Съ праздникомъ
Happy Julian-date feast day of St Mark, Russian Orthodox.

From lewrockwell.com and The Moscow Times
Moscow’s homeless turn to Mother Valeria
Photo by Vladimir Filonov, The Moscow Times

From SBS News Media
Russian church to be built in Rome
Permission has finally been received from the Italian government to build a Russian Orthodox church in Rome, not far from the Vatican and the Basilica of St Peter. The foundation stone was laid two years ago. The idea for the church dates back to the reign of the last Russian Emperor. Senior Russian representatives including Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov were present at a special ceremony marking the granting of the Italian authorities’ approval by Italian authorities. The construction of the new church was negotiated between Russia and Italy, not the Vatican. Source: WorldWatch.

Although this story has to do with the Italian government and not the Catholic Church, Catholic goodwill to the Orthodox in Italy is nothing new, and there are some Catholic churches in Rome that follow Russian Orthodox usages, including the Russicum theological college and an Italian convent whose nuns live like Russian Orthodox ones.

From A conservative blog for peace correspondent Lee Penn
From The American Spectator:
Identity crisis
by John Dunlap

From christianitytoday.com
Today in church history: an ‘up’ and a ‘down’
May 8, 1373: English mystic Julian of Norwich receives 15 revelations (she received another the following day) in which she saw, among other things, the Trinity and the sufferings of Christ. She recorded her visions and her meditations on them 20 years later in her book The Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love.

May 8, 1559: The Act of Uniformity receives Queen Elizabeth I's royal assent, reinstating the forms of worship Edward VI had ordered and mandating the use of the Book of Common Prayer (1552). (Corrected.) This made Anglican Protestantism the state religion in England, which, except when Oliver Cromwell replaced it with a more extreme Protestantism, it has been to this day.