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MOSCOW — While lightning has been blamed for Tuesday’s downing of a Pulkovo Airlines Tu-154 jet, it is unlikely to have been the sole cause of the crash, which left 170 dead.
Lightning incidents are not unheard of on airplane flights, aviation expert Oleg Panteleyev said, with an average of one incident every two years in some areas. But few of those end in disaster, thanks to onboard equipment.
That equipment includes conductors in the plane’s wings to dissipate electricity in the event of a lightning strike, said Oleg Yermolov, deputy head of the Interstate Aviation Committee.
Yermolov said he could not remember a single instance in the past several decades of a commercial jet going down after being struck by lightning. |
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Gleb Garanich / Reuters
Journalists film the black box found among the wreckage of the Russian Tupolev Tu-154 airplane 45 kilometers north of the regional town of Donetsk on Wednesday. |
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Flight data recorders from the Pulkovo Airlines plane that crashed in eastern Ukraine, killing all 170 on board, were recovered Wednesday.
Bad weather is believed to be at least partly to blame for Tuesday’s crash of the 14-year-old Tu-154M.
All of the bodies have been found.
Forty-five of the victims were under 12. Six of the children were under 2; the youngest was 4 months old.
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MOSCOW — When the price of bread jumped by 6 rubles overnight, Vladimir Gaidukas was left reeling.
City authorities quickly began handing out bread coupons to him and hundreds of other pensioners in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky — the first time food vouchers had been issued anywhere in the country since the dark days of 1992. |
All photos from issue.
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MOscow — The blast that left at least 12 dead at the bustling Cherkizovsky market Monday was most likely a hate crime committed by ultranationalist youths, law enforcement officials said Tuesday.
Two of the three suspects who have been detained in connection with the blast were charged with racially motivated homicide, the city’s chief prosecutor, Yury Syomin, said Tuesday. |
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MOSCOW — Two Egyptian citizens face criminal charges in the Bryansk region for attempting to tunnel under the Russian border using a shoehorn, Interfax reported Wednesday. |
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In response to soaring demand for mid-price Fords, a number of local car dealers have announced plans to open new facilities. One of the city’s largest dealers, Alarm-Motors, is to begin construction of a new service center in the Krasnoselsky district, in which it will invest about $6 million, the company said Wednesday in a statement. |
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Pulkovo airline’s Tu-154 plane, which crashed Tuesday near Donetsk in Ukraine, was insured by the SOGAZ group but the insurer has yet to make public details of any pay out on the policy. |
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The Right Track
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — Oktyabrskaya Railway will invest 460 million rubles ($17.2 million) into modernization, Interfgax reported Tuesday.
The company will spend 220 million rubles ($8.2 million) on locomotives, 50 million rubles ($1. |
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MOSCOW — Yukos’ court-appointed receiver, Eduard Rebgun said Wednesday that he had hired Gazprombank and Ernst & Young to help him prepare the sale of the company’s assets. |
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STAVANGER, Norway — Insufficient gas pumped into Ukraine’s storage facilities could threaten supplies of Russian gas to Europe this winter, European Union Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs said Wednesday.
His comments came a day after Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych sought to assure EU countries that the country would not siphon off gas from pipelines this winter. |
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Considering Copper
YUNNAN, China (Bloomberg) — Yunnan Copper Industry (Group) Co., the parent of China’s third-largest smelter of the metal, may set up joint-venture mines in Russia and Mongolia to source copper ore, a senior company executive said Thursday. |
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The imposition of sanctions on two Russian companies this month for selling military technology to Iran by the presidential administration of U.S. President George W. Bush certainly sends the Kremlin a message — but it won’t be the one the White House has in mind. |
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I had to get a spravka recently and, when I got it, I stared at it in disbelief. In this case the spravka, or certificate, was a document showing who was registered as residing in my apartment. |
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 The St. Petersburg Times was not the first English-language newspaper in St. Petersburg. Before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, when the city was a flourishing Imperial capital, a range of publications were printed in English. In the final part of a six part series, art historian Andrei Vorobei looks at periodicals published in St. |
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The local urban-folk band La Minor, whose frontman Slava Shalygin was on vacation in Sevastopol until this week, will perform at Platforma at what will be the band’s first local concerts in the last couple of months. |
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Headaches, difficulties in concentrating and constant tiredness is the price many of us pay for living in the city. But Sushilka, a new sushi bar, claims to have a novel solution.
“Ha! ‘oxygen bar’ — what a funny name,” the taxi driver exclaimed, stopping at “The first oxygen bar in St. Petersburg” sign on the corner of Khersonskaya Ulitsa and Prospekt Bakunina.
But it is not merely a marketing trick or a play on words. Here they really do try to make money from air, or to be precise, a purified version of air with 96 percent oxygen.
The oxygen bar is a machine that extracts oxygen from ambient air, and then supplies it to customers through a nose hose. |
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 Locals may disagree, but St. Petersburg boasts a great music scene, where even buskers are highly talented, according to Richard Chappell, a technical engineer for art rock legend and world-music pioneer Peter Gabriel. |
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PRAGUE — Suspense was deeper than a black hole as the world’s top astronomers prepared to announce whether lonely, little Pluto — ninth rock from the Sun — would be ejected from the planetary A-list.
After ten days of impassioned debate, some 2500 space scientists convening in Prague were to decide later in the day on a redefined solar system and a new taxonomy of the mainly lifeless objects circling our Sun. |
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BRUSSELS, Belgium — EU diplomats meeting before foreign minister talks later this week have attempted to draw up a list of troop contingents that member nations could contribute to a strengthened UN force in Lebanon. |
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LONDON — Eleven people have been remanded in British custody over an alleged plot to use suicide bombers to blow US-bound airliners out of the sky.
The 11 accused — including a young mother and a minor — appeared in a magistrates court in London Tuesday, 12 days after police raids in and around the British capital which prompted unprecedented security measures at major airports worldwide. |
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NEW YORK — A multitude of tennis fans, no doubt, would love to see Andre Agassi replicate last year’s improbable feat of reaching the U.S. Open final this year. But the draw for the final Grand Slam event of 2006, unveiled in New York yesterday, didn’t do the 36-year-old any favors as he prepares for the final tournament of his career. |
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KARACHI — Pakistan have dropped their plan to ask the International Cricket Council (ICC) to hold a disciplinary hearing before Monday into captain Inzamam-ul-Haq’s actions in the fourth and final test against England. |
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LONDON — Sprinter Justin Gatlin must serve at least four years of his doping ban, an International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) spokesman has said.
The American Olympic and world 100 meters champion was banned for up to eight years on Tuesday after agreeing that his positive drugs test constituted a doping violation. |
Temp: -2°C moderate or heavy snow showers
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