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 MOSCOW – The countrywide celebrations marking the one-year countdown to the start of the Winter Olympics in Sochi were overshadowed Thursday by a high-profile dismissal at the Russian Olympic Committee.
During a two-day inspection of Olympic construction sites, President Vladimir Putin fired the committee's deputy president, Akhmed Bilalov, because of skyrocketing construction costs and delays in completion of the Russkiye Gorki ski jump at the Krasnaya Ployana ski resort. |
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 MOSCOW – Investigators on Thursday raided the apartment of Vladimir Ashurkov, director of the Foundation for Fighting Corruption and an anti-Kremlin activist, in connection with a criminal case against opposition leader Alexei Navalny. |
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MOSCOW – U.S.-based pro-democracy watchdog Freedom House slammed President Vladimir Putin for the “worst deterioration in Russia's democracy and human rights situation” and urged U.S. President Barack Obama to take a harder line, according to a report published Thursday.
The report criticized Putin for his “anti-American rhetoric and policies” and said the Obama administration should take a “markedly different approach” from the reset policy of Obama's first term.
The U.S. and allied leaders should not lend Putin “undeserved legitimacy or invest much time with him,” the report said, and Obama should personally “speak out against Putin’s human rights abuses and crackdown on civil society. |
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 MOSCOW – One year before the Winter Olympics are to kick off, it looks like Sochi 2014 is getting mired in controversy.
While the country's leaders have made it clear that the Olympics are a matter of national pride and prestige, national and international media attention is increasingly focused on the unprecedented $50 billion price tag, allegations of massive corruption, involvement of warring mafia clans, ecological destruction and the unfair forced resettlement of local residents. |
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MOSCOW – Japan scrambled four fighter jets to intercept two Russian fighters it said invaded Japanese airspace near Russia's Kuril Islands for about 11 seconds Thursday, as Japan celebrated a national day of commemoration calling for the disputed archipelago seized in World War II to return to the Japanese.
Russia's Defense Ministry denied that an intrusion had taken place and said it was conducting military exercises in the area. For months, Japan has been locked in a bitter territorial dispute with China over land in the East China Sea.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, elected in late December with promises to strengthen territorial defense, said at a rally earlier Thursday, Japan's Northern Territories Day, that his country would seek to find a "solution" to the dispute over the Kurils, which Japan calls the Northern Territories. |
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 MOSCOW – Eleven prominent rights groups have sent a complaint against Russia’s so-called foreign agent law, which targets NGOs engaged in political activities, to the European Court of Human Rights. |
All photos from issue.
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 The Investigative Committee said Tuesday it had opened an investigation into alleged attacks on policemen who stormed a historic building belonging to the now-defunct Warsaw Railway Station.
The 19th-century warehouse had been occupied by activists, who had turned it into a cultural center in the hope of saving it from impending demolition.
Two of the activists face up to 10 years in prison on charges of violent assault of a police officer.
The OMON special-task police stormed the building late Monday, arresting 22 activists. The activists, mostly anarchists and preservationists who had given themselves the name Spasi i Sokhrani (Save and Protect) Collective, said they were beaten, some badly.
The police said Tuesday that three officers had sustained injuries, two of whom have been hospitalized. |
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TIME TRAVEL
ELENA IGNATYEVA / AP
A bus controversially decorated with a portrait of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and a sign reading ‘Stalingrad gets back its victorious name’ drives in front of the Kazansky
Cathedral on Saturday, the 70th anniversary of the end of the battle of Stalingrad. Similar buses will run in Volgograd, as Stalingrad is now known, until Victory Day on May 9. |
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A group of scientists from St. Petersburg State University has bred a number of transgenic plants that are able to boost the human immune system, including the cells responsible for fighting viruses, the university’s press service announced, Interfax reported.
The scientists have developed transgenic tobacco, pea and carrot plants that synthesize bull interferon.
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The World Health Organization, which has supported Russia’s plans to take tough measures to limit smoking, is calling for the age limit for cigarette sales to be raised in Russia, Interfax reported.
“In many countries you can buy cigarettes from the age of 18. |
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Typhoid in City
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — A child has been diagnosed with typhoid fever in St. Petersburg, Interfax reported.
The child’s mother, reportedly a citizen of Tajikistan who lives in the suburbs of St. |
 A St. Petersburg shipyard will send France the assembled stern section for the first Mistral helicopter-carrying amphibious assault ship this summer, Alexei Kravchenko, spokesman for the United Shipbuilding Corporation, announced Friday.
The stern section is under construction at the Baltiisky Zavod shipyard in St. |
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Officials from the Primorsky district administration are suspected of fraud concerning a contract worth 270 million rubles ($9 million) for the removal of garbage. |
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SKA St. Petersburg won the Continental Cup on Friday after defeating Western Division rival Dinamo Moscow 3-1 to cap a three-game winning sweep in the club’s final home series.
SKA bulldozed its way to the cup, awarded to the Kontinental Hockey League regular season champions, having chalked up a 5-1 win over Traktor Chelyabinsk and a 3-0 shutout over Metallurg Magnitogorsk earlier in the week. |
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Mikhail Puchkov, an engineer from St. Petersburg, is planning to launch a private submarine that he has made himself, Interfax reported.
Puchkov began building the submarine in the 1980s. |
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MILAN, Italy — Venice is seeking to break off cultural relations with St. Petersburg because of the Russian city’s legislation curbing gay rights.
The city council invoked Venice’s “history, international prestige and conscience” in a motion unanimously approved Monday evening asking the city administration to refrain from cultural exchanges as long as anti-gay laws are in place. |
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French Minister for Women’s Rights Najat Vallaud-Belkacem has repealed a law dating from 1800 banning Parisian women from wearing trousers in public places, Interfax reported, citing French media. |
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 MOSCOW — An employment dispute between Russia’s largest airline and an outspoken union leader has highlighted a sharpening confrontation between pilots and Russia’s air carriers over how to deal with a chronic shortage of qualified fliers.
Aeroflot pilot Igor Deldyuzhov, who also heads the Sheremetyevo Cockpit Personnel Association, was fired by the airline in March 2012 but won an unfair dismissal case in September. |
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MOSCOW — More than 40 percent of Russian cancer patients turn to doctors only in the last stages of the disease, Russia’s top oncologist, Valery Chissov, told RIA-Novosti on Monday in an interview to mark World Cancer Day. |
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MOSCOW — One year before they kick off, the Sochi Winter Olympics have already bagged a world record. They will go down as the most expensive games in history.
The cost will top 1.5 trillion rubles ($50 billion) in state and private investment, and three-quarters of that sum has already been spent, as shown in figures released Friday by the governmental commission overseeing preparations for the games. |
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MOSCOW — The government’s plans to protect children from harmful online content are causing increasing alarm among anti-censorship activists, who see one region’s plans to introduce a smut-free version of the Internet as the latest move to banish distasteful speech. |
 MOSCOW — Georgian wine and mineral water could return to Russian store shelves as early as this spring, Russia’s chief sanitary official said Monday.
Moscow will send teams of sanitary inspectors to facilities in Georgia, Gennady Onishchenko told reporters. |
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MOSCOW — A female raccoon named Gemma, who shot to fame after accurately predicting the results of the 2012 European Football Championship and London Olympics, died at Tula’s regional zoo. |
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MOSCOW — A Muscovite who posted nude photos of his ex-girlfriend on the Internet was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison on charges of distributing pornographic materials and violation of privacy, investigators said Monday.
The Investigative Committee said in a statement that the 32-year-old put more than 200 nude photos of his 26-year-old ex-girlfriend without her consent on various websites, including a pornography site, where he included her name, date of birth and address. |
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 Approval of new guidelines for outdoor advertising in St. Petersburg, which market players have been waiting for since last year, has still not been given.
The Committee for Architecture and City Planning (KGA) and the Committee for State Control, Use and Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments (KGIOP) have declined to approve the strategy for the development of the outdoor advertising market, according to a source in the advertising sector. |
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MOSCOW — Alisher Usmanov, the billionaire owner of Metalloinvest, is proposing that Sergei Chemezov, the head of state corporation Russian Technologies, join the board of Norilsk Nickel, Vedomosti reported Monday. |
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MOSCOW — The country’s aviation watchdog revoked the license of Red Wings Airlines, controlled by billionaire Alexander Lebedev, weeks after one of its Russian-made jets crashed.
Lebedev told Interfax on Friday that the Federal Air Transportation Agency had revoked the company’s license effective Monday. |
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 On Jan. 25, the State Duma passed in the first reading a bill prohibiting display of “homosexual propaganda” among minors. The bill stipulates that an individual found guilty of violating the law be fined up to 5,000 rubles ($167) and that a legal entity face a fine of up to 500,000 ($16,667) rubles. |
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Recently, Moscow Times columnist Yulia Latynina showed how differently the wealthy in the U.S. and Russia use their fortunes. She listed a dozen U.S. robber barons, captains of industry and financiers who founded major universities, libraries and museums. |
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 St. Petersburg has a reputation as the cradle of the Russian rock revolution, and an upcoming exhibition at the Pushkinskaya 10 art center is expected to showcase some of its legacy and artifacts.
Called “Realities of Russian Rock. Continuation,” the exhibition will also embody a proposal for a future museum of St. Petersburg rock, according to organizer Vladimir Rekshan.
Rekshan, 62, is himself part of this history, having founded the rock band Saint Petersburg in 1969. |
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 MOSCOW — When famed viola player Yuri Bashmet declared that he “adored” President Vladimir Putin, he stirred little controversy in a country where classical musicians have often curried favor with the political elite. |
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Õëåáîì íå êîðìè: someone’s favorite thing
I think we can all agree that Russians can get pretty passionate about things — perhaps even more so than other nationalities, although I’m not sure how to go about researching that. There is no nuts-o-meter that would allow cross-cultural comparisons. But in any case, the Russian language offers a plethora of ways to express passionate interests.
To describe lovers of the arts, Russian began to use a word borrowed from French, ìåëîìàí (music lover), and then generated áàëåòîìàí (ballet lover) and êèíîìàí (cinema lover). A theater lover is described with the homegrown terms òåàòðàë for a man and òåàòðàëêà for a woman. |
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 When the collective of 25 young people who had traveled across Russia in one month had just arrived in Moscow after a three-day train trip from Irkutsk, their priorities were, understandably, to eat dinner, get washed, shave and finish their film edits. |
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A moody mouthful
“I know a place with a great eel roll by Vladimirskaya” was probably not on anyone’s tongue before the opening of Ne Grusti! And it probably still isn’t, but since the restaurant only opened in December, it may just be a matter of time. Thank goodness we ignored the recommendations of the waiter, who told us he didn’t like fish and suggested the Olivier salad and the T-bone steak. |
Temp: -1°C clear 
Issues Archive