Sochi pensioner Zinaida Ryndina held Vladimir Nikolaev, a plumber of city housing administration No. 6, hostage for several hours. As ITAR-TASS was informed by the Sochi police department, the “hostage” was released only after police knocked on the door of the apartment. The woman explained her action by the need to influence the building management, which does not fulfill its obligations to the tenants to repair the plumbing.

The Lefortovo court in Moscow refused to release from custody the former chairman of the board of directors of the Krasnoyarsk aluminum plant, Anatoly Bykov, accused of preparing a murder. At a hearing on Friday, the court recognized the request of Bykov's lawyers to change the preventive measure against their client as unfounded, Interfax reports.

Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma on Friday signed a decree that effectively abolished the position of the country's Deputy Prime Minister for the fuel and energy complex. It was from this position that Yulia Tymoshenko was released on January 19, against whom two criminal cases were initiated. It is assumed that the fuel and energy complex will now be supervised by the Deputy Prime Minister for Industrial Policy. According to the same decree, Oleg Dubina became him.

The head of the Media-Most press service, Dmitry Ostalsky, called the fact that the Prosecutor General's Office published data on loans received by the holding's employees as a "violation of constitutional rights and an illegal invasion of privacy." Earlier, on Friday, Adviser to the Prosecutor General Vladimir Kolesnikov said that the investigation into the Gusinsky case received documents during searches indicating that Media-Most employees and people unrelated to him received large sums of

On Thursday, hackers managed to disrupt several Microsoft sites again, AP reports. Hackers attacked the company's websites using so-called denial-of-service attacks, when special programs generate so many requests to the attacked server that it cannot cope with them and crashes. A series of DoS attacks began, according to Microsoft itself, on Thursday morning and brought down the websites microsoft.com and MSN.com . By evening, the functioning of the sites was restored.

In the case of businessman Mikhail Mirilashvili, suspected of organizing a kidnapping, four more people were detained in St. Petersburg. As Mirilashvili's assistant Dmitry Miropolsky told Interfax, these are employees of structures owned by the businessman Andrei Demenko, Evgeniy Kazmirchuk, Viktor Petrov and one of the security guards. All of them were invited to testify, after which they were detained.

On Friday, the Russian President personally called NTV journalist Svetlana Sorokina. It was about a meeting between Putin and the channel’s employees, Gazeta.Ru reports. Vladimir Putin did this after Sorokina addressed him with a televised address in which she asked the president to meet with the NTV team. Svetlana Sorokina reminded Putin that NTV journalists are not shareholders of Media-Most and are not accused of fraud by law enforcement agencies.

At 6:10 p.m., investigators from the Prosecutor General’s Office completed the procedure for seizing documents related to the financial and economic activities of Media-Most CJSC, which began at 2:00 p.m. The twenty-eighth search took place at the main office of the holding, located in Bolshoi Palashevsky Lane, RIA Novosti reports.

The Tu-154 plane, flying from Kemerovo to Moscow, made an emergency landing at Tolmachevo airport in Novosibirsk on Friday morning. As Interfax was told by the airport's press service, the reason for the landing was an instrument signal that the left landing gear was not retracted after takeoff. Ten minutes after takeoff, the board on the plane lit up, signaling a malfunction of the left landing gear.

Fans of the Star Trek film series, based on the works of Gene Roddenberry, want to see the continuation of the adventures. A group called Horizons, which unites fans of the film, collected 3,800 signatures for their demands. Their goal is to convince Paramount to make a movie or miniseries using the cast of the television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The show was released in 1993.

In the Dutch Wijk aan Zee, where a major chess tournament is ongoing, the games of the tenth round were played on Thursday. The leaders - Russian Garry Kasparov and Spaniard Alexei Shirov - ended their games in a draw. Russian grandmaster Alexander Morozevich came close to them, winning with black against Belarusian Fedorov. In the tenth round, the chess players playing as white did not win a single victory.

Barnaul airport was closed for an hour and a half due to the appearance of an unidentified flying object on the runway. According to Interfax, the pilots of the Il-76 cargo plane owned by the Tesis company, having seen the glowing UFO, refused to take off and returned to their parking lot. Another cargo plane flying from Irkutsk, for the same reason, did not make an intermediate landing at Barnaul airport and went to an alternate airfield.

Police in the Japanese city of Aki carried out a carefully planned operation to capture a dangerous criminal who was harassing girls. To succeed, the police had to stage a masquerade. The policeman dressed up as a high school schoolgirl: he put on a dress and made himself fake breasts. In this form, he went to the area where the girls were being molested by an unknown man. The criminal fell into a trap - he even tried to stroke the “girl” on the chest, Ananova.com reports.

The head of the department of the Tula Artillery Institute, Colonel Yuri Danilov, invented a machine gun for firing under water and on land, ITAR-TASS reports. When switching to underwater shooting, you just need to change the magazine: special cartridges are used under water, while on land they use the most common, Kalashnikov cartridges. Another special feature of the machine gun is that after an underwater shot it does not produce a gas bubble that interferes with aiming.

On Thursday, a 13-year-old boy was found guilty of first-degree murder, the Boston Globe Online reported. Lionel Tate became the youngest person in Florida history to be convicted in an adult trial. Now he faces life imprisonment. The jury of 10 women and five men deliberated for more than three hours before reaching their decision. “It was terrible, just terrible,” said one of the jury members. “If somehow a reason could be found to reduce the punishment...