New town for 55,000 people to be built in Moscow region.

MOSCOW, July 28 (Itar-Tass) - Foundation of a new town for 55,000
residents is due to be laid in the south of the Moscow region Wednesday,
officials at the Moscow region administration told Itar-Tass.
Novoye Stupino - New Stupino in contrast to the existing town of
Stupino that is located in roughly the same area - will be separated by a
distance of 70 kilometers from Moscow's Automobile Ring Road and the
federal road Don will offer the shortest route to the new town.
The start of the groundbreaking ceremony has been scheduled for 10:30.
It will be attended by Russia's Regional Development Minister Borit
Basargin and Moscow region governor, Boris Gromov.
The project of the new urban area suggests it will span 1,200 hectares
and the buildings to the built there will cover an area of 2.15 million
square kilometers.
Public utilities there alone will occupy an area of 245,000 square
kilometers.
Novoye Stupino is destined to have an industrial park that will cover
a territory of 200 hectares and will house ecologically safe and friendly
types of manufacturing.
Designers of the project hope for an inflow of investment, including
the one from foreign countries. Their hopes are based on the fact that
Stupino district in general is one of the best territorial entities in
Russia in terms of attracting foreign investors.
MR Group, the construction company that will operate the project, says
it draws on the Canadian experience of city planning and R.E. services. In
part, the Canadian timber-framing technologies help to build energy saving
economical houses.
"Novoye Stupino project is called upon to meet the demand for
small-story affordable residential houses and to create new jobs," a
company executive said.
The housing in the new town will mostly stand in the economy class and
the first turn of the whole project is due to be commissioned in 2012.

.Breakaway Church factions losing popularity in Ukraine -- official.

KIEV, July 28 (Itar-Tass) - Breakaway factions of the Orthodox Church
are apparently losing popularity in Ukraine and many members of the
communities that deflected to them are now returning to the realm of the
canonical Church, says Metropolitan Hillarion, who accompanies Patriarch
Kirill I on the current trip to Ukraine.
"We're getting many signals from inside the dissent - from the lay and
from those who're considered to be hierarchs there - that they feel the
necessity of reuniting with the Mother Church, as the sensation that they
are denied an opportunity to take part in the life of the Orthodox
Christian congregation of the Universe weighs heavily upon them," said
Metropolitan Hillarion.
He chairs Moscow Patriarchate's department for external Church
relations and has expert knowledge of the situation in various segments of
both Eastern and Western Christianity.
"This split /in the Orthodox Christian community in Ukraine -
Itar-Tass/ was a political project," Metropolitan Hillarion said.
"The dissenting tendencies in Ukraine were fanned artificially and now
the prerequisites for this fanning are gone and the very vogue for the
dissent is gone, too," he said adding that the vogue for a split inside
the Church was in demand in the 1990's "when the ideas of separatism and
disintegration prevailed."
As for today, more and more people start asking themselves if it is
really worthwhile living in an atmosphere of permanent hostility and
reciprocal accusation or would it not be better to live in peace and
friendliness.
"There are groups of laymen, parishes and clergymen who reunite with
the Church eventually," Metropolitan Hillarion said. "This process hasn't
moved to a mass-scale level yet but it's present in many Orthodox dioceses
in Ukraine."
He indicated that the people who manipulated the dissent from
backstage pursued the goal of enfeebling the Orthodox Church in Ukraine to
the maximum and fragmenting it into small factions.
"There's no breaking up something that took shape over centuries just
because of the petty political calculus," His Beatitude Hillarion said in
an interview with the Kiev-based TV channel Inter. "This unity should be
kept up with great caution and care."
"I think the Church that has managed to preserve its unique
consolidating potential is the main force capable of uniting people and
helping them remember the spiritual unity that binds Russia, Ukraine and
Belarus in spite of the existing state borders, which we respect and which
we don't call into question in any way," Metropolitan Hillarion said.
-0-kle


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