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A gay pride event will be held in St. Petersburg on Saturday despite threats from extreme nationalists and City Hall’s continued refusals to authorize the rally, organizers said Thursday. “I blame the Russian authorities for any possible attack on us and any possible damage that we suffer,” said the organizing committee’s chair Maria Yefremenkova. Earlier Thursday, Yefremenkova filed a lawsuit against City Hall’s law, order and security committee over the rejections, which she described as “derisive.” The committee declined two applications and six routes and sites for a march and standup meeting that the organizers had proposed, without offering an alternative place and/or time as required by law, she said. |
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 St. Petersburg welcomed a delegation of international rabbis to the city’s Grand Choral Synagogue on Tuesday and Wednesday for its first Congress of Rabbis. |
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The All-Russia Society for the Blind has published a unique Atlas of St. Petersburg in Braille script for blind residents of the city and blind visitors to the city. The book is aimed at helping them to find their way in unfamiliar areas of the city. “Until today, the city’s blind lacked any kind of Braille guide or map of the city. |
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MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev become the first Russian owner of an iPhone 4 after Apple CEO Steve Jobs presented him with the new smartphone an hour before it went on sale in the United States on Wednesday. |
All photos from issue.
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 The city’s Legislative Assembly passed an environmental bill Wednesday that could ultimately result in the city’s green spaces shrinking by a staggering 40 percent in coming years. Under the new law on green spaces, only 1,388 out of St. Petersburg’s 2,398 parks, gardens and green areas retain their status as areas protected from construction. |
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Two computer literacy centers opened last week at the rehabilitation center of St. Petersburg State University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics (ITMO) as part of Microsoft’s “Your Course” initiative. |
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A St. Petersburg lawmaker has called for the drafting of an etiquette handbook for the imperial capital that would advise foreign visitors to speak only in Russian and to avoid wearing national dress — similar to a behavior code planned in Moscow. Yelena Babich, a city deputy with the Liberal Democratic Party, said she was moved to act after seeing people in cotton robes and house slippers walking down St. |
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 Every hotel, beach and ski resort in Russia will soon have to obtain an obligatory classification as the country gears up to host the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. Previously, Russian hotels obtained star-category classification on a voluntary basis, but obtaining certification will become obligatory after an order signed in June by Vitaly Mutko, minister for sport, tourism and youth policy, comes into force. |
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Russian Railways and the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) in St. Petersburg signed a memorandum last week on continuing their collaboration via their modular executive MBA corporate training program. |
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MOSCOW — Russians’ real salaries surpassed pre-crisis levels in May, according to a Bank of Moscow report, but the gains are primarily thanks to low inflation rather than generous employers. Salaries in May rose 1.5 percent above their September 2008 all-time high, said Kirill Tremasov, director of the bank’s analytical department, while their average level in the first five months of the year was 3 percent higher than in the same period of 2008. |
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MOSCOW — United Company RusAl has requested 1.4 billion rubles ($45 million) from the government for the development of two innovation projects. No other company has ever requested such a large sum. |
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MOSCOW — Moscow’s City Hall may force developer Don-Stroi to lop several completed stories off a giant luxury apartment complex in southwestern Moscow, saying the extra floors were built without prior approval. A source in the Mayor’s Office told RIA-Novosti on Wednesday that as many as 22 stories could be ordered demolished, although City Hall spokesman Sergei Tsoi told Russian news agencies later in the day that eight or nine floors could be enough. |
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 It is 20 years since leaders from across Europe and North America met to set the seal on the end of the Cold War. The result was the Charter of Paris for a New Europe, a visionary statement signed on Nov. 21, 1990 by most European governments, Canada, the United States and the Soviet Union. |
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The explosion on the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico and the huge oil spill that resulted has led to a predictable reaction from many liberals — curses directed at profit-obsessed transnational corporations, calls for introducing exorbitantly high taxes on offshore drilling and appeals to abandon hydrocarbons completely and live in harmony with nature. |
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 The city got its second new museum of contemporary art in as many weeks with the opening Monday of the Erarta Museum and Gallery of Contemporary Art — a five-floor complex dedicated to contemporary Russian art. An unprecedented project that has taken three years of preparation, it is the largest contemporary art space in Russia, with more than 2,000 works by 140 artists on show in the gallery alone. |
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Êîäåêñ ìîñêâè÷à: Muscovite’s code Just when I thought I had mastered the complexities of being a longtime foreign resident of the Russian capital, the Moscow City Duma has decided to produce êîäåêñ ìîñêâè÷à (Muscovite’s Code) to help us foreigners assimilate. |
 Leading photographers from around the world are due to congregate in St. Petersburg for an international summer photography workshop that opens Sunday and runs for a week. “Ways of Photography,” which is organized by the FotoDepartament Foundation for Informational and Cultural Projects, will consist of seminars and lectures devoted to explaining various photography techniques. |
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For years (the last 15, to be precise), these premises housed Bremen, a German restaurant. Back in 1848, however, the same location was home to Chairs, a newly opened restaurant that would go on to attract guests such as Anna Pavlova, Grigory Rasputin, and ballerina and courtesan to Russia’s imperial family Matilda Kshesinskaya, not to mention leading literary lights such as Fyodor Dostoevsky and H. |
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