A deadly fire at a Russian shopping mall has killed at least 64 people in the Siberian coal-mining city of Kemerovo.
According to officials, many of the victims are children, with 10 people still listed as missing.
The fire started on an upper floor of the Winter Cherry complex while many of the victims were at the cinema.
Video posted on social media showed people jumping from windows to escape the flames on March 25.
Russia’s Investigative Committee said in a statement: “According to preliminary information, the roof collapsed in two cinemas.”
The cause of the fire is not yet known and authorities have launched an investigation.
The region’s deputy governor Vladimir Chernov was quoted as saying the fire began in a children’s trampoline room.
He said: “The preliminary suspicion is that a child had a cigarette lighter which ignited foam rubber in this trampoline room, and it erupted like gunpowder.”
Kemerovo, a key coal-producing area, lies about 2,200 miles east of Moscow.
Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Anna Kuznetsova, blamed negligence, and called for urgent safety checks at similar entertainment complexes.
Some 660 emergency personnel were deployed in the rescue effort. Firefighters tackled the blaze for more than 17 hours.
The Winter Cherry complex, which opened in 2013, includes a multiplex cinema, restaurants, a sauna, a bowling alley and a petting zoo. All the animals at the zoo are reported to be dead.
Eleven injured victims are being treated in hospital, suffering from smoke inhalation. The most serious case is an 11-year-old boy whose parents and siblings died in the fire, Health Minister Veronika Skvortsova said.
The fire is believed to have started at around 5PM local time on March 25 in a part of the building that contains the entertainment complex, local media report.
Yevgeny Dedyukhin, deputy head of the Kemerovo region emergency department, said the area of the fire was about 1,500 sq m.
Four people have been detained for questioning, including the head of the company that manages the shopping centre, according to the Investigative Committee. The owner of the shopping mall is among those detained.
Russian officials had initially given a figure of 64 people missing but later clarified that this included victims whose remains had not been identified.
At least nine of the bodies found so far are children.
Three-year -old Tserin Dopchut survived alone for 72 hours in a forest in the remote Russian region of Siberia, in an area renowned for being inhabited by wolves and bears.
The boy only had a small bar of chocolate in his pocket when he wandered into the woodland.
According to The Siberian Times, the child slept on a dry makeshift bed under a larch tree.
A huge land and air search was launched to find Tserin, who may have been following a puppy when he vanished.
The toddler had been under the care of his great grandmother, local media reported, but he ventured off near the village of Khut, located amid dense forestry in the Tuva Republic when her back was turned.
Image source RT
For 72 hours the boy braved plummeting temperatures, the threat of wild animals and the danger of falling into a fast-flowing river before he was eventually rescued by his uncle.
“The situation was very dangerous. The River Mynas is fast and cold. If a small child fell in, it would be certain death,” Ayas Saryglar, head of Tyva’s Civil Defense and Emergencies agency, told the Siberian Times.
“There are wolves, and bears in the forest. The bears are now fattening for the winter. They can attack anything that moves.
“In addition, it is warm during the day, but at night there are even frosts. If we consider that the kid disappeared during the day, he was not properly dressed – only a shirt and shoes, no coat.”
A day and night search operation to find the toddler involved villagers, local policemen and even a helicopter scouring a vast area of about 120 square km.
Another official told local media that the boy was saved after recognizing his uncle’s voice calling his name. After being hugged, Tserin’s first question was whether his toy car was okay.
Rescuers were quick to praise the boy’s initiative – he found a dry place under a larch tree and slept between its roots.
“The whole [of his] village is throwing a party to celebrate his survival,” regional leader Sholban Kara-Ool was quoted as saying.
Tserin Dopchut has now been nicknamed Mowgli, The Siberian Times reported. Mowgli is the fictional orphan in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book novels.
Doctors say that Tserin Dopchut suffered no serious injuries from his ordeal.
Passengers on board a Katekavia airline flight due to take off from Siberia had to get out and push the aircraft after its brake pads froze solid, Russian media reported.
The plane was trying to take off from the town of Igarka, but was unable to move after the temperature fell to -52C, the RIA Novosti news agency reports.
Passengers on board the flight, many of them shift workers, apparently offered to lend a hand, fearing that otherwise their journey home would be delayed, The Siberian Times reports.
The Katekavia airline flight later took off and landed safely in the city of Krasnoyarsk.
“According to the initial account, the air temperature dropped to -52C, and the braking system in the plane’s landing gear froze in the parking position,” Oxana Gorbunova, a senior aide at the Western Siberia state transport prosecutor’s office, tells RIA Novosti.
“The pushback tractor was unable to budge the aircraft onto the taxiway, and the passengers decided to help give it a push, which is not permitted, as this can damage the aircraft skin.”
Prosecutors are now checking whether the airport, the airline, the crew or the passengers broke any air safety laws.
The town of Igarka lies 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle, so chilly winter temperatures are not unusual. However, -52C is significantly colder than normal; the average low temperature is closer to -30C.
Igarka’s airport is a regional airline hub used by 100,000 passengers a year, many of them working in Russia’s Arctic oil and gas fields.
Russian President Vladimir Putin stripped to his waist and landed a 21 kg pike during a trip to Siberia.
Vladimir Putin was joined on the trip by PM Dmitry Medvedev, in a clear bid to prove Russia’s top two remain unified despite reports of in-house tension.
Dressed in camouflage and sporting a slouch hat, Vladimir Putin manned the helm aboard a small fishing boat before taking a turn casting a line.
Vladimir Putin landed a 21 kg pike during a fishing trip to Siberia
State television showed Vladimir Putin laughing in amazement as he dragged the pike onto the jetty.
He then turned to the cameras and kissed his prize on the gills.
“It was very interesting relaxation. Putin and Medvedev socialized very warmly, talked and went swimming,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told state television.
While the cameras were still rolling, Vladimir Putin also took his top of, in his latest show of peck-flexing machismo.
Vladimir Putin has never shied away from self-publicity, particularly in bolstering his hardman reputation.
He was famously pictured in 2007 while on holiday in southern Siberia’s Tuva region swimming, hunting and fishing with no shirt on to show off his masculine physique.
Vladimir Putin is also a keen jodu player and has been photographed flying helicopters, driving formula 1 racing cars and shooting guns on a regular basis.
Emergency workers in Tyumen, central Russia, had to rescued a man from a rubbish chute after he jumped into it to hide from his girlfriend.
The man plunged three floors from the eighth floor of an apartment building in Tyumen, Siberia, before getting stuck. Residents then heard the 31-year-old man’s cries for help.
Rescue workers had to use tools to cut him free. He was not seriously hurt.
He had had a row with his girlfriend, officials said, without elaborating.
Emergency workers in Tyumen, central Russia, had to rescued a man from a rubbish chute after he jumped into it to hide from his girlfriend
Soviet-era buildings in Russia frequently have a metal rubbish chute in the stairwell, with a latch opening on each floor.
Tyumen emergency service officials said the incident happened late on Wednesday, but the man is already back at work.
“According to the 31-year-old victim, he jumped into the metal chute on the eighth floor to escape his girlfriend,” a statement on the service’s website said.
The officials said there had been a similar incident in Tyumen a few years ago, again with a happy outcome.
An UTair passenger plane having 43 people on board has crashed shortly after take-off in Siberia, Russian officials say.
Thirty-two people were killed and 11 survivors have been taken to hospital, Russia’s emergencies ministry said.
The ATR-72 turboprop aircraft had just left Tyumen on a flight north-east to the oil town of Surgut when it crashed.
Officials said 39 passengers and four crew members were on board the plane. It remains unclear what caused the crash.
At least five survivors are in a critical condition, according to the state-run RIA news agency quoting hospital officials in Tyumen.
The UTair passenger plane having 43 people on board has crashed shortly after take-off in Siberia
The ITAR TASS news agency is reporting that all the crew, which was made up of two pilots and two flight attendants, died.
Flight 120 disappeared from radars at 05:35 local time (01:35 GMT), state-owned Russian news channel Rossiya 24 reported.
The carrier UTair is a domestic Russian airline. The company said on its website that the pilot had been trying to make an emergency landing when the plane came down.
A search team found it had crashed and burst into flames in a snowy field about 35 km (22 miles) from Tyumen.
The ATR-72 turbo-prop aircraft was built by a French-Italian company.
The transport ministry has launched an investigation and the deputy transport minister has flown to the site.
Some reports suggest the flight recorder has been found which should help establish what caused the crash.
Air safety has been notoriously bad in Russia – but it had seemed to be improving, correspondents say.
Last year, at least 15 Russian planes crashed, killing 120 people and questions were raised about maintenance.
Russian and Japanese scientists believe it may be possible to clone a woolly mammoth within five years after finding well-preserved bone marrow in a thigh bone recovered from permafrost soil in Siberia.
Teams from Japan’s Kinki University and Russia’s Sakha Republic’s mammoth museum will launch fully-fledged joint research next year aiming to recreate the giant mammal, Japan’s Kyodo News reported from Yakutsk, Russia.
By replacing the nuclei of egg cells from an elephant with those taken from the mammoth’s marrow cells, embryos with mammoth DNA can be produced, Kyodo News said, citing the researchers.
The researchers will then plant the embryos into elephant wombs for delivery as the two species are close relatives, the report said.
Securing nuclei with an undamaged gene is essential for the nucleus transplantation technique, it said.
Russian and Japanese scientists believe it may be possible to clone a woolly mammoth within five years after finding well-preserved bone marrow in a thigh bone recovered from permafrost soil in Siberia
For scientists involved in the research since the late 1990s, finding nuclei with undamaged mammoth genes has been a challenge.
Mammoths became extinct about 10,000 years ago.
The discovery in August in Siberia has increased the chances of a successful cloning.
Global warming has thawed ground in eastern Russia that is usually almost permanently frozen, leading to the discoveries of a number of frozen mammoths, the report said.
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