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 St. Petersburg residents whose apartments have been damaged by leaking roofs are demanding the dismissal and punishment of City Governor Valentina Matviyenko and other officials they believe to be responsible for the mismanagement of funds resulting in what they have described as “the complete collapse of the municipal services system.” “We are informing you that St. Petersburg has ceased to be a European city today; it has turned into an emergency zone and poses significant danger to peoples’ lives,” the participants of one of the three rallies on the topic that took place in St. |
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 As Russia’s police force gears up for its controversial rebranding from Militsiya to Politsiya, followed by major cuts in its ranks, concerned citizens have been stepping forward left, right and center to ensure that law, order and public morality are upheld, come what may. |
All photos from issue.
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 It’s a snail-paced solution to pollution woes. The city’s municipal waterworks company Vodokanal is putting six giant gastropods to work monitoring emissions from a sewage incinerator. The African snails, the size of rats, are attached to sensors that will show them getting sick if they take in too much bad air. |
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A group of preservationists and residents who blocked trucks in an attempt to stop the controversial demolition of the historic Literary House at 68 Nevsky Prospekt said they were beaten by people they believed were employed by the developer Sunday. |
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Four local activists imprisoned for seven days for taking part in the most recent Strategy 31 rally in defense of the right of assembly that took place on Jan. 31 were released Monday, but they say a new criminal case against the opposition is pending. As soon as the four were released late Monday, two of them, The Other Russia party members Andrei Milyuk and Igor Chepkasov, were taken by anti-extremism Center “E” officers to the Prosecutor’s Investigative Committee’s offices for questioning. Originally, Milyuk was sentenced to 15 days in prison, but an appeal court shortened the term Monday, finding it “excessively severe,” Milyuk said. The activists were found guilty of violating the law on meetings and demonstrations and failing to follow the police officer’s lawful orders. |
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 A web site affiliated with Chechen rebels has released a video in which insurgent leader Doku Umarov claims responsibility for last month’s deadly suicide bombing at Russia’s largest airport and threatens more bloodshed if Russia does not leave the region. |
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Britain’s Guardian newspaper said Monday that its Moscow correspondent had been expelled from Russia after he used WikiLeaks’ cables to report on allegations that Russia under the rule of Vladimir Putin had become a “virtual mafia state.” Luke Harding, who had been back in London for two months to write a book on WikiLeaks, was refused entry by Russian authorities when he tried to return to Moscow last weekend, the paper’s editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger said. |
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The potential mascots for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi premiered on the air Monday night in the first public presentation of the images after months of collecting ideas and design work. |
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MOSCOW — Liberal leaders have pledged to get a new party registered as the country prepares for the State Duma and presidential elections, but skeptics doubt if the apparently futile effort is worth it. Leaders of the Party of People’s Freedom were adamant Monday that even if chances were slim, it was vital to file for registration to establish political credibility. “Yes, it will be hard, but we need to demonstrate to voters that we want to work for them,” party co-founder Vladimir Milov told The St. Petersburg Times. Current law requires political parties not represented in the State Duma to prove that they have at least 45,000 members in more than half of the country’s 83 regions to be registered. |
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 TOKYO — Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan led a large rally Monday demanding the return of several islands held by Russia since the end of World War II and calling the recent visit there by Russia’s president an outrage. |
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The female donkey that made headlines after its owner sent it parasailing last year over the Sea of Azov died of a heart attack at a horse farm in the Moscow region, RIA-Novosti reported Friday. Veterinarians were unable to say whether the death of the 40-year-old animal, Anapka, was caused by stress it suffered during its 30-minute flying stint in July or resulted from old age, a representative of the farm said. |
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For the first time, the city authorities are attempting to seize a historic building from private owners. The Committee for State Control and Preservation of Mounuments (KGIOP) has filed a suit with the Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast against Prestige for forfeiture of the Rogov House, a cultural heritage monument located at 3 Zagorodny Prospekt, said Deputy Governor Igor Metelsky. |
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The foodservice industry has fully recovered from the crisis thanks to fast food and low-cost restaurants. The fine dining sector, however, is still in stagnation. |
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The former developer of the historic New Holland island, which owes the city budget more than 500 million rubles ($17 million), could be declared bankrupt. Novaya Gollandiya, controlled by Shalva Chigirinsky and Igor Kesayev, had its contract with the city annulled in March last year. A suit seeking to have Novaya Gollandiya declared bankrupt was filed with the Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast on Feb. 4 by Geoizol, which was contracted to strengthen the foundations of buildings on the island and is owed a total of 171 million rubles by the developer. There were 10 claims filed in court against Novaya Gollandiya in 2009. |
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 “Extraordinary potential” is how then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger described Russia’s technological future during his visit in October, encouraging investors to participate in the Skolkovo innovation hub and tap into the intellectual capital on offer. |
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During the financial crisis, one in seven mortgage loans issued in 2006 and 2007 had to be restructured, and now one in 10 is in default. In the past two years, the Mortgage Loans Restructuring Agency has assisted more than 63,400 borrowers looking to restructure their mortgages, said Andrei Yazykov, the agency’s director. |
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 It is often said that young lovers argue for one main reason: To experience the sweet pleasure of making up shortly thereafter. The exact opposite is true in Russian-NATO relations: The only reason they make up is to argue once again shortly thereafter. |
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On July 29 last year, St. Petersburg was included on a state list of historic settlements that are entitled to special protection and town planning regulations. |
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 Finland’s best-known bands internationally might be metal bands such as HIM and Rasmus, but behind the commercial facade, the country is bursting with exciting and challenging music. With its tradition of revolt and fresh ideas, the industrial city of Tampere in Finland’s southwest — dubbed “Manse,” short for the “Manchester of Finland” — was an inevitable candidate to become one of the country’s burgeoning rock music scenes. With a population of more than 210,000, Tampere is the country’s third largest city after Helsinki and Espoo, and one of the country’s main industrial centers. The city’s history is closely linked with the Scottish industrialist James Finlayson, who came to Finland via Russia and founded a cotton mill in Tampere in 1820. It was in the Worker’s Hall of Tampere that Lenin and Stalin first met over beers in 1905 — an encounter depicted in a painting kept in Tampere’s Lenin Museum, established in the building in 1946. |
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/ For The St. Petersburg Times
‘Sanctum,’ Alister Grierson’s 3D action-thriller about a diving team exploring a system of underground caves, opened at local cinemas last weekend. |
 LOS ANGELES — Film director Darren Aronofsky, whose latest movie “Black Swan” opened in Russia on Saturday, gained inspiration for the film from a visit to St. Petersburg, he told The St. Petersburg Times in a recent interview. The keenly awaited thriller “Black Swan,” which has been nominated for five Oscars, is set in the New York ballet world and stars Natalie Portman as the perfectionist ballerina Nina.
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Ðèñê: risk As I’ve watched events unfold in Egypt, my mental storehouse of differences between Russians and Americans got a new load of evidence. American tourists on a luxury cruise ship docked near Luxor said they were comfortable, had plenty of food and were in absolutely no danger, but yet demanded that their government immediately airlift them out — at the taxpayers’ expense, incidentally. |
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The underground club Zoccolo had to close its doors at one point last week when it became clear that the crowd that had turned out to see a debut concert by Zorge, the band formed by former Tequilajazzz frontman and songwriter Yevgeny Fyodorov, could not fit in. |
 According to legend, in 1902, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt was hunting in the state of Mississippi. His attendants, wishing to help their boss, caught a small black bear and tied it to a tree, but Roosevelt refused to shoot the animal and set it free. |
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“Creative cooking and northern romance” is the slogan of Helskinki Bar, a new DJ-bar-cum-restaurant on Vasilyevsky Island. Opened in December, Helsinki Bar — a side project for the director of Svetlaya Muzika, the concert promoters who run the Stereoleto festival — is already a venue for after-parties and word-of-mouth acoustic gigs, and also has a “bring your own vinyl” evening. |
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 Loving couples know how to share. This simple truth is at the heart of a social project that calls upon local couples to share their blood with those in need on St. Valentine’s Day. Titled “Heart to Heart,” the initiative was launched by the St. Petersburg branch of the Russian Red Cross and the St. |
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Olga Marshkova, 54, an editor: I hate this celebration because it is a forced one. It was invented by French PR people when they needed to sell a large volume of flowers. |
 Even in the winter, St. Petersburg is a romantic city with plenty of places that seem as though they were created especially for love-struck couples. Newlyweds from all over the world come to spend their honeymoon here. With Valentine’s Day approaching on Feb. |
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The St. Petersburg Times Official festivities for St. Valentine’s Day have been banned in the Belgorod region by the local governor, who reportedly said the holiday goes against Russian cultural traditions, Rusnovosti. |
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 KAIRO — President Hosni Mubarak set up a committee Tuesday to recommend constitutional amendments to relax presidential eligibility rules and impose term limits — seeking to meet longtime popular demands as a standoff with protesters seeking his ouster enters its third week. |
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LONDON — A Swedish legal expert said Tuesday there were serious irregularities in the way prosecutors built their sex crimes case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. |
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LONDON — Britain’s previous government did “all it could” to help Libya win the release of the only man convicted of the Pan Am bombing in Scotland in 1988, though it insisted the decision was made entirely by Scottish officials, Britain’s head of civil service said Monday. |
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BUCHAREST, Romania — There’s more bad news in the cards for Romania’s beleaguered witches. A month after Romanian authorities began taxing them for their trade, the country’s soothsayers and fortune tellers are cursing a new bill that threatens fines or even prison if their predictions don’t come true. |
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