Ukraine's leading English-language newspaper since 1995

The Sept. 12 Kharkiv concert of Queen + Paul Rodgers on Sept. 12 proved so popular that a promoter decided to broadcast it on Nov. 6 in more than 425 American movie theaters. The AIDS benefit drew 350,000 people in Kharkiv’s Freedom Square. Courtesy photo Americans tune in to Queen + Paul Rodgers; Dining near Chernobyl attracts British TV show; Competition begins for most beautiful woman; Polish, Ukrainian leaders exchange invitations; Priest hunts Ukraine for graves of Nazi victims

Americans tune in to Queen + Paul Rodgers

The Sept. 12 Kharkiv concert of rock legends Queen + Paul Rodgers lives on. At least it will on Nov. 6 in 425 American movie theaters. Entertainment Business Newsweekly wrote on Nov. 2: “This one-night-only event will be the only chance for U.S. audiences to experience this historic concert, featuring the band’s greatest hits and new music from their album.”

Queen + Paul Rodgers kicked off their 2008-09 world tour “with this powerful concert captured live at the historic Freedom Square” in front of more than 350,000 fans, according to the magazine.

“With this exclusive in-theatre event, fans of Queen + Paul Rodgers have an incredible opportunity to see this amazing concert alongside other fans in the personal setting of their local movie theatre,” Dan Diamond, vice president of NCM Fathom, told Entertainment Business Newsweekly. “This concert was performed in Ukraine for hundreds of thousands and NCM Fathom is proud to offer U.S. fans an exclusive chance to feel like they were there.”


Dining near Chornobyl attracts British TV show

The Age newspaper of Melbourne, Australia, put the spotlight Oct. 30 on the BBC-produced TV program “Cooking in the Danger Zone.” Naturally, TV host Stefan Gates found his way to Chornobyl, site of the world’s worst nuclear power accident in 1986.

“This week’s series return sees him traipse around Chornobyl, Geiger counter in hand, to meet Ukrainians flaunting dire health warnings to continue to live within the ‘zone of alienation’ around the stricken nuclear power plant,” according to the newspaper. “A combination of necessity, ignorance and stolid fatalism has seen peasants move back illegally into the area, in which wildlife has ironically flourished since the 1986 accident.”

Gates sets his sites on the nearby town of Slavutych and, according to The Age, “finds himself swayed by the combined powers of a toothless babushka, her alcoholic husband and a stoic bunch of Ukrainian men, to taste food cultivated deep within the contaminated zone.”


Competition begins for most beautiful woman

The world apparently cannot get enough of Ukrainian (and Russian) beauties. Either that, or online matchmaking agencies are in need of marketing gimmicks to boost business.

Anastasia International, a U.S.-based online introduction agency, wants people to select the Anastasia Queen 2008 from thousands of Russian and Ukrainian women registered on their website.

“Anastasia Queen Beauty Contest Announced: 15,000 Gorgeous Girls – Choose the One!” screams the press release. “Russian and Ukrainian women are renowned for their outstanding beauty and feminine allure,” it goes on to say.

The voting is open to all registered members of Anastasia International. Members will also be allowed to e-mail, telephone and have video chats with the contestants. The competition is conducted in three stages. The first ends on Nov. 9. Then, the 15 girls with the most votes go on to the bikini round of the competition. From seven finalists, a winner will be chosen following a “video talent contest.”

More information can be found at www.anastasiaqueen.com


Polish, Ukrainian leaders exchange invitations

Ukrainan President Victor Yuschenko and his Polish counterpart, Lech Kaczynski, have two important events coming up that neither wants the other to miss.

Kaczynski, in Donetsk last week for an economic forum, invited Yushchenko to Poland on Nov. 11 to mark the 90th anniversary of his nation’s independence. “I accept with gratitude,” Yushchenko said, according to Poland Business Newswire on Oct. 29.

The Ukrainian president, in turn, invited Kaczynski to Kyiv on Nov. 22 for an international forum dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the Great Famine of 1932-1933, which Yushchenko wants the world to recognize as genocide against the Ukrainian people.


Priest hunts Ukraine for graves of Nazi victims

The saga of Father Patrick Desbois, a French Roman Catholic priest, got more attention in the Oct. 29 issue of The Vancouver Province, a Canadian newspaper.

Desbois is the author of “Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews.” It was originally published in French in 2007, but Desbois is now promoting the English-language version.

“The skeletons of 1.5 million murdered Jews lie in unmarked mass graves in Ukraine, 700,000 more are in Belarus, and countless others are in Russia,” according to the article. Desbois, 53, has made it his mission to find them, which means “poring over wartime archives to locate each site, visiting villages to interview witnesses, collecting shell casings used by the killers and cataloguing the carnage of the killing fields of 1941 to 1944.”

According to The Vancouver Province, Desbois’ interest stems from his grandfather, a French resistance member who was deported to Ukraine during the war and who told him that Jews were being systematically rounded up and shot.

“The assassins moved from village to village. There were no deportations,” Desbois told the newspaper. “They surrounded the village in the morning, making the Jews line up on the main street with their luggage. They’d dug a pit . . . and they walked them there, where the firing squads were waiting. They had one rule: ‘One bullet, one Jew, one Jew, one bullet.’ It was an order of the Wehrmacht [German army] to save on ammunition. The Jews were shot and, whether they were dead or not, pushed into the pit.”

Witnesses are still alive to tell the tale. “Every victim saw his killer, every killer saw his victim,” Desbois told the newspaper. “It was a personal crime – no machine, no train, no camp, no gas. Only killing.”