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President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday proposed that Federation Council senators be elected through a popular vote — but only after being nominated by gubernatorial candidates.
He put forward legislation that would require politicians running for governor in regional elections to nominate three senators for the public to vote on.
The potential senator with the most votes would serve in the Federation Council, the upper house of parliament. The other two would be possible replacements in case the elected senator resigned or was deemed unfit to rule.
"The Federation Council should be more democratic," Putin told the upper house, run by his close ally, Valentina Matviyenko. |
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 A Su-27 fighter jet crashed near a village in the northern republic of Karelia on Thursday morning.
Both pilots managed to safely eject from the plane, which went down at 9:50 a. |
 The billionaire founder of one of Russia's largest privately owned investment groups is helping fund a $1 million "Jewish Nobel Prize" together with the Israeli government.
Mikhail Fridman, head of Alfa Group and a partner in Russia's third-largest oil company TNK-BP, will fund the Genesis prize through the Genesis Philanthropy Group, which he co-founded along with a string of other billionaires including TNK-BP executive director German Khan, Bloomberg reported. |
All photos from issue.
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 UNESCO will review the program for the reconstruction and restoration of the historical center of St. Petersburg after it is finalized, Kishore Rao, the director of UNESCO’s World Heritage Center, said Monday.
Speaking at the 36th session of the World Heritage Committee that is currently being held in St. Petersburg’s Tavrichesky Palace, Rao said UNESCO’s experts would consider contributing their recommendations and judgments to the program in cases that involve the city’s world heritage sites.
The program for the reconstruction and restoration of the historical center of St. Petersburg that is still being formulated will cover the period from 2013 to 2018, and will require up to one trillion rubles ($30. |
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GREEN SCENE
GREENPEACE
Greenpeace activist stands outside the city’s Tavrichesky Palace on Tuesday, where a UNESCO World Heritage Committee summit is currently being held. The sign reads: ‘UNESCO! Protect our natural heritage from Russian bureaucrats!’ |
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Being forced to donate kills the pleasure of sharing. This was the sentiment expressed by Russian businessmen Friday at a panel discussion on the peculiarities of Russia’s attitude to charity at the 16th St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
The country’s businesses may be seeing their profits soar, but bosses have shown little inclination to share their increasing wealth with the country’s poorest, weakest and most vulnerable.
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 Construction of the new terminal at the city’s Pulkovo Airport is going ahead according to schedule and should be completed at the end of next year, airport representatives said Monday.
Pulkovo currently consists of two terminals, one for domestic flights and another for international routes. |
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The police dispersed Michael Jackson fans near the U.S. consulate and arrested one for holding “an unsanctioned rally” in St. Petersburg on Monday.
The remaining 20 to 30 fans, who were carrying a tape recorder playing Jackson songs and a sign reading “We remember, we grieve,” were told to disperse. |
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City Hosts Marathon
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — The St. Petersburg White Nights Ergo Marathon will take place this weekend, beginning at 9 a.m. on Sunday on Palace Square. The event is expected to attract around 1,000 competitors and follows a route that takes in the main sights in the historical center of the city. |
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 MOSCOW — The United States and Russia are planning to enhance cooperation in nuclear reactor design, while maintaining joint efforts to prevent nuclear materials from falling into the wrong hands, officials said Tuesday.
U.S. Deputy Energy Secretary Daniel Poneman said after a nuclear energy security working group meeting between the two countries that both nations have developed a “strong partnership” in the field. |
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MOSCOW — Hackers broke into a prominent Russian opposition leader’s Twitter and email accounts, sending his followers abusive messages.
Alexei Navalny’s spokeswoman, Anna Veduta, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that Navalny is not going to create new accounts, and warned his quarter of a million Twitter followers that the stream of abuse is fake. |
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MOSCOW — Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko thinks the Russian team will take third place at the London 2012 Olympic Games in the face of stiff competition from other frontrunners.
“We will fight for a place in the top three, but we won’t be able to catch the Americans or the Chinese,” Mutko said at a news conference Tuesday, Interfax reported. |
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MOSCOW — President Vladimir Putin, traveling in Israel on Monday in a bid to revive ties with the Middle East, said that he hoped for a “constructive relationship” with newly elected Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi. |
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MOSCOW — Russian nationalists are seeking inclusion in the presidential human rights council in the same week that several prominent rights defenders quit the advisory body.
“We are definitively seeking our place in the human rights council. In contrast to many others, we have something to say,” Slavic Union leader Dmitry Demushkin told Izvestia on Tuesday.
Demushkin added that he had sent a letter making his case to council chairman Mikhail Fedotov.
“We work not in human rights circles, not in Duma circles, but on the street. All these commissions, congresses and councils are made up of aging aqsaqals [elders] and elderly rights defenders,” Demushkin said. |
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 BETHLEHEM, West Bank — Visiting Russian President Vladimir Putin praised his Palestinian counterpart Tuesday for what he said was a “responsible” position in negotiations with Israel, frozen for nearly four years, and said Russia has no problem recognizing a Palestinian state. |
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MOSCOW — The State Duma is to vote early next month on a far-reaching visa facilitation agreement with the United States, a senior lawmaker said Friday.
The vote is scheduled for July 6, said Leonid Kalashnikov, a first deputy chairman of the foreign relations committee and member of the Communist party. |
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MOSCOW — Authorities are proposing to introduce fines and short prison stays for those placing hyperlinks to “extremist content” on the Internet, media reports said Tuesday. |
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 MOSCOW — The 25-percent stake in the country’s rail monopoly that the government wants to privatize by 2013 is worth about 260 billion rubles ($7.83 billion), Russian Railways’ managers said.
The estimate is considerably lower than the government’s own figures, however. |
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MOSCOW — A new World Bank survey ranks Moscow the worst of 30 Russian cities in which to do business.
The ranking is a major embarrassment for Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, who has promised that companies would face fewer hassles. |
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The Film and Television Producers Association wants social networks to be responsible for the content that users upload, and the association is pressing for legislation to reflect that view.
“To produce [movies and TV content] we need to earn money. But how can we do this without help from the state?” Anna Krutova, adviser to the association’s management board, told The St. |
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MOSCOW — Alexei Navalny, the bane of both the Kremlin and state corporations, found himself elected to the board of state-owned Aeroflot on Monday — and immediately promised to create an anonymous complaint system to improve governance at the flagship airline. |
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 All of the predictions that the authorities would tighten the screws on opposition leaders and on the protest movement after President Vladimir Putin’s May 7 inauguration are proving true. The May 6 protests have become the Kremlin’s “cause celebre” for the new crackdown, and the authorities are attempting to manipulate Article 212 of the Criminal Code on mass riots to jail protesters for up to 10 years and to intimidate the entire anti-Putin movement. |
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Paul the Octopus correctly predicted the outcomes of a surprising number of games in the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Likewise, the weekly magazine Odnako — whose editor-in chief is Mikhail Leontyev, an outspoken conservative who supports a strong Russian state — has made some very accurate predictions concerning events in Russia. |
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 Soviet punk rock becomes relevant again when human rights are challenged, according to New York promoter Bryan Swirsky, who is currently working on a compilation of Soviet and Eastern European punk. Last week, he promoted a Pussy Riot benefit in Brooklyn to support the three imprisoned members of the Russian feminist punk group, whose pretrial detention was last week prolonged until July 27 in Moscow.
The women — Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, Maria Alyokhina, 24, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 29 — were arrested in March and charged with “hooliganism motivated by hatred toward a religious group” for performing an anti-Putin song in a Moscow church. |
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Natasha Vassilieva-hull
Photographer natasha vassilieva-hull has released a new book of images of rock legends kino in time for what would have been frontman viktor tsoi’s 50th birthday. |
 As St. Petersburg — and the world of rock — marked what would have been the 50th birthday of Viktor Tsoi, frontman of the legendary rock band Kino, last Thursday, photographer Natasha Vassilieva-Hull presented her new book, “Kinokhroniki iz Podpolya” (“Kinochronicles from the Underground.”)
Among recent events dedicated to the musician, who was killed in a car crash in 1990 at the age of 28, the release of Vassilieva-Hull’s new book — her third — stands out, firstly because this is the biggest collection of Kino photos that has ever been published.
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Øëÿïà: hat; something bad, unpleasant, disgusting, worthless (slang)
It’s time for our weekly language pop quiz: What do the Russian words for hat and dullness have in common? No idea? Let me put it another way: Have you talked to a teenager lately?
If you have, you’ve definitely heard øëÿïà (hat) and òóïî (dully) a lot. But you might have been confused. In standard literary Russian — that is, the Russian that is described in dictionaries — hats do not usually appear on plates and dully is generally not used four times in a sentence before every verb.
Welcome to the new crop of slang.
Let’s start with hats. Øëÿïà is any kind of brimmed hat. |
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 This weekend will see street art take over the city’s Krestovsky Island for the holding of a new festival.
The Colors of St. Petersburg international street art festival began in 2009 as a student project. |
 Last week the acclaimed actress Chulpan Khamatova and It Girl and media personality Ksenia Sobchak in a rare mood of unity both criticized the jailing for another month of the outrageous anti-Putin punks Pussy Riot.
Khamatova even attended the Tagansky district court where the case was being heard Wednesday and told journalists she wanted to defend the women and thought they should be allowed to go home to their children. |
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Eating out in Russia can be a stressful experience for foreigners — especially for those who speak limited Russian. It is not uncommon to encounter slow service or unhelpful servers in restaurants and neither are ever a welcome addition to a meal out, particularly as standards are, on the whole, improving. |
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 YELABUGA, Tatarstan — Watching over the point where the Kama and Toima rivers meet in European Russia, the city of Yelabuga is a confluence of many types.
Its suburbs boast a Special Economic Zone with tax incentives, brand-new factories and high-end manufacturing that co-exist with state-supported industry. Centuries-old architecture and house-museums mix with modern restaurants and retail outlets. |
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 The term “cultural capital” is one that some view to be a kind of consolation prize for impressive cities that do not hold the title of real capitals. Others see them as cities recognized for their bustling artistic life. |
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 ANKARA, Turkey — Turkey warned Tuesday that any Syrian military unit approaching its border will be treated as a direct threat, a serious escalation in tensions days after Syria shot a Turkish military plane out of the sky.
Turkey’s NATO allies expressed solidarity with Ankara and condemned the Syrian attack but made no mention of any retaliatory action against Syria. |
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LONDON — Concerns over the ability of Europe’s leaders to agree a package of measures to deal with their debt crisis kept stock markets in check Tuesday, a day after Cyprus became the fifth euro country to ask for financial assistance from its partners in the currency zone. |
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ATHENS, Greece — A second Greek Cabinet member has resigned in two days, the latest casualty for the financially struggling country’s new conservative-led government.
Giorgos Vernicos, deputy minister for Greece’s merchant marine ministry, announced his resignation Tuesday and it was accepted by the government. |
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KOHYON-RI, North Korea — North Korea dispatched soldiers to pour buckets of water on parched fields and South Korean officials scrambled to save a rare mollusk threatened by the heat as the worst dry spell in a century gripped the Korean peninsula. |
Temp: -1°C clear 
Issues Archive