Russian Railways plans to introduce new budget train cars for customers willing to endure a lack of air conditioning and toilets. Federal Passenger Co., the subsidiary which runs long-distance passenger services for the state-owned Russian Railways, said in an annual report that it plans to upgrade a third of its 19,300 carriages by 2025. As part of the overhaul, the company said it will discontinue more than 5,000 carriages with an average age of 20 years by 2021. “Before their complete disposal, old cars without air conditioners and bio-toilets are scheduled to be allocated into a separate temporary ‘economy-budget’ brand,” the subsidiary said in the report. The Russian Railways development program for 2025 disclosed plans last month to start phasing out platzkart train cars — legendary Soviet-era third-class carriages with stacked beds — as early as 2019. Instead, the carriages will be fitted with shower cabins, vending machines and USB slots, the Vedomosti business daily cited Russia’s biggest rail car maker as saying.

An unemployed man in St. Petersburg has been detained after reportedly dismantling 275 metric tons of railway tracks over the past month. The city’s transport police said it caught the 38-year-old suspect red-handed in a municipality southeast of the city center. “The woebegone mechanic dismantled more than 275 metric tons of metal products with a wrench and a crowbar,” transport police said in a statement Wednesday. The unnamed culprit faces up to five years behind bars and an 80,000 ruble ($1,250) fine on charges of theft. St. Petersburg’s Fontanka.ru news website estimated that the 275 metric tons of tracks could be sold for 5 million rubles ($79,000), citing scrap metal price listings.

More Russians are willing to participate in economic and political protests now than in the past two decades, according to a new survey released by the independent Levada Center pollster. Public discontent has spread throughout Russia this summer after the government announced plans to raise the retirement age. The United Russia ruling party saw its approval ratings plummet to seven-year lows, while trust in President Vladimir Putin has dropped to below 50 percent, despite the president’s efforts to distance himself from the unpopular reform. Twenty-eight percent of Russians say they would personally participate in protests against falling standards of living — the highest such figure since 1999, according to the latest Levada poll published Wednesday.

A second Russian scientist has reportedly been charged with sharing state secrets with another country this month, a week after the high-profile detention of a space researcher on treason charges. Last week, Viktor Kudryavtsev, a scientist at one of Russia’s leading space research labs, was charged with state treason for a suspected leak of hypersonic missile technology to a NATO country in 2013. A member of the Public Monitoring Committee (PMC) prison watchdog said last Friday that a second scientist was found to have been detained on treason charges in July, despite prison wards having previously assured observers that only one scientist was being held. Alexei Temiryov, 64, was detained on July 18 and placed under arrest for allegedly leaking secret documentation to Vietnam, his lawyer, Anna Polozova, was quoted as saying by the RBC news website Sunday. His lawyer said that the information her client is accused of leaking was not classified. “All of it is in the public record, it’s in every textbook in every library,” she told RBC.

Religious leaders have rallied to shut down a scheduled zombie walk in central Russia, saying that the event could be dangerous for children. Young people dressed up in zombie costumes have spooked the residents of Perm every summer since at least 2010, but this year, local Orthodox Christian and Muslim leaders have raised objections. A spokesman of the Russian Orthodox Church in Perm was cited as saying Tuesday that the zombie parade was detrimental to the psychological and moral health of children. “Kids games should be directed at developing and forming values that are socially desirable,” Yury Kishchuk, a spokesman for the Perm archdiocese, told the V-kurse.ru news website. He went on to say that the zombie parade is in violation of the federal law on “the protection of children from information that is harmful to their health and development.” On Tuesday, organizer Artyom Feoktistov said this year’s zombie walk was canceled after a barrage of complaints.

A woman in Siberia reportedly faces up to six years in prison on extremism charges for posting memes on social media deemed “insulting” by Russian investigators, part of a growing trend of Russians being punished for online activity. Internet freedom advocates decry what they call skyrocketing government censorship under Article 232 of the Criminal Code, which targets hate speech. Russia’s Supreme Court estimated that convictions under the extremism charge more than tripled between 2012 and 2017. Maria Motuznaya, 23, tweeted Monday that a team of investigators had raided her apartment in early May, confiscated her computer and phone and accused her of posting offensive images on the VKontakte social network, including satirical pictures of priests and Jesus Christ. A scanned page of what Motuznaya said was a police file described one of her captions as “containing linguistic signs of the white race’s superiority over the black race.” “I was told that I was offending people by storing the images and that I should confess my crime,” Motuznaya wrote, saying she was later threatened with incarceration. Her trial on two charges of hate speech and extremism, which carry a combined sentence of 6 years, has been set for Aug. 6, according to a court ruling that she attached to her tweet. Motuznaya said she was inspired to “come out” with her story on social media after reading a blog post about a prison torture case that has rocked Russia over the past week.

A polar bear singing hip-hop verses about public services in the Arctic is the latest oddity to have been unearthed by Russian social media users this week. The furry mascot’s endorsement of municipal programs in the town of Norilsk is introduced with a hip-hop verse that goes to address social and economic issues. The polar bear, depicted on the Norilsk coat of arms, goes on to reinterpret famous Soviet and Russian songs to a Europop beat in a series of videos that praise the virtues of the local administration. A high-pitched autotune voice pledges to clean the streets and manage finances as the mascot, who does not bear a name, dances against the backdrop of an animated city. The videos languished in near obscurity on the municipal cinema’s YouTube page for two years before being discovered by a Navalny staffer in Krasnoyarsk. Social media users have been split over the video, with one user calling it “the lowest pit of the lowest circle of hell,” while another called it “fabulous.”

Foreign visitors have reportedly spent $1.5 billion during the football World Cup over the past month in Russia. An estimated 3 million foreigners visited the 11 host cities of the tournament this summer, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was cited as saying by the state-run TASS news agency on Monday.