The Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada again failed to elect a speaker yesterday. Meanwhile, in the morning there was a smell of sensation in parliament: it was announced that three opposition factions - Viktor Yushchenko's Our Ukraine bloc, Yulia Tymoshenko's bloc and Alexander Moroz's socialists - had agreed with the Communist Party on a joint vote. The Quartet offered two “packages”.

Basketball. Russian Championship. Men . 35th round . "Ural Great" - "Lokomotiv" - 92:87. Shakhtar - Samara - 74:63. “Khimki” – “Avtodor” – 103:101 (OT). "Spartak" - CSKA - 75:82. The leaders are : Ural Great - 67 points (35 games), UNICS (Kazan) - 64 (35), CSKA - 61 (36), Lokomotiv - 60 (35). In principle, the penultimate round of the championship did not decide anything significant. It is still unclear how the 6th-7th places will be distributed.

Gennady Seleznev and his associates are asked to leave Tomorrow there may be three fewer communists. Duma Speaker Gennady Seleznev and two chairmen of Duma committees - Svetlana Goryacheva and Nikolai Gubenko - are at risk of leaving the ranks of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. The Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation adopted a recommendatory decision yesterday: to expel all three for violating party discipline.

The environmental prosecutor's office of the Novgorod region opened a criminal case into illegal hunting by local officials in a hunting reserve. The raid, organized by employees of the prosecutor's office and special forces of the local department for combating organized crime in the reserve on the shore of Lake Ilmen, was carried out on April 26. Then, in the area of ​​the village of Sergovo, investigators discovered the Dolphin boat and several pre-prepared hunting caches.

Vice-Governor Anatoly Kagan, who heads the St. Petersburg administration's health care committee, has been charged with a second charge. And again in negligence, under the same article. 293 of the Criminal Code, under which he was already charged in March 2002. The first criminal case concerned the purchase by the Health Committee of insulin in the amount of 9.3 million rubles at a price 2.6 times higher than the market price.

Evgeny Kiselev returns to the air with a trail of legal proceedings Sports fans have a reason to be sad - from June 1, sports programs on the sixth meter channel will be replaced by socio-political and artistic programs. Last night, Media Society, which won the competition for the right to broadcast on the “sixth button” on March 27, received the appropriate license from the Ministry of Press.

At the beginning of the last century, an invention was made that, at first glance, was far from everyday needs. Physicists have learned to work at very low temperatures, close to absolute zero. The avalanche of discoveries that followed led to a phenomenon that today we call the scientific and technological revolution of the 20th century. The revolution in science has changed the face of our civilization no less, if not more, than the social revolutions.

The resignation of CSKA head Mikhail Mamiashvili came as a complete surprise to him and his colleagues at the army club. “I don't believe your words. This is a surprise for me,” Valery Gushchin, one of the leaders of the CSKA hockey club, commented on the situation in just a few words. Meanwhile, according to the directive of the Ministry of Defense, from now on the position of head of CSKA will be occupied by civilians. This became the formal reason for the resignation of Colonel Mamiashvili.

Football players are told to follow the example of hockey players Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin met with the country's national hockey and football teams at the Bor sanatorium. The president congratulated the hockey players on their successful performance at the World Championships in Sweden, and wished the football players success at the upcoming world championship.

One of the most famous players of the Irish national team, Roy Keane, has been expelled from the team. The captain of the Irish team behaved defiantly. At first he himself wanted to leave the team, but allowed himself to be persuaded to stay. Keane then got into a fight with one of the team's coaches and the goalkeeper, but apologized and was forgiven again. However, the head coach of the Irish national team could not tolerate direct criticism from the obstinate football player.

The director of a sparkling wine factory, Mikhail Gordey, was detained in Minsk on suspicion of taking a bribe. According to the press secretary of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Dmitry Parton, the police have irrefutable evidence that Gordey received a bribe - about 80 thousand dollars from businessmen from Moldova for the right to supply wine materials to the enterprise.

A border guard soldier who left his service without permission at one of the outposts of the Vyborg border detachment in the Leningrad region was detained yesterday in Finland by local police. 21-year-old Bagautdin Isaev, called up from Dagestan in the fall of 2001, was listed as a paramedic. On Wednesday, as part of an engineering team, he was sent to repair the signaling complex at one of the sections of the Russian-Finnish border.

Terrorist attacks continue in Israel. This time the bombers concentrated on Tel Aviv and its suburbs. Yesterday, a kamikaze from Arafat’s organization “Martyrs of the Al-Aqsa Mosque” staged a terrorist attack in the town of Rishon Lezion near Tel Aviv, where immigrants from the former USSR live. The terrorist disguised himself as a blond man with an extravagant punk hairstyle. Two passers-by were killed and about 50 people were injured.

St. Petersburg residents are stocking up on chicken and posters for the arrival of the American president According to rumors, there has been a shortage of chicken legs in the stores of the “cradle of the revolution” on the eve of George Bush’s arrival - St. Petersburg communists and leftists are stocking up on them to visually express their attitude towards the American president during pickets and protests planned for the coming weekend.

The President asked the oligarchs to think about the budget On the eve of a meeting with American President George Bush, Vladimir Putin spoke with the “trade union of oligarchs.” This is already the fifth meeting of the President with the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP). Recently, it has often been said that since the president began meeting with members of the RUIE one by one, collective visits to the Kremlin have lost all meaning.