Olga Costa was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1913, at the outset of World War I. Her parents, Jacobo Kostakowsky and Ana Falvisant Bovglarevokeylandel, were immigrants who had fled czarist Russia to escape persecution of the Jews. Costa and her younger sister Lya were raised in Berlin, where their fat...

Olympic Torch Relay (Day 97) - Saratov The Olympic Torch Relay has got under way to Sochi on 7 October 2013. The Sochi 2014 Olympic Torch Relay is going to be the longest in the entire history of the Olympic Winter Games. During the Olympic Torch Relay, 14,000 torchbearers will carry the Sochi 2014...

Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake is a contemporary ballet based on the Russian romantic work Swan Lake, from which it takes the music by Tchaikovsky and the broad outline of the plot. Bourne's rendering is best known for having the traditionally female parts of the swans danced by men. It was the longest-...

Residents of Ukraine's capital, Kyiv, celebrated their country winning the Eurovision song contest on Sunday morning. As many predicted coming into this politically charged Eurovision final, held in Turin, Italy, Ukraine were the big winners as the international public seized the chance to show thei...

Kristian Kostov started his musical journey at the age of 6. After going solo when he was 11 years old, he took part in many competitions, but the first big boost for Kristian’s career was his 2014 appearance on Russia’s The Voice Kids, where he was mentored by for Eurovision Song Contest winner Dim

The temperature in Harbin reaches forty below zero, and stays below freezing nearly half the year. The city is actually further north than notoriously cold Vladivostok , Russia , just 300 miles away. So what does one do here every winter? Hold an outdoor festival, of course! Rather than suffer the c...

In his recent remarks to congress, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke of his countrymen and women, and of his land, in loving terms. I immediately remembered the poetry of Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873-1934) set by David Nowakowsky (1848-1921), of the Brodsky Synagogue in Odessa, which evokes ...

John Legend took the stage at the 2022 Grammys to perform a special and powerful tribute to Ukraine amid their ongoing war with Russia. The 43-year-old singer debuted his new song, "Free," while singing and playing the piano after Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, shared a video statement ab...

A Soyruz rocket launched NASA's Scott Kelly and two Russian cosmonauts into space for what will be a year-long mission aboard the International Space Station. It is NASA's first-of-its-kind study of identical twins to learn more about how long-term spaceflight affects the human body — by sending one

Mod Carousel, a Seattle based boylesque troupe, performs a comedic cover of Miley Cyrus' "Can't Be Tamed" with the help of Seattle's own Leeni (of the band Prom Queen) The rise in homosexual hate crimes in our own Seattle neighborhoods as well as recent unsettling news concerning international polit...