The clubs went on vacation, and the national team will travel to Sweden The winter holidays have begun for Super League clubs, the last of this season. The teams were given two weeks to rest before the final push towards the finish line of the regular season. There are 11 rounds left before the end of the six-month marathon, and the tension in the hottest spots of the tournament table has approached its climax.

One of the teachers of the Krasnoyarsk Siberian Aerospace University (SAU) was recently detained for accepting a bribe. The dishonest associate professor was “handed over” to the detectives by his own colleagues. According to SAU Vice-Rector for Personnel Security Pavel Shurygin, as soon as the university management learned that Candidate of Technical Sciences Remizov was going to offer students to pay 600 rubles to take an exam in theoretical mechanics, they immediately notified the police.

The Belkin Prize reveals a good writer The recently announced shortlist for the Ivan Petrovich Belkin Prize has somewhat puzzled “professional readers.” In the top five best stories of the year, along with the opuses of the well-known Marina Vishnevetskaya, Andrei Gelasimov and Asar Eppel and Ilya Kochergin, who is in the “youth quota”, “Counter Movement” was discovered, hitherto, it seems, in the capitals of the unnoticed Yuri Goryukhin, a writer whose surname gracefully came back to haunt

In January, gas payments fell by almost 60% If until now expert estimates about Gazprom’s possible losses from the restructuring of the gas distribution system within the country, which was blessed by Alexey Miller on the eve of the New Year (the Vremya Novostey newspaper wrote more than once about order No. 129 signed by him on December 30, 2002) looked speculative, then now they have acquired a completely material form.

Volgograd teachers want to get their salaries The protest of fifty-five teachers of secondary school No. 111 continues for the third day in Volgograd, demanding that the city authorities pay off wage arrears and compensation for late payment of vacation benefits. Yesterday, representatives of the school's trade union committee conveyed their ultimatum to the city fathers.

Lawyers elect their president The Russian legal profession is preparing to live by new rules - by the end of today, the First All-Russian Congress of Lawyers will elect a council and president of the council of the federal chamber of lawyers. According to the new law on the legal profession, which came into force on July 1 last year, every region of Russia now has its own chamber of lawyers. And they all belong to the federal chamber.

Former hostages are ready to seek compensation in the Supreme Court and Strasbourg The lawyer for the former hostages who suffered from the terrorist attack on Dubrovka did not agree with the decision of the Tver Intermunicipal Court, which rejected the first three claims against the capital government. As expected, on Thursday the defense filed a short cassation appeal with the Moscow City Court.

Our strongest tennis player Marat Safin most likely will not be able to play in the first round match of the Davis Cup World Group Czech Republic - Russia, which will take place on February 7-9 in Ostrava. Two weeks ago at the Australian Open, Marat tore ligaments in his left hand and has still not recovered from this injury. Instead of Safin in our team's entry, Nikolay Davidenko, Mikhail Youzhny and Evgeny Kafelnikov were joined by Igor Andreev, the 291st racket in the world.

The capital's Comstar company, one of the leading providers of integrated telecommunications services for corporate clients, has begun building a new generation data transmission network NGN (New Generation Network). According to the company, the new multi-protocol network will be built on the basis of MPLS (Multi Protocol Label Switching) high-speed packet switching technology.

“The Death of Democracy” is the second joint work of Vladimir Ruga and Andrei Kokorev. As in the previous novel by these authors - “The Kaiser's Gold” (published by the Olma-Press publishing house in 2002), the action takes place in a fictional Russia, where there was no victory of the October Revolution. The same main character - a young counterintelligence officer, Lieutenant Pyotr Shuvalov - continues to honestly serve the Fatherland.

A little more than a month remains until the start of the next Formula 1 world championship. The entire off-season was spent searching for the intrigue of the upcoming races against the backdrop of Ferrari’s total superiority. The International Motor Sports Federation has made a number of changes to the rules in the hope of intensifying the fight as much as possible, but if Ferrari’s main competitors do not make progress, then there will still be no need to dream of intrigue.

The securities of Moscow exporters almost sank the Caspian fleet The capital's intelligence services brought to court the first of a series of criminal cases initiated as part of the investigation into another large-scale scam involving the so-called false export. According to operatives, about 140 Moscow companies took part in it, which in 2001 alone managed to receive $800 million from the budget through fraudulent transactions.

Hate towards Thailand spills out in Cambodia All political, economic, customs, cultural relations between Thailand and Cambodia are either suspended or terminated. This is the result of the pogroms in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. An angry mob on Wednesday set fire to the Thai embassy in Cambodia, two hotels, several buildings and cars belonging to Thai businessmen. According to preliminary data, one person, most likely a looter, was killed.

Moldovan writers are against the rehabilitation of the “occupation regime” Eight Moldovan writers refused the highest state award - the Order of the Republic, which they received in already independent Moldova. The reason for this clearly political demarche was that the former first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Soviet Moldova, Ivan Bodyul, known for his closeness to Secretary General Leonid Brezhnev, became a holder of the Order of the Republic.

The exhibition “New Russian Collections” opened at the Moscow Arts Center The Moscow Art Center decided to report not only on the activities of its gallery, but also on the functioning of the entire Russian art market. The exhibition contains top-notch, first-class works by masters of the first third of the 20th century, provided by many well-known and completely new collectors.