A leak of poisonous isoprene gas occurred on Thursday night at the Novokuybyshevsk petrochemical plant, located in the Samara region. As a result, 45 workers were poisoned by gas fumes, 27 of them were hospitalized. One of the company's employees died in intensive care. Doctors assess the condition of the remaining victims as stable.

At international competitions in Glasgow (Scotland), our pole vaulter 22-year-old Svetlana Feofanova set a new world indoor record. The Russian woman cleared the bar at a height of 4 m 76 cm, which is one centimeter higher than her previous achievement, which was set on March 2, 2002 in Vienna. Let us remind you that last season Feofanova broke the “winter” record six times, each time adding a centimeter.

How you can earn money by filling out an income tax return This is the second year that Russians have been able to get back part of the money they paid to the state as taxes. True, as the Vremya Novostei correspondent was told in the capital's department of the Ministry of Taxes and Taxes, the declaration campaign is so far progressing sluggishly. Although it would seem that it should be the other way around.

Russian veterinarians are again dissatisfied with the quality of “Bush legs” Today, the results of Russian-American negotiations on the problems that arose after Russian veterinarians inspected American chicken suppliers, as well as on developing technologies for the next inspections, should become known. So far, representatives of the Ministry of Agriculture have refused to make any comments, noting only that only “technical issues” are being discussed at the negotiations.

In St. Petersburg, holidays, new scandals and redistribution of property are expected from 2003 Without exaggeration, we can say that the coming year will be an era of great upheaval for St. Petersburg. Over the next 12 months, the city on the Neva will have to experience an anniversary, a gathering of presidents and VIPs from all over the world, a voluntary-forced rotation of political leaders and large-scale revelations initiated by law enforcement agencies.

Alexander Dybal negotiates with members of the NTV board The situation at the NTV television company remains deadlocked. Yesterday, the head of the Gazprom-Media holding, Alexander Dybal, met with members of the NTV board to discuss the situation around the company. Alexander Dybal refused to talk about the results of the negotiations and how they ended, but according to the Vremya Novostey newspaper, the parties did not reach an agreement.

Russian premiere of "Frida" The film biography of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo confirms the well-known idea: all artists of the New Age are a little conceptualists - even those who did not even know the word. Their fame and the value of their work - both symbolic and expressed in monetary terms - are determined not only (and sometimes not so much) by talent and skill, but also by the circumstances of the context - appearance, personality, biography, way of life and thought.

The prosecutor's office of the Kamchatka region opened a criminal case regarding the misuse of funds by the administration of the city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. First of all, investigators are interested in how correctly officials managed the considerable sums that came into the city treasury from the regional budget and were intended to pay off debts to energy workers.

The Russian army entered the fight against frost The Russian army now has a real, as opposed to a potential and probable, enemy. This is "General Frost". The capabilities of the new enemy turned out to be so great that the strategy to combat it was jointly developed by the Supreme Commander-in-Chief and the Minister of Defense.

End of strike worries OPEC Yesterday, exactly two months after it began, the general strike in Venezuela ended. True, oil workers are still on strike. But shopkeepers, hairdressers, small entrepreneurs and bankers have already faltered - they were the ones who bore the main losses from the paralyzed business. This gives President Hugo Chavez reason to celebrate his victory. The strikers failed to achieve their main demand: the resignation of Chavez.

Russian ship could not withstand the Black Sea storm The Russian river-sea class cargo ship Strelets sank yesterday morning in the Bosporus Strait in the Black Sea. There were 14 crew members on board the ship, which was traveling from the Turkish port of Yarinjar to Taganrog. According to the Russian Ministry of Transport, seven sailors were killed, two were rescued, the fate of five is unknown. Despite the strong storm, their search continued throughout the night.

The fourth game of the leader of the world chess rating, Russian Garry Kasparov, with the computer program “Deep Junior” ended in a draw. The computer played White, and by the middle of the game the brainchild of Israeli programmers had seized the initiative. Kasparov had to show a lot of ingenuity in defense and still managed to achieve equality on the board. The computer spent the last few moves unsuccessfully trying to realize the extra pawn, and on the 61st move its creators proposed a draw.

The Chechen prosecutor's office yesterday opened a criminal case into the abduction of two of its high-ranking employees. At the end of last year, Nadezhda Pogosova, deputy prosecutor of the Shali interdistrict prosecutor’s office, and Alexey Klimov, deputy head of the Shatoi interdistrict prosecutor’s office, mysteriously disappeared on the territory of the republic. On the afternoon of December 27, they left Grozny in an Opel official car and were heading to Mozdok airport (North Ossetia).

“October” (No. 1) is full of high-quality prose: the compact and extravagant (starting from the title, in which you don’t look for typos) novel by Yuri Buida “that animal”, the tightly written “Sea Stories” by Afanasy Mamedov and Isaac Milkin (again proving that serious prose can be written in collaboration), “Short Stories” by Grigory Petrov , as usual, somewhat “foolish”, but cute.

Mikhail Gorbachev was offered the voice of “The Wolf and Petya” Mikhail Gorbachev is about to remind the Western public of his existence. True, this time his main audience will be children. Next week, the first and only president of the USSR is to take part in a major charity project of the Russian National Orchestra. He was invited to voice the new musical fairy tale “The Wolf and Peter”. This sequel to Prokofiev's famous "Peter and the Wolf" was written by the Frenchman Jean-Pascal Beinthus.