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 The polar bear cub born in the Leningrad Zoo last year will leave his mother for Yakutsk, the capital of Russia’s Sakha republic on Wednesday, Dec. 19.
The cub was born in November 2011 into the zoo’s polar bear family of Uslada and her mate Menshikov. The cub was introduced to the public in May, when a competition was held among visitors to the zoo to name the cub. He was given the name Lomonosov in honor of the great Russian scientist Mikhail Lomonosov, as in November 2011, when the bear cub came into the world, the country marked the 300th anniversary of the scientist’s birth.
The birth of a new polar bear is a much anticipated event for zoos all over the world, as the bears are an endangered species due to global warming. Many zoos do not see the regular births of polar cubs, but the Leningrad Zoo couple reproduces faithfully every two years. |
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ICE AGE
ALEXANDER BELENKY / SPT
A vessel sails down the icy River Neva on Tuesday evening in front of the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary on Vasilyevsky Island. The church has been undergoing
renovation work for many years and is gradually being restored to its former glory. An average temperature of minus 14 degrees Celsius is predicted through the weekend. |
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The St. Petersburg authorities clamped down hard Saturday on the March of Freedom, despite having authorized the event.
Hundreds who came to protest President Vladimir Putin’s rule, electoral fraud, anti-democratic laws and politically motivated arrests were made to walk on narrow sidewalks on Kronverskaya Naberezhnaya and Troitsky Bridge under the threat of arrest, with policemen walking next to them, convoy style.
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Ded Moroz (Father Frost), Russia’s version of Santa Claus, will switch on the lights of the city’s Christmas trees on Dec. 22, the press service of the city’s Culture Committee announced earlier this month.
This year Ded Moroz will not parade along the city’s main street, Nevsky Prospekt, but will instead arrive by sled, riding along the Neva River to the spit of Vasilyevsky Island, where he will switch on the lights on the Christmas tree. |
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No Zoo for Yuntolovo
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — City Hall has decided to cancel the construction of a new zoo in the Yuntolovo area of the city’s Primorsky district, Interfax reported, citing St. |
 About 50 people gathered for a traditional Christmas carol service held by the Anglican Chaplaincy of St. Petersburg in the Anglican church on 56 English Embankment on Tuesday night.
It was the first time an Anglican Christmas service had taken place in the building for nearly 100 years. |
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Budget Bonuses
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — City Governor Georgy Poltavchenko has halved the annual bonuses of the six deputy governors who work at City Hall and scrapped the bonuses of other officials entirely, citing disappointment with the way the city budget was handled in 2012. |
All photos from issue.
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 Fans of two-time defending Russian champion Zenit St. Petersburg are calling for non-white and gay players to be excluded from the team.
Landscrona, the largest Zenit supporters club, released a manifesto Monday demanding the club field an all-white, heterosexual team. |
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JAKARTA, Indonesia — Pilot error caused a Russian-made passenger jet to crash into an Indonesian volcano seven months ago during a demonstration flight, killing all 45 people aboard, the National Commission on Safety Transportation announced Tuesday. |
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BISHKEK, Kyrgyzstan — Thousands of households in the capital of Kyrgyzstan have been hit by gas and electricity shortages just as temperatures dropped to around minus 20 Celsius.
Residents of Bishkek and nearby towns, including Kant, which houses a Russian air base, struggled Tuesday for the fifth straight day to keep homes warm. |
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MOSCOW — A Russian navy squadron has set off for the Mediterranean amid official talk about a possible evacuation of Russians from Syria.
The Defense Ministry said Tuesday that the ships would rotate with those that have been in the area since November. |
 MOSCOW — State Duma deputies stepped up Russia’s retaliatory response to the so-called Magnitsky Act on Monday by introducing a measure that would ban U.S. citizens from adopting Russian orphans.
The move was roundly condemned by children’s rights advocates, who warned that a blanket ban on U. |
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MOSCOW — Russia’s foreign minister has promised his Polish counterpart that Russia will return as soon as possible the wreckage from the plane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 95 others. |
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MOSCOW — The Interior Ministry and the Federal Security Service detained members of a huge counterfeiting ring responsible for producing and distributing over 40 million rubles ($1.3 million) a month in counterfeit bills, police said Tuesday.
Apart from Russian rubles, the counterfeiters also produced fake U. |
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 City Hall is refusing to finance social facilities in new housing projects, as officials believe that too much housing is currently being built in the city.
No budget funds will be allocated for the construction of schools or kindergartens in new housing projects simply because the owner of the plot of land has decided to build residential real estate on it; if companies want to build, they should build social infrastructure as well, and then hand it over to the city for public use, said deputy governor Igor Metelsky at a press conference earlier this month. |
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MOSCOW — The $60-billion purchase of TNK-BP by state-owned energy giant Rosneft that will create the world’s largest publicly traded oil company was criticized Tuesday by the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service. |
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MOSCOW — The Eighth Arbitration Court of Appeals in Omsk sided with a minority shareholder of TNK-BP Holding in its dispute with BP, Vedomosti reported Monday.
TNK-BP Holding is oil major TNK-BP’s largest subsidiary.
The court declined to accept a decision by shareholder Andrei Prokhorov not to sue BP over $3 billion. |
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MOSCOW — Authorities plan to equip new metro wagons with fold-away seats from 2014 to increase passenger capacity during rush hour.
“We are planning to open a tender for a new batch of wagons in the first quarter of 2013 to attract any interested manufacturers, including foreign [companies],” Ivan Besedin, head of the Moscow metro, said Tuesday, Interfax reported. |
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MOSCOW — NTV has outstripped rival Channel One to become the most-watched channel of the year for the first time since TV audiences have been measured.
Since the beginning of 2012, NTV captured an average of 13.9 percent of TV viewers, while Channel One attracted 13. |
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MOSCOW — Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev wants to cap the amount of money that can be charged for consumer loans, but financial authorities have yet to find an acceptable option. |
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 At the end of November, the Prosecutor General’s Office announced the upcoming trial of Sergei Magnitsky, a man who’s been dead for more than three years. Putting a dead person on trial hasn’t been done in Europe in more than 1,000 years. The reason is obvious: a dead person can’t defend himself, no matter how absurd the charges. |
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Russia is shifting its position on Syria toward more cooperation with the West to secure a settlement in the 21-month civil war. Unfortunately, it may be too late to save Syria as a state. |
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Russia will host the Group of 20 summit in September in St. Petersburg. In advance of this summit, the B20, composed of the top business leaders of the G20 nations, will also meet.
This will be a fitting occasion for governments and business from the developed and emerging markets to find solutions to one of the biggest challenges these diverse nations all have in common: corruption. |
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 There was a distinct Russian feel at the Brussels Center for Fine Arts (Bozar) auditorium on Dec. 14 at the premiere of a Concerto for Violin and Orchestra by the Russian-Belgian composer Victor Kissine.
The evening was in fact doubly Russian. The National Orchestra of Belgium was led by its new principal conductor, Andrei Boreyko, a graduate of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, who has made a name for himself in Germany as musical director of symphony orchestras in Dusseldorf and Stuttgart. And in another nod to the former Soviet Union, the soloist was Gidon Kremer, who grew up in Riga, Latvia and studied with the legendary Soviet violinist David Oistrakh.
Kremer is considered one of the finest violinists of his generation and has been at the top of his profession for more than 40 years. He first came to the attention of Belgian audiences when he was a 1967 finalist in the country’s prestigious Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition. In 1970, he won the first prize at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. In 1997 he founded the Kremerata Baltica orchestra that performs all over the world, playing primarily contemporary music, including Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina, Philip Glass and John Adams. |
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Writer A.S. Byatt once said translators are her best readers. They find every little mistake or typo that even the most meticulous copy editors miss. This isn’t because we translators are trying to find mistakes. It’s just because we work so closely with the text that we notice problems that editors and even authors can glance over.
We also tend to notice changes in the language before lexicographers get to them.
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 This weekend saw the bustling official opening of Tkachi Smart Space, a colorful and multifarious event that celebrated one of the latest additions to St. Petersburg’s growing creative cluster scene.
Like the similarly minded Loft Project Etagi and the recently opened Skorohod performance arts space, the location chosen for Tkachi Smart was that of an old factory, in this case an expansive five-story textile factory built in the mid-19th century. |
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 Vegetables take center stage in Alain Ducasse’s new book, “Nature: Simple, Healthy and Good, 190 Recipes from a French Master Chef” that the author presented at a gastronomic dinner in his miX restaurant at the city’s W hotel last month. |
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Lanson, the world’s third-oldest champagne house and the official purveyor of champagne to the British royal family since 1900, has began distributing in St. Petersburg — just in time for the festive season.
“Our trademark champagne that gives a clear idea of the taste of a Lanson wine is Black Label Brut, with its floral and fruity bouquet with a hint of toast,” said Jean-Paul Gandon, Lanson’s chief enologist who has worked for the company for an impressive 40 years, making it the longest alliance between an enologist and a champagne house in the region. |
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According to official statistics on food consumption in Russia by various social groups, the pattern that emerges is a surprising one. Polls indicate that while Russians with more modest incomes have improved the quality of their diet and begun to show a greater interest in consuming organic products, their richer compatriots have remained carefree about their culinary habits. |
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Missing the mark
It’s no secret that it is not uncommon in Russia to come across wildly tacky and ostentatious displays of wealth, from outlandishly expensive sports cars to gaudy jewels and over-the-top fur coats. Angle Vert is another example of this attempt at elegance gone horribly wrong. |
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 It takes only a two-and-a-half-hour smooth drive (185 kilometers) to get from Estonia’s capital Tallinn to the town of Tartu, even though the south-east route crosses almost all of this small Baltic country.
The bus speeds past the country’s timeless landscapes of snow-covered forests and fields, with the occasional wooden house to be spied.
Based around Tartu University, with a large proportion of its population being students and teachers, the town is seen as the nation’s intellectual capital. |
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 MOSCOW — The British government has introduced tax rules that will hit foreign owners and buyers of high-value residential properties in the country, with wealthy Russians living in London being among the main targets. |
 MOSCOW — When Maria Gritsai was diagnosed with late-stage cervical cancer, she didn’t spend much time grieving. She knew she had to act fast.
With the support of her husband and son, she turned to the Blokhin Cancer Center, one of Russia’s best oncology hospitals, where the diagnosis was confirmed. Doctors there also gave her some devastating news: At such an advanced stage, her cancer was incurable. |
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 PYONGYANG, North Korea — North Korea unveiled the embalmed body of Kim Jong Il, still in his trademark khaki jumpsuit, on the anniversary of his death Monday as mourning mixed with pride over a recent satellite launch that was a long-held goal of the late authoritarian leader. |
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KARACHI, Pakistan — Gunmen shot dead five women working on UN-backed polio vaccination efforts in two different Pakistani cities on Tuesday, officials said, a major setback for a campaign that international health officials consider vital to contain the crippling disease but which Taliban insurgents say is a cover for espionage. |
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JOHANNESBURG — Under the bright lights, the corruption allegations and the ethical concerns trailing South African President Jacob Zuma faded away and the master politician basked in his re-election as head of the governing African National Congress party, singing on stage, smiling and waving to cheering delegates. |
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PARIS — Germany and three other European members of the UN Security Council are preparing a statement condemning Israel’s latest settlement plans in east Jerusalem and the West Bank, a European diplomatic official said Tuesday. |
Temp: -1°C clear 
Issues Archive