leading Russian rock band DDT was speaking up for political prisoners rather than playing concerts or releasing albums. On Thursday, Feb. 10, Shevchuk opened the first event of a charity project titled “Children of Contemporary Russia’s Political Prisoners.” DDT’s studios were visited by Guzel and Alina Sokolov, the wife and daughter of the imprisoned Yekaterinburg rights defender Alexei Sokolov, for a photo session with Shevchuk.
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 A homage to film noir is being held at the city’s Rodina movie theater this week in the form of the “Film Noir. The Other Side of Hollywood” festival. A succinct and expressive phrase by the American writer and film noir expert Eddie Muller illustrates the very essence of the genre. |
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Íà÷àëî: beginning, essence, basics, basis, origin Thinking about êîíåö (end) awhile back got me thinking about íà÷àëî (beginning) and íà÷àòü (to begin). |
 “I love the feeling of sitting in a glamorous place, sipping coffee with cognac in front of a large screen and watching Placido Domingo or Natalie Dessay performing live, miles and miles away,” says Olga Nikolayeva, a local bank clerk and one of the dedicated fans of the Opera High Definition Live project that runs at the Jam Hall Cinema Center. “I can indulge in the feeling of actually attending the premiere while being very far away. |
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 This week, a few more showbiz stars awkwardly explained why they signed a letter backing the first jail sentence for former Yukos chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky — but did not really mean it. |
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Walking into Malevich Cafe-Club on Ulitsa Zhukovskogo does feel a bit like entering a Supremacist painting. The high-contrast decor in black, white and red was made more striking by the dining room’s near emptiness on a Wednesday evening. The carefully designed interior is saved from coldness by comfortable, wide leather benches and several cozy booths, and by an unusually welcoming waiter who managed quite nicely as the only staff on duty. |
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 MOSCOW — David Cameron should envy Dmitry Medvedev: The Russian president decided this week to move his whole country one time zone further east — something the British prime minister also wants to do, but faces stiff opposition over. Cameron has come under fire from traditionalists who despise giving up Greenwich Mean Time or GMT for “Berlin Time,” and from Scottish lawmakers who argue that in the north the sun will rise at only 10 a. |
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KOROLYOV — After 257 days in a locked steel capsule, researchers on a mock trip to Mars ventured from their cramped quarters Monday in heavy space suits, trudging into a sand-covered room to plant flags on a simulated Red Planet. |
 MOSCOW — Russia will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Yury Gagarin becoming the first man in space in April this year. To mark the anniversary, a British graphic novel titled “Yuri’s Day” has been released, telling the story of that famous flight. Author Piers Bizony said he wanted a real character rather than a comic book superhero for the 64-page graphic novel. |
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Mezzo-soprano Olga Borodina and bass Ildar Abdrazakov, a married couple who both started out at the Mariinsky Theater and rapidly rose to worldwide fame performing at Milan’s La Scala and New York’s Metropolitan Opera, shared their first Grammy award this week. |
Temp: -1°C clear 
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