The top-ranking United States senator on Monday downplayed as ”overstated” media reports saying US President George Bush was planning military options to knock out Iran’s nuclear programme, but stopped short of denying them outright. ”We believe there has been much overstatement in the American press over the last several days with regard to the use of military force in Iran,” Senate majority leader Bill Frist said.
Group of Eight (G8) countries were divided on Thursday on ways to ensure long-term world-energy security, as the European Union admitted its members had diverging views on ambitious plans for developing nuclear power being pushed by Russia and the United States. ”It is a very different approach from the members of the G8.”
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/ 27 February 2006
Russia on Monday downplayed progress on its plan to alleviate fears over Iran’s nuclear programme, saying there was still work to be done to reach agreement and warning that time was quickly running out ahead of a March 6 deadline. "This is a complex issue and the negotiations are difficult," said Sergei Kiriyenko, Russia’s chief nuclear negotiator with Iran.
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/ 25 February 2006
Russian poet Gennady Aigi, who was often considered a contender for the Nobel Prize in literature, has died at the age of 71, news agencies reported on Friday. His poems, written in the indigenous language of the Chuvashia region, were translated into scores of other languages.
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/ 25 February 2006
The death toll from the collapse of a Moscow market roof has reached at least 64, with 22 people still hospitalised, an official with the Russian emergencies ministry said early on Saturday. Rescuers have retrieved 63 bodies from the rubble of the market where the roof collapsed on Thursday, and one more person died in hospital.
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/ 23 February 2006
At least 38 people were killed and 29 injured on Thursday when the snow-laden roof of an indoor market in Moscow collapsed, said Artyom Bibilurov, a spokesperson for the emergency situations ministry. Hours after the roof collapsed, fire appeared to have broken out in the ruins.
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/ 14 February 2006
Fish with bleeding ulcers are turning up in the Amur River in Russia, sharpening concerns about the effects of a factory accident that sent a toxic chemical slick coursing through the waterway. Russian scientists are conducting tests to determine whether the ulcers were caused by the chemicals dumped into the river by an explosion at a Chinese plant
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/ 10 February 2006
Finance chiefs from the world’s leading industrial nations kick off two days of discussions in Moscow on Friday focused squarely on mounting Western concern over the Kremlin’s swelling clout in world oil and gas markets. Taking its first turn at the helm of the Group of Eight, Russia has set a diverse agenda for the meeting.
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/ 6 February 2006
Chechnya’s underground separatist leadership has announced a reshuffle of its exiled ministers in what rebel websites said on Monday was a step to consolidate their scattered forces. The measures, announced in decrees by fugitive rebel President Abdul-Khalim Sadulayev, target several of the best-known rebel figures.
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/ 2 February 2006
Residents of Moscow and western Russian regions braced for more Arctic temperatures on Wednesday as a cold front that has taxed municipal heating systems in Siberia pushed westward. Temperatures in the Russian capital dropped to minus 20 degrees Celsius overnight and at least four people dies of exposure.
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/ 1 February 2006
President Vladimir Putin rebuffed critics on Tuesday who have questioned Russia’s commitment to democracy and its role in the G8, saying his country belonged in the powerful group and would ensure that the G8 did not become just an elite club of ”fat cats”.
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/ 23 January 2006
Russia’s intelligence service on Monday accused four British diplomats of involvement in a spy ring in which agents allegedly passed secrets through a high-tech communications system hidden in an innocent-looking stone in a Moscow park.
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/ 21 January 2006
Freezing air from Siberia sent temperatures across much of northern and eastern Europe diving on Friday and the death toll from the cold rose to more than 70 in Russia, the hardest hit in the region. Temperatures fell to minus 33 degrees Celsius in the eastern part of Estonia.
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/ 19 January 2006
Cold weather so painful that even winter-hardened Russians complained about it has gripped Moscow and much of the rest of the country. At least two dozen people have reportedly died of exposure nationwide and Russians used a record amount of electricity to keep warm. Temperatures dropped to minus 30 degrees Celsius overnight.
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/ 18 January 2006
Twenty-four people froze to death in western Russia and Moscow switched to a ”strict” energy conservation regime on Wednesday as overnight temperatures plunged below minus 30 degrees Celsius in the capital and to substantially colder levels elsewhere in the country.
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/ 17 January 2006
Two people froze to death in Moscow, officials said on Tuesday, as Arctic cold from Siberia descended on western Russia, sending nighttime temperatures to as low as minus 36 degrees Celsius and prompting warnings of power cuts to some businesses. Forecasters said the cold snap is expected to last most of the week.
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/ 5 December 2005
At least 14 people were killed and several more injured when the roof of a public swimming pool collapsed in the Urals region of Russia, officials said early on Monday. Of the 14 victims, 10 were children between nine and 12-years-old, said local emergency ministry official Anatoly Shinakov. Four women were also killed in the accident.
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/ 7 November 2005
It was one of the most ambitious projects of the Stalin era, known as the ”railway of bones”’. At least 10 people a day died during the four years of its construction, but unlike most of Uncle Joe’s grand designs, it was never completed and now sits unfinished in the tundra, an icy road to nowhere.
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/ 2 November 2005
Nearly two-thirds of Russians questioned in a new poll do not believe that business can be both honest and profitable, the Romir monitoring company reported. About 59% of the poll’s 1 600 respondents said it was impossible to profit from a business if one paid all the proper taxes and gave out no bribes, researchers said, adding that in large cities the percentage of sceptics rose to 64%.
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/ 27 October 2005
Russia put Iran’s first ever satellite into space on Thursday, as a Kosmos-3M rocket blasted off from the northwestern Plesetsk launch site carrying one Russian and seven foreign devices, the Russian space agency said. The Iranian press has described the satellite as being for telecommunications and research purposes.
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/ 20 October 2005
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the founder of the Yukos oil giant and formerly Russia’s wealthiest man, has been sent to a prison colony in eastern Siberia to serve the rest of his eight-year sentence for financial crimes. Alexander Pleshkov, head of the punishment implementation department for Siberia, said the the tycoon had been sent to a colony in the Krasnokamensk district of Chita province
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/ 13 October 2005
France’s Amelie Mauresmo crashed at the first hurdle in the ,3-million Kremlin Cup on Thursday, going out 6-1, 6-1 in the second round of the WTA event to Italy’s Francesca Schiavone. Mauresmo, the second seed, looked weary after her loss to American Lindsay Davenport in the final of the Grand Prix in Filderstadt, Germany on Sunday.
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/ 12 October 2005
The stress of post-Soviet social changes ranging from work redundancies to rebellious children is forcing thousands of people to seek psychological help from a unique network of centres in Moscow. ”We’re expanding and it’s always full,” said Valery Shatilo, deputy director of the Moscow Psychological Help Service.
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/ 30 September 2005
The Russian Federation’s weak and poorly enforced laws against child pornography have turned the country into a haven for paedophiles, participants at a conference in Moscow devoted to the problem said this week. The confenrence heard that child pornography can be distrubuted through the internet with relative impunity because of weaknesses in the criminal code.
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/ 28 September 2005
Glamour girl Maria Sharapova’s meteoric rise to world number one is inspiring a new generation of Russian teenage girls to head for the courts hoping to emulate her sporting and financial success.
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/ 26 September 2005
Historic Russian admiral Fyodor Ushakov — a hero of Russia’s wars against Turkey and Napoleon Bonaparte — was designated the patron saint of nuclear-armed, long-distance Russian bombers by the Orthodox Church on Monday. "His strong faith helped Saint Fyodor Ushakov in all his battles," the church said.
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/ 19 September 2005
Russian newspapers celebrated on Monday the career of pioneering editor Yegor Yakovlev before and after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, following his death from heart failure. Yakovlev, a journalist and author of several books, died in a Moscow hospital on Sunday, aged 76.
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/ 12 September 2005
Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov warned on Monday that attempts to rush reform of the United Nations Security Council would risk splitting the world body. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has said he hopes for an agreement on the sensitive issue of reforming the Security Council by year’s end.
Russian veterinary workers incinerated thousands of slaughtered fowl on Wednesday in an attempt to prevent a bird-flu epidemic blamed on wild ducks from spreading further west toward Europe. An expert blamed Russia’s growing problem on a failure to keep domestic fowl isolated from wild birds.
A store fire in the northern Russian city of Ukhta killed nearly 20 people on Monday, emergency officials said. The emergency situations ministry put the toll at 19 dead and 17 injured. The Federal Security Service in Moscow earlier said 16 had been killed and 20 injured.
Russia’s space agency has signed a space tourist contract with United States millionaire Gregory Olsen, a spokesperson said on Wednesday, in a deal that would make the 60-year-old scientist only the third tourist to visit the international space station.
Beatings and bullying have been taking place for years at the prison in western Russia where hundreds of prisoners have mutilated themselves in an unprecedented act of protest, former inmates said this week. Inmates at the prison began cutting their necks and stomachs with razor blades on the night of June 26-27 and 1 300 of them have since gone on hunger strike.