A strange and formally inexplicable incident occurred at the end of last week with lawyer Vladislav Lapinsky, who is defending one of those accused of preparing an assassination attempt on the governor of St. Petersburg, Valentina Matvienko. On November 8, Lapinsky, the chairman of the presidium of the St. Petersburg Bar Association “Lawyers for the Constitutional Rights of Citizens,” was denied another meeting with his client, 29-year-old Timur S.

Robots will replace guards Modern security companies place the main emphasis on the “non-human factor”: not so much on the guards themselves in uniform vests or overalls, but on the latest words in science and technology. These “last words” were demonstrated at the 16th international forum “Safety and Security - Sfitex 2007”, which took place last week in St. Petersburg.

The executive branch seeks to become the legislature For the second time (the first precedent took place in June), Legislative Assembly deputy lawyer Yuri Karpenko proposes to liquidate the Charter Court. Namely, to remove everything related to the Constitutional Court from the Charter of St. Petersburg, repeal the law “On the Charter Court” and transfer judges to a “regular” federal court.

The western high-speed diameter, according to the master plan, should pass 200–250 meters from residential buildings on Morskaya Embankment. However, at public hearings on the project for planning the reclamation areas, residents learned that the distance would be from 70 to 200 meters.

Requirements from state employees to take absentee ballots were pure “excesses on the ground,” said Governor Valentina Matvienko. According to her, no one gave instructions to the heads of district administrations to force employees of budgetary organizations to take “unattached cards” in order to vote on the day of the parliamentary elections at their place of work. However, local people continue to demonstrate their devotion to the ruling party and invent new ways of violating election laws.

Alexander Kazantsev at the Mariinsky Hospital Are there virtually no investigations into criminal cases involving the beating of dissenters? From the famous dispersal of the April march of dissent in St. Petersburg, two criminal cases remained, initiated against police officers under Art. 286 part 3 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation “Exceeding official powers with the use of violence and causing grave consequences.” A chance to restore justice was given to the St.

Wide publicity of information about the purges of the opposition by our valiant police, apparently, is only a thrill. After a series of articles in the media, the number of various preventive conversations and surveys on the subject of belonging to the “white angels” (see “New” No. 84) and so on did not decrease at all, rather the opposite. So the other day the editor received a letter from one of those freshly cleared.

Snow is snowing, and passions around the green zone in Vesyoly Poselok are heating up: the other day, Legislative Assembly deputies got hold of the governor’s response to their request regarding the destruction of the boulevard between Krylenko and Evdokim Ognev streets. The contents of this document, worthy of being quoted, fully reflect the point of view of the executive branch. Everything is clear in principle... but what should we believe?

Modern Russian television is in good demand among the mentally ill. This is probably why one of the psychiatric hospitals in St. Petersburg urgently needed new Korean televisions. The dispensary administration is ready to spend $5,000 to purchase each of the four electronic boxes. The money, of course, was allocated from the city budget.

A strange war continues in Sosnovy Bor, which local law enforcement agencies declared on one single family. The targets of the police attack were the two Penkin brothers—not oligarchs, not deputies, or even dissenters, but just representatives of small businesses. War, according to the brothers, was declared after they, having opened a car repair shop in Sosnovy Bor, refused to pay “for security” to the local department of the Organized Crime Control Department.