Food retailer Magnit said Monday that its sales rose 34.5 percent in May, year on year, to stand at 48.3 billion rubles ($1.50 billion), after a rise of 33 percent in April. Magnit, which recently overtook rival X5 as Russia's biggest grocery chain by revenue, said the May result brought sales for the first five months of the year to 225 billion rubles, an increase of about 32 percent.

A bear ran amok in the streets of the Siberian city of Nizhnevartovsk on Monday, confirming what every foreigner already knew about Russia . In the early hours, local police received a call warning that a brown bear was wandering through the 16th district of the oil-rich town on the Ob river, the Tyumen Times reported. First making his way to a kindergarten where he wandered around for a bit, the bear then set off into the streets.

An architect’s rendering of how the new Luzhniki stadium complex might appear when it is completed by 2018. Proposed redevelopment of the Luzhniki stadium in preparation for the 2018 FIFA World Cup will result in the loss of a sporting icon and an infrastructure collapse, experts said.

Russia's stunted growth in the private sector in May was due to the extended holidays, while India led the pack of BRIC peers for economic growth, a report said. While noting that the economic growth in emerging market economies remained sluggish overall last month, the HSBC composite index, which maps both the manufacturing and services sectors, for Russia stood at 51, for India at 52, for China at 50.9, and for Brazil at 51.2. An index measure of above 50 indicates expansion.

PIK Group, one of Russia's largest homebuilders, plans to raise $330 million in a secondary share offering, Vedomosti reported Monday, citing the company. The company issued a total of 167.2 million new shares. Existing shareholders were given preemptive rights and had up until May 20th to apply for $150 million worth of new shares. A further $180 million of shares has been offered on the open market at a price of approximately $1.9 a share.

The MT Conferences section did not involve the reporting or the editorial staff of The Moscow Times. Anna Berlina Associate Dentons Few of us have not heard of "employee secondment" and "outstaffing." The underlying concepts are familiar and widely used in practice. However, the fact that employee secondment is still not regulated in labor law is only known to a small group, mainly staff supply agencies and companies that use such agencies and have studied the associated risks.

ATHENS — Greece's troubled privatization program suffered a setback Monday as energy giant Gazprom pulled out of bidding for the privatization of Greek natural gas firm DEPA, a government official said. The news, announced as a delegation from Greece's international creditors returned to Athens for a new round of inspections, sent stocks on the Athens Stock Exchange tumbling by nearly 5 percent.

The number of foreign tourists coming to Russia in the first four months of 2013 is up 9 percent on the previous year, Interfax reported Monday. Russia attracted 248,100 tourists during the first four months of 2013, according to the State Statistical Service. The most numerous visitors were: the Chinese, with 30,500 visitors; the Germans, with 23,800; the Turks, with 23,700; the Israelis, with 14,200; and the French, with 12,600.

The MT Conferences section did not involve the reporting or the editorial staff of The Moscow Times. Ludmila Shusterova Deputy General Director, Marketing and Business Development BDO Outsourcing Division Andrei Tupolev, a leading Soviet aircraft designer, once said, "An unsightly plane won't fly." I think he could also have said that about a business. An unsightly and user-unfriendly project is not viable. This is true about more than just the product one makes or the service one provides.

Three men relaxing near a banner for the founding congress of the All-Russia People's Front on Manezh Square. Igor Tabakov President Vladimir Putin is expected to take the reins of the All-Russia People's Front on Tuesday at the organization's founding congress in a move some experts say is aimed at distancing himself from United Russia.

KIEV — Four years after British financier Neil Smith bought one of Ukraine's largest local vodka producers, it was listed by Forbes as one of the country's fastest-growing firms, with annual sales of $600 million. Then, a local court ruling nearly shut it down. Such cases are one reason why Ukraine performs so poorly in attracting foreign investment, drawing just over $6 billion in FDI last year compared to over $10 billion each for its EU neighbors Poland and Czech Republic.

GORKI — Maternal mortality in Russia has fallen by 55 percent since 2005, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Monday. "We recently obtained data on a decrease in maternal mortality," Medvedev said at a meeting of deputy prime ministers. "Since 2005, or in essence since the start of the national healthcare project, it dropped 2.2-fold." In 23 Russian regions, the maternal mortality figures have fallen to the level of Western European countries, he added.

An Iranian official says his nation's Russian-built nuclear power plant has suffered an electric generator malfunction. Mahmoud Reza Sajjadi, Iran's ambassador to Russia, was quoted by the Itar-Tass news agency on Monday as saying that the flaw at the Bushehr plant was not caused by recent earthquakes in Iran. Sajjadi said Russian and Iranian experts were trying to fix the problem, without saying when it occurred or whether it led to the plant's shutdown.

Izzard is becoming noticably more political as he mulls a mayoral future. Ambitious stand-up comedian Eddie Izzard will be next in a growing influx of English-language one-man laughter acts to take to a Moscow stage. Izzard's "Force Majeure" tour spans 25 countries worldwide with the Moscow show at Crocus City Hall on June 14 sandwiched between events in St. Petersburg and Johannesburg, South Africa. He is also traveling as far as Kathmandu.

I kept running into a woman I have known in Moscow for 20 years or more. She had an enigmatic smile on her face, as if she was squinting to look into the distance and was finding something of interest there. As I passed her for the third or fourth time she said, "I can't make up my mind which of these rooms I want to live in. I keep walking back and forth but I can't choose.