During the State Duma elections, it will be possible to form voting blocs, writes the RBC Daily newspaper. According to the publication, such a provision will be in the new law on elections of deputies. At the same time, as the newspaper notes, parties will have an advantage over blocs: for them the electoral threshold will be lower. RBC Daily refers to sources in the presidential administration. The publication does not provide specific figures.

The Moscow authorities intend to hold a professional competition to create a concept for the development of the Zaryadye territory. As the Izvestia newspaper writes with reference to the general director of the state unitary enterprise Mosproekt-2, Mikhail Posokhin, domestic and foreign companies with experience in designing park areas will be invited to participate in it.

Samsung at CES 2013, which opened in Las Vegas on January 8, announced the Exynos 5 Octa mobile processor, The Verge reports. The processor has eight computing cores. Exynos 5 Octa can be used in tablets and smartphones. When developing the processor, Samsung focused on multitasking and increased 3D graphics performance, but tried to reduce the power consumption of the chip, company representatives said. Energy savings are achieved by using two groups of cores in the processor.

British biologists led by Tom Smulders discovered that the appearance of wrinkles on the fingers when they are in water for a long time can have a functional significance: in this form, the fingers allow a person to more easily handle the manipulation of wet objects. The scientist's work was published in the journal Biology Letters , and its summary is provided by NatureNews and ScienceNow .

On January 9, 1863, the first underground line opened in London. This method of transport communications was used for the first time in the world. In the first months after the opening, passenger traffic was 26 thousand people per day. Today, the London Underground serves approximately 3.5 million people every day, using 270 stations. The total length of the tracks exceeds 400 kilometers. Queen Elizabeth II with a tube station sign made for her residence, Buckingham Palace.

The oath will wait. Chavez's inauguration has been postponed indefinitely. Hugo Chavez. Photo: Juan Barreto / (c)AFP On Tuesday, January 8, the National Assembly of Venezuela fulfilled the request of the country's Vice President Nicolas Maduro to postpone the inauguration of Hugo Chavez, who is undergoing treatment for cancer in Cuba.

The nominees for the Golden Raspberry Award, which is awarded every year to the worst actors, directors and films, have been announced. The announcement of nominations is posted on the official website of the award . The absolute leader of "Raspberry" this year was the film "The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn. Part 2." Bill Condon's film was nominated in all 10 award categories, and was even nominated for Worst Couple twice.

Hockey players from Khabarovsk “Amur” and “Yugra” from Khanty-Mansiysk performed 18 shootouts in the post-match series to determine the winner of the KHL championship game. The players were accurate seven times, and the decisive shot was from Amur forward Jakub Petruzalek, who brought his team victory. The official website of the league reports this. The main and extra time of the match "Amur" - "Ugra" ended with the score 2:2.

09.01.2013, 17:24:43 version Print | PDA/PDA Project of the future Willy Brandt Airport. Image: official airport website Zone of eternal turbulence The failed construction of the Berlin airport hit the image of Germany In Berlin, the opening of Willy Brandt Airport (BER), which has not been completed for the seventh year, has been postponed for the fourth time. The new airport should replace the existing ones and become the only one in the Berlin-Brandenburg region.

The volume of government subsidies to manufacturers of small arms and ammunition in the United States over the past five years has amounted to at least $49 million. Bloomberg writes about this with reference to publicly available data. Earlier, the public association of Maine journalists estimated that manufacturers of assault rifles themselves received assistance in the amount of $19 million.

Employees of the Polish television channel TVP carried three kilograms of explosives into the building of the lower house of parliament to prove its vulnerability to terrorist attacks. This was reported by the weekly Wprost. A simulation of a terrorist attack was carried out in the new program of journalist Tomasz Sekielski “Po Prostu”. The transfer staff acquired all the substances necessary to create a remote-controlled bomb, the radius of which would be several meters.

The vandal who defaced Pablo Picasso's "Woman in a Red Armchair" (1929) in June 2012 has surrendered to police at the US-Mexico border. According to the Associated Press , the vandal was 22-year-old Uriel Landeros. The painting, from the Menil Collection in Houston, was defaced on June 13. Landeros went to the museum, applied a stencil to the canvas and left on it, using spray paint, the inscription "Conquista" ("conquest, conquest"), as well as an image.

Asteroid Apophis (99942), which made a record approach to the Earth today, January 9 at 15:43 Moscow time, turned out to be 75 percent larger in volume than previously thought. New estimates of its size and albedo data have been published on the website of the European Space Agency ESA. New data about Apophis was obtained using the Herschel space observatory. According to previous estimates, the diameter of Apophis should have been 270 ± 60 meters.

The audience of the professional social network LinkedIn has reached 200 million users. This was reported on January 9 in the service blog . The entry notes that the social network is used by residents of 200 countries and territories speaking 19 languages. LinkedIn has the most users in the USA (74 million), India (18 million), Brazil and the UK (11 million each). LinkedIn's fastest-growing markets for 2012 were Türkiye, Colombia and Indonesia.

Pirates released four sailors kidnapped off the coast of Nigeria on December 23, including three Italians and one Ukrainian. The newspaper Il Mattino reports this with reference to the words of Italian Foreign Minister Giulio Terzi. Three Italian sailors will return to their homeland in the near future, the head of the ministry specified . He did not say when the Ukrainian would arrive home.