UrBC, Yekaterinburg, September 14, 2015. Sverdlovsk Region's Agriculture & Food Minister Mikhail Kopytov feels the local farmers won't be able to recover this year's harvest in its entirety. 'This year's weather conditions make it difficult to collect all of our potatoes properly. The harvesting tempo is lower than the average of many year since it keeps raining all the time and the soil is too wet. Tractors can barely enter the fields, the potatoes are all covered in soil. Our farmers use every opportunity for field work, with all the vehicles ready. We still

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, September 14, 2015. Sverdlovsk Region's surveillance authorities are planning to have some 20,000 kg of apples destroyed; the fruit was confiscated in an attempt to get it across the constituency border in a (supposedly) Polish trailer, Head of Yekaterinburg Customs Sergei Abrosimov said at a press conference today. 'A trailer full of apples, supposedly from Poland, was detained at the northern customs point. According to the documents on hand, these were Serbian apples, but our lab tests indicate the signatures on the documents were forged,' he said.

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, September 14, 2015. 66% of Russian citizens have left their home constituency at least once in the last two decades, and 80% of them would like to travel domestically in the near future, Levada Center's recent survey findings indicate. Only 8% of respondents, however, are interested in coming to the Urals. This is a long way from the top three most coveted territories: the Crimean Peninsula (38%), Saint Petersburg (31%), and Sochi (30%). At the same time, the Urals are more popular than Western Siberia (4%), the Volga River basin (4%), and the North Caucasian

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, September 14, 2015. Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev had a look at all of the promising developments presented at Russia Arms Expo 2015 and gave the international military vehicles and munitions exhibition a very high estimate. 'Exhibitions like these are major, and successful, sites for demonstrating the newest developments in the Russian arms industry; such events naturally attract a lot of attention. This year's one has received a record number of visitors, with delegations from over sixty different countries (about a third of all the states on this

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, September 11, 2015. 172 inspections of gas-filling stations were carried out in Ural Federal District in the year 2015 so far; in 60% of cases, legal offenses relating to poor quality of fuel were detected. A year earlier, the percentage was 32%, Head of Rosstandard’s Ural division Svetlana Mikheyeva said at a press conference. Mikheyeva explained problems had to do with the chemical composition of the fuel and with the accompanying documents. 4,565,000 RUR worth of fines were imposed on the offenders, including 1.385,000 RUR worth of fines within Sverdlovsk Region.

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, September 11, 2015. The number of those officially registered as job-seekers in Yekaterinburg is four times less than that of vacancies advertised by local employers, the city council’s press service reports. ‘According to our statistical data, there are currently 5,405 people out of jobs in the city. Remarkably, not only do all of them stand a chance of employment, but they can also pick from a range of companies, since there are 22,118 job openings on the market this month. In fact, the number of the unemployed was somewhat higher in June (5,493 people), while the

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, September 11, 2015. Sverdlovsk Region’s residents now owe their electric power suppliers over 1bn RUR, EnergosbytPlus reports. ‘Over 650m RUR are unpaid electricity bills accumulated by 330,000 locals, including more than 5,000 inhabitants of Yekaterinburg,’ says the company’s Sverdlovsk Region Sales Director Alexei Sergeyev. The power supplier laid a total of 34m RUR worth of claims with courts; besides, 145 rounds of visits to debtors were carried out by the company representatives and court officers. Nearly 50% of debtors paid their bills as the result. Some 30,000

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, September 11, 2015. According to Sverdlovskstat, 1.543m m2 worth of new housing were commissioned in Sverdlovsk Region between January and August 2015, which exceeds the figures for a year earlier by 1.34 times. 660,000 m2 worth of housing were put up in Yekaterinburg, 112,000 m2 in Sysert, nearly 90,000 m2 in Beloyarsky, 68,000 m2 in Verkhnyaya Pyshma, 56,000 m2 in Berezovsky, over 45,000 m2 in Nizhniy Tagil, nearly 41,000 m2 in Pervouralsk, 37,000 m2 in Revda, Polevskoy, and Zarechny each, and 34,000 m2 in Kamensk Uralsky.

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, September 11, 2015. An agreement to set up a military cluster in Nizhniy Tagil was signed during the RAE 2015 Exhibition. The paper was signed by Head of Rostourism Oleg Safonov, Uralvagonzavod Corporation’s Director-General Oleg Sienko, Nizhniy Tagil Metal Testing Insitute’s DG Nikolai Smirnov, Mayor of Nizhniy Tagil Sergei Nosov, and Managing Director of National Tourist Union Valeriy Kaigorodov. Uralvagonzavod Corporation’s press service reports Oleg Safonov said Nizhniy Tagil had great potential in terms of military and patriotic education of the youth, so the

UrBC, Magnitogorsk, Chelyabinsk Region, September 10, 2015. MMK Trading House won a number of tenders to become the key rolled steel supplier for the construction of a stadium in Volgograd. ‘We have already delivered around 1,000,000 kg of metal goods made at Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works. Last month, orders were placed for the delivery of another 1,500,000 kg of rolled steel in September 2015,’ the company says. The stadium will look like an upturned truncated cone with the diameter of 303m. The facades that grow narrower at the bottom have to do with the fact that the stadium must fit

September 10, 2015. The number of Russian citizens with incomes below living wage rose by 14.8% in the first half of 2015 and came to 21,7m people (15.1% of the overall population), RIA Novosti refers to Rosstat as stating. The number of the poor actually went down by 12%, from 22.9m people (15.9% of the population) to 20.1m people, which comes to 14% of the population, between the first and the second quarters of the year. In QII’15, the country’s average living wage came to 10,017 RUR (10,792 RUR for working-age citizens, 8,210 RUR for retirees, and 9,806 RUR for children). This is,

September 10, 2015. Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service sued Google’s Russian daughter enterprise, Mail.ru, and Ruskredit for violating the existing advertising legislation, Prime refers to the FAS as reporting. Both Google and Mail.ru are reported to feature Ruskredit’s loan advertisement. Now Ruskredit does not actually have a valid banking license, and it is against the Russian legislation to advertise unlicensed goods or services. Article 7 (Paragraph 7) of the Advertising Act states no goods can be advertised that need to be licensed or authorized if such licenses haven’t been granted

September 10, 2015. Head of Yekaterinburg Council Alexander Yakob took part in Russia Arms EXPO 2015 at Staratel range in Nizhniy Tagil. The exhibition is one of this year’s major international events in the military world. The city council reports Yakob first went to Nizhniy Tagil’s stand and then met the city mayor Sergei Nosov to take a tour of the premises together. Uralvagonzavod Corporation’s stand was their first stop. ‘I’ve just arrived here and I’m already brimming with new impressions, but I expect to see even more,’ Yakob said. ‘I am glad this large-scale exhibition takes place

September 10, 2015. The number of Sverdlovsk Region’s residents dropped by 4,797 people as they moved from the constituency to other parts of Russia in the six months of 2015, which was 7.5 times more than a year earlier. Sverdlovskstat reports 60,026 people arrived in the constituency and 64,823 people left between January and June 2015. On the international scale, 1,849 people left Sverdlovsk Region to go abroad, compared with 340 fresh arrivals a year earlier.

September 10, 2015. Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court declared Central Ural State Unitary Geological Industrial Enterprise insolvent, the court reports. The company was set up in Pervouralsk in 2002 to develop gravel pits and sand quarries and to do geological survey and research. The company’s creditor Quartz Trade submitted a claim to court on January 9, 2014, asking to declare the enterprise bankrupt. It was determined in the course of the hearing that the creditors’ overall claims amounted to 45,355,000 RUR. The trustee in bankruptcy stated that the company couldn’t possibly recover to

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, September 9, 2015. A team of Uralvagonzavod Corporation designers won the third prize in the Innovative Developments Contest in the Railway Cars & Track Machines category. The contest was part of the 5th International Railway Vehicles & Technologies EXPO 1520 in Shcherbinka, Moscow Region. The corporation's press service reports the prize was awarded to petroleum tank car 15-5157-04. 'This tank car was developed by the corporation's head plant in cooperation with Ural Railcar-Building Design Office. The product is meant for transportation of oil,

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, September 9, 2015. A four-star hotel by Park Inn was spectacularly opened in Nizhniy Tagil recently. Uralvagonzavod Corporation's daughter enterprise acted as the investor for the project, the corporation's press service reports. The red-ribbon-cutting ceremony was performed by the corporation's Director-General Oleg Sienko, Carlson Rezidor's Senior Vice President in Russia & CIS Arild Hovland, Sverdlovsk Region's First Vice Premier Alexei Orlov, and Mayor of Nizhniy Tagil Sergei Nosov. 'Nizhniy Tagil is gradually turning into a tourist

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, September 9, 2015. Works by ChTPZ Group Training Center‘s students will be presented at the 3d Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, the company press service reports. ‘The students‘ graphic works will serve as exhibits during the Art Residences Program at the Biennial. Additionally, a workshop by a Saint Petersburg-based artist Alexander Morozov was held on the premises of the company's Pervouralsk New Pipe Plant,‘ the press service says. Twenty students and faculty members joined the artist to do some bird-watching and put the birds' trajectory down on

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, September 9, 2015. The official unemployment figures came to 139,412 people in Sverdlovsk Region last month, which exceeded the figures for a year earlier by 7,284 people. According to Sverdlovskstat, the unemployment rate thus came to 6.1% against 5.8% in August 2014. 994 more people were out of jobs in late August 2015 than in December 2014.

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, September 9, 2015. Pay parking lots yielded 1.066m RUR to Yekaterinburg budget in August 2015, the city council reports. 'We've got pay parking lots with 2,354 car slots at the moment, including the 854 slots introduced last month. A special mobile app will be launched any day now so that drivers can use their bank cards to pay their parking fees from their smartphones,' the city council says.