Reebok has pulled a racy ad in Russia after online users and the apparel company’s management derided it as being done in bad taste.
Styled after the global #BeMoreHuman campaign that features celebrities like Gal Gadot and Ariana Grande, Reebok launched a Russian version on Thursday with a hashtag that roughly translates as #OutOfLine. Russia’s campaign features two female athletes and the author of a feminist Telegram app channel, whose slogan read: “switch seats from a man’s approval to a man’s face” in Russian.

Authorities in the Arkhangelsk region, which oversees Novaya Zemlya, declared a state of emergency on Saturday due to the mass invasion of at least 52 polar bears. Photos and videos on social media showed polar bears entering apartment blocks and other living quarters and rummaging through garbage in the settlement of 3,000.
Efforts to drive out the polar bears from the human habitat have partly paid off, Zhigansha Musin, the head of the municipal administration, told Russian media on Monday.

Russia will spend 25.7 trillion rubles ($391 billion) on carrying out President Vladimir Putin’s expansive promises to overhaul Russia’s economy by the end of his last term in office, according to a new government estimate.
After his inauguration last May, Putin outlined plans to spend at least 8 trillion rubles on infrastructure and social issues until 2024. Some of the goals set in his 17-point executive order, known as the “May Decrees,” include halving poverty and turning Russia into a top-5 world economy, while investing heavily in healthcare, education and infrastructure.

Russian scientists have again delayed the launch of a research spacecraft to the sun over technical issues, researchers say.
Russia had been scheduled to send the spacecraft as part of the “Interheliozond” project sometime after 2015, though this was later postponed to 2022 and then again to a final date of 2026.
A Russian Academy of Sciences official told state-run media on Tuesday that work on “Interheliozond” had been suspended in favor of “projects that are ready to launch as well as international cooperation.”

The head of Russia’s Investigative Committee is reportedly seeking donations for the construction of a bronze Archangel Michael statue at the entrance of his agency’s new headquarters in Moscow as religious symbols gain an increasingly prominent place in Russian state institutions.
The Russian Orthodox Church has become a powerful political force since the anointment of Patriarch Kirill as its leader in 2009. Last year, the Russian military began collecting donations for its state-of-the-art military cathedral with six golden domes dedicating to the patron saint of each military branch.

Moscow has been named as the world capital of traffic jams in 2018 in an annual report released by the INRIX automotive analytics company.
In the rating, Moscow edged out other global cities renowned for traffic congestion including Istanbul, Bogota, Mexico City and Sao Paulo. Other Russian cities in the ranking of 220 included St. Petersburg (9th place), Rostov-on-Don (33rd) and Nizhny Novgorod (39th).
Moscow drivers on average waited 210 hours in traffic queues last year and reached an average speed of around 18 kilometers per hour, according to the research published on Monday.  

A volunteer with opposition activist Alexei Navalny’s campaign has become the first person to be prosecuted under a new law that bans encouraging young Russians to attend unsanctioned protests.
Adults face 15 days of jail and fines under the new law that President Vladimir Putin signed in late December. The law was introduced after Navalny drew thousands of mostly young anti-Kremlin demonstrators to the streets over the past year.
Authorities in Russia’s westernmost exclave of Kaliningrad charged local resident Ivan Luzin for involving two adolescents in a picket late last week, the RBC news website reported Tuesday.

Russians reportedly took out 8.61 trillion rubles ($130 billion) in loans last year as real personal incomes declined.
Russian economic growth has been hampered by a volatile currency, low oil prices and Western sanctions since Moscow’s 2014 annexation of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine. Real disposable incomes were forecast to drop for the fifth year in 2018, while inflation increased by 0.9 percent this month as the value-added tax (VAT) hike took effect.