A thirteen-year-old teenager exploded a firecracker in the food court of a shopping center in Nizhny Novgorod; the pyrotechnics severely injured the child’s hand, RIA Novosti reported . The explosion was loud and caused panic among visitors, “some shouted that it was a terrorist attack,” local telegram channels “My Nizhny Novgorod”, “Nizhny Novgorod without censorship”, “N 1” and others reported , citing eyewitnesses.

The low-cost airline Jeju Air, flying from Bangkok, exploded during an emergency landing at the airport in Muan province in southwestern South Korea. There were 181 people on board, firefighters reported two survivors, CNN reports . In published videos from the scene of the crash, a passenger Boeing 737-800 slides on the fuselage without the landing gear extended and then explodes.

10-year-old Amber Daniels lived in the tiny town of Santa Claus, Georgia, in a large family: with three siblings and three adopted siblings. A month before the New Year, her mother Kim decorated the house and decorated the Christmas tree, but she was unable to celebrate her favorite holiday. Late at night on December 4, 1997, police found Amber and her two sisters on the road 50 kilometers from home, wearing only their pajamas.

With annual cocaine sales topping $12 billion, the global market is “much larger and more geographically diverse than at any time in history,” The Washington Post reported , citing the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction. South America now produces twice as much cocaine as it did ten years ago, according to a newspaper investigation.

One of the largest Russian mobile operators, MTS, named the most popular schemes among scammers to deceive people on the eve of the New Year. Representatives of the company shared with TASS the results of observations of the actions of attackers over the past few days. There were three most common fraud schemes before the New Year. The first is fake sites with New Year sales. On professionally made Internet sites, goods before the holidays are put up for sale at reduced prices.

The head of the travel company Men Travel, Andrei Kotov, accused of organizing tours for queer people, was found dead in the Moscow Vodnik pre-trial detention center. This was reported by the tabloid “Moskovsky Komsomolets”, telegram channels Mash , Baza and Shot . Later, the death was confirmed by the businessman’s lawyer, the First Department said . The investigator told the lawyer that 48-year-old Kotov committed suicide in his cell on December 29 at 4:00 am.

A sixteen-year-old eighth-grade student at a school in St. Petersburg, Eva Bagrova, was arrested and sent to a pre-trial detention center on charges of “justifying terrorism.” The investigation believes that it was Bagrova who hung photographs of Denis Kapustin and Alexey Levkin, members of the Russian Volunteer Corps, fighting for Ukraine, on a stand in a local educational center. The photo contained the inscription “Honored Hero of Russia,” Fontanka reported .

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said that the crashed Azerbaijan Airlines passenger plane was fired upon over Russia, and accused the Russian side of trying to “hush up the issue.” In an interview with state media, Aliyev said that for the first three days after the plane crash, “we heard nothing from Russia except delusional versions.” “One of the things that upset and surprised us was that Russian official structures put forward versions of the explosion of some gas cylinder.

Former football player Mikheil Kavelashvili, appointed by a special electoral college, was inaugurated as president of Georgia, Interfax reported . The ceremony was accompanied by a protest meeting, the participants of which raised their hands with red cards - such cards are shown by the referees when removing football players from the field, a Paper Kartuli correspondent reported .