Russia plans to establish a moon colony by 2040, the federal space agency announced on Wednesday after discussions on the country’s long-term space program.
A previous program drafted by the federal space agency Roscosmos in 2014 envisioned a three-stage plan to send humans to the lunar surface to set up infrastructure for a colony. Hundreds of aspiring cosmonauts had submitted applications willing to become the first Russians to land on the moon.

At least one “critical defect” has been discovered at the multibillion-ruble Vostochny Cosmodrome in Far East Russia that operators claim was fixed last month.
Scandals have rocked Russia’s space industry in recent months, including mass embezzlement charges, the discovery of a small hole in a spacecraft attached to the International Space Station (ISS) and a rocket failure that aborted a manned mission to the ISS in October.

Moscow has opened a cable car line with bird’s-eye views of the city’s beautiful Vorobyovy Gory district on Tuesday.
Moscow City Hall announced last year it was launching river shuttles ahead of the 2018 World Cup as part of its program to expand tourism infrastructure. The Russian capital was named the second-worst city for traffic jams in the world by the INRIX analytics company earlier this year.

Two traffic police officers have been commended in the Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk for averting a tragedy when they rushed to help put out a fire armed with nothing more than snowballs.
First Lieutenant Yevgeny Lunin and Lieutenant Pavel Istomin were on patrol in the village of Kuragino when they witnessed heavy smoke rising out of a garage next to a house, police said in a statement Monday.
They alerted the fire department and helped facilitate the evacuation of residents before the flames spread.

A Russian beauty queen has finally met her king in far-away Malaysia.
King Sultan Muhammad V, 49, married Miss Moscow 2015 winner Oksana Voyevodina, 25, in the Russian capital late last week, Malaysian news outlets reported.
Malaysian tabloids called the ceremony at the Barvikha Luxury Village concert hall in one of Moscow’s most expensive suburbs a “stunning Russian wedding.”

Russia has introduced a new tax that will affect self-employed babysitters, tutors, translators and other freelancers in Moscow and three other regions starting on Jan. 1, 2019.
Under the new law, self-employed Russians will be subject to a 4 percent tax on their income, while those who provide services to companies or individual entrepreneurs will be charged 6 percent. The new law is part of an effort to raise tax revenues and legalize the under-the-table income of an estimated 20 million self-employed Russians who do not currently pay taxes.

A Russian energy company has opened a wind farm in a remote village north of the Arctic Circle to help 4,600 of its residents reduce reliance on expensive diesel generators and fuel deliveries.
Russia’s RusHydro electric company teamed up with Japanese researchers and the administration of Russia’s Far Eastern republic of Sakha last year on an energy management system aimed at stabilizing the remote settlement’s power grid. The “Polar Microgrid System” project’s stated goal is to integrate existing generating facilities with wind turbine generators and storage batteries.

Moscow has been named the world’s sixth-best metropolis in a ranking of 100 major cities released last week by a North American consulting company.
Branding advisors from Resonance Consultancy rate cities on six “pillars of place equity,” including their economy, education, infrastructure and online rankings, including data from TripAdvisor and Instagram.
“You’ll fall under the spell of Moscow the minute you set foot in this endlessly fascinating and dynamic destination,” reads Resonance’s 2019 ranking of the world’s “best” cities.