The cost of housing on the primary market in Moscow decreased in 2009, compared to 2008, by 4.4%, according to data from the territorial body of the Federal State Statistics Service for the capital (Mosgorstat). Secondary housing in the capital decreased in price last year by 5.3%.

Skrynnik's ex-husband released The head of the public procurement department of the Chelyabinsk regional administration, Sergei Skrynnik, the former husband of the Minister of Agriculture Elena Skrynnik, has been released on bail of 1 million rubles. He was detained on January 15 while accepting a bribe of 300,000 rubles. Prime-TASS Zurabov will begin execution President Dmitry Medvedev has instructed Mikhail Zurabov to assume his duties as Russia's ambassador to Ukraine.

It’s a paradox, but officials are not at all happy about the appearance of a new colleague. I have not yet met anyone who would speak positively about the newly appointed Deputy Prime Minister and Presidential Envoy Alexander Khloponin. Registration required Only Readers Club members can participate in the discussion. If you have already registered, log in to the Readers Club . To become a member of the Readers Club, you need to register .

The most common reason for Russian women to return to work after maternity leave is the desire for professional fulfillment, according to a survey conducted on January 12-13 by the research center of the SuperJob.ru portal among 1,800 working Russian women with children under 7 years of age. It was the desire to “ realize their professional potential” that 52% of women named as the reason for their return to work after maternity leave.

PricewaterhouseCoopers in its report accuses the European EADS of mismanaging the costs of creating the A400M, reports the German Handelsblatt. According to PWC, for several years EADS did not have an effective control system over the project to produce 180 A400M aircraft with a total cost of 20 billion euros. In addition, PWC analysts say that the company's management seriously underestimated the real cost of the project.

Newsru.com International donors must be prepared for a long and difficult process of rebuilding Haiti. They must make sure that “when the TV cameras go away, the donors don’t go with them,” the Financial Times quotes World Bank President Robert Zoellick as saying. According to the latest figures released by the Haitian government’s civil defense department, the death toll from the devastating January 12 earthquake has reached 75,000, with another 250,000 injured and a million left homeless.

January 20, 2010, 02:17 / Business The President of Transneft wants to combine two competing projects Alexander Tutushkin Kirill Khripunov Both projects have the same goal - to direct export flows from the Black Sea basin bypassing the overloaded Turkish Bosporus and Dardanelles straits. According to Transneft, 110 million tons of oil and 45 million tons of petroleum products are transported through them per year.

Ukrainian presidential candidate in the January 17 elections, Strong Ukraine party chairman Serhiy Tigipko held consultations with Yulia Tymoshenko and Viktor Yanukovych and decided not to support any of the candidates in the second round, Ekho Moskvy radio station reported. According to Tigipko, the negotiations took place on the same day, and "certain proposals" were made by both sides, but his position on this has not changed.

“Sports facilities should have been built here, and not houses for those difficult people who now live in them,” Yuri Luzhkov said in an interview with Moskovsky Komsomolets. Moscow schools can be replenished with new teachers - officers discharged from the army and undergoing retraining, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov said on Tuesday live on the TVC channel. “ We have set a course for those who are being discharged from the army.

Yesterday, the government commission on administrative reform, chaired by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, decided to reduce the powers of the Ministry of Agriculture. Following this department, other federal government bodies will have to go through the commission, the first in line being the Ministry of Education and Science. The materials for the meeting were prepared by a working group headed by the head of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) Igor Artemyev.

In the afternoon, the publication of Citi's Q4 2009 financials added to the negativity; the bank's losses amounted to 33 cents per share, while the forecast was 30 cents per share. Futures on American indices responded to the news with a decline, but later the dynamics straightened out, and at the beginning of the trading session in the US, the indices showed growth of 0.7-1%. This gave Russian shares the opportunity to partially recoup the decline.

Constitutional Court judge Anatoly Kononov, who resigned in January, disagreed with his colleagues on many important issues. If his opinion had been the basis for court decisions, many cases would have been decided differently. Laws would have restricted human rights less often – in particular, freedom of assembly would have been real. Indirect and targeted taxes would have been significantly limited.

The frosts that have set in in Moscow in recent weeks have caused numerous breakdowns of intercoms, the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets wrote on Wednesday. The capital is currently experiencing twenty-degree Epiphany frosts. As forecasters note, given that the cold weather is not going to give up next week, 2010 may leave a noticeable mark in the annals of meteorological observations.

January 20, 2010, 18:32 / Finance Buffett criticizes bank tax and Kraft Foods-Cadbury deal Andrey Kotov American billionaire Warren Buffett has spoken out against the planned $19.6 billion takeover of British Cadbury by Kraft Foods, calling it a “bad deal.” He also doesn't like the tax on banks. "I think it's a bad deal," Buffett said live on CNBC. On Tuesday, Cadbury accepted Kraft's increased offer to $19.6 billion.

The pace of implementation of the "People's Garage" program in Moscow is significantly behind what was planned by the city authorities - most of the parking lots, which, as city officials promised, were supposed to appear in 2009, will not be completed before March 2010 at best. The parking problem is one of the most acute in Moscow. This issue worries most of the capital's motorists both in the center and in the residential areas.