An early morning fire in a psychiatric hospital in southern Russia yesterday killed three people and injured 12 others, officials said, while a gas explosion in another part of the country killed five people in an apartment house.
The blaze swept through the two-story structure around 5am and took two hours to extinguish, said Sergei Kozhemyaka of the Emergency Situations Ministry.
The cause has not been determined, but Kozhemyaka said that it may have been related to the misuse of heating devices. The local prosecutor's office opened a criminal investigation into the blaze, Interfax reported.
The hospital, which houses 48 patients, is located in the village of Doroganovo, about 65km outside Rostov-on-Don, which is 960km south of Moscow.
A gas explosion in a two-story apartment building in the Ryazan region, meanwhile, killed five residents, one of them a five-year-old child, according to Captain Aleksei Korneyev of the regional Emergency Situations Ministry. The blast occurred around 5.15am.
The blast destroyed a section of the apartment house, located in the village of Sarai, about 240km southeast of Moscow.
Each year, about 17,000 Russians die in fires -- a per-capita rate several times higher than in Western nations.
A nursing home fire in March in southern Russia claimed 63 lives. The local fire department had been disbanded, and fire crews took an hour to get to the scene.
In December, 45 women died in a fire at a Moscow drug treatment facility, where they were trapped by locked gates and barred windows. A fire at a Siberian mental hospital the next day killed nine patients.
Officials blame poor enforcement of fire regulations and improper construction for the large number of fire deaths. Some lawyers say the Russian court system fails to hold business and government accountable for safety.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing