South Korea's leader warns of North Korea collapse

February 16, 2016

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — South Korea's president warned Tuesday that rival North Korea faces collapse if it doesn't abandon its nuclear bomb program, an unusually strong broadside that will likely infuriate Pyongyang.

President Park Geun-hye, in a nationally televised parliamentary address defending her decision to shut down a jointly run factory park in North Korea, said South Korea will take unspecified "stronger and more effective" measures to make North Korea realize its nuclear ambitions will result only in speeding up of its "regime collapse."

Park shut the facility in response to the North's recent long-range rocket test, which Seoul and Washington see as a test of banned ballistic missile technology. North Korea last month also conducted a fourth nuclear test. Both developments put the country further along it its quest for a nuclear armed missile that could reach the U.S. mainland.

Without elaborating, Park said the North has diverted much of the Seoul payments to North Korean workers at the factory park to the Pyongyang leadership, which is in charge of nuclear and missile development. She also said the South has sent more than $3 billion in government and civilian aid to the North since mid-1990s.

Much of the aid was made when South Korea was governed by back-to-back liberal governments seeking rapprochement with North Korea from 1998 to 2003, according to her office. Park said South Korea must not provide few-strings-attached large-scale aid to North Korea "like in the past."

She called for support for her government amid a divide in South Korea about its tough response to North Korea. "Aiming the point of a sword back at us and splitting us up are things that must not take place," she said.

South Korea's main liberal opposition party has criticized the government's decision to suspend operations at Kaesong, saying the measure will hurt only South Korean businessmen and deepen tensions with North Korea.

Following Pyongyang's rocket launch, Seoul announced it will begin talks with Washington on deploying a sophisticated U.S. missile defense system in South Korea and that the allies' upcoming springtime military drills will be the biggest ever. The United States plans to send four F-22 stealth fighter jets to South Korea on Wednesday in a show of force against North Korea, according to Seoul media reports.

The deployment of the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, is drawing oppositions not only from North Korea but also China and Russia. Critics say the system could help U.S. radar spot missiles in other countries.

After meeting with South Korean officials in Seoul, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Yesui said he relayed Beijing's opposition. "China showed its stance against (the deployment)," he said. It is unusual for a top South Korean official to publicly touch upon such a government collapse in North Korea because of worries about how sensitive North Korea is to talk of its authoritarian government losing power. Pyongyang has long accused Washington and Seoul of agitating for its collapse.

Park's speech contained harsh language, describing North Korea as "merciless" and under an "extreme reign of terror" following recent purges of top officials that outside analysts say were aimed at bolstering leader Kim Jong Un's grip on power.

Park's comments are certain to anger North Korea as they were made as the country marks the birthday of late dictator Kim Jong Il, the father of Kim Jong Un. Seoul officials said North Korea was able to divert the Kaesong payments because the workers there were not paid directly. Instead, U.S. dollars were paid to the North Korean government, which siphoned off most of the money and paid only what it wanted to the employees in North Korean currency and store vouchers, according to a statement from Seoul's' Unification Ministry on Sunday.

The ministry did not detail how it arrived at that conclusion. North Korea has previously dismissed such views. In response to Seoul's Kaesong shutdown decision, Pyongyang last week expelled all the South Korean workers from the factory park, put its military in charge of the area, and cut off key communication hotlines between the Koreas.

Associated Press writer Kim Tong-hyung contributed to this report.

Tatars step up resistance to Russian rule over Crimea

February 15, 2016

UROZHAYNE, Crimea (AP) — Elnara Asanova lives alone with her four small children because her husband, an ethnic Tatar, is in jail. Last April, when she was seven months pregnant, police grabbed him from the streets of their village because he had taken part in a Tatar protest against Russian annexation of Crimea.

She's not allowed to visit him, so she travels to every court hearing. Once she took 7-month-old Mustafa, so her husband could glimpse the child as he was led from the police van to the courtroom. The court has refused to release him on bail, describing him as a flight risk.

"They say he will run away. But where to?" said Elnara, a meek young woman. She points to her children. "We live in the country. You can't survive here without a husband." Two years after Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin touts the move as a historic achievement, looking on with a satisfied smile from countless billboards across the peninsula. However, overwhelming opposition from the Muslim Tatar ethnic minority puts a crack in this picture of unanimous support, as evidenced in interviews with more than two dozen Tatars across Crimea. And the resistance appears to be growing.

Many described the intimidation of community leaders, the closure of Tatar language classes and a general atmosphere of mistrust of Tatar residents. The Associated Press conducted some interviews at other people's homes because of worries about police surveillance.

The majority of the people in Crimea are ethnic Russian and support Russia's annexation. The nearly 300,000 Crimean Tatars, who make up less than 15 percent of the population, are Muslims, although largely secular.

Community leaders say repression has left young people fuming, risking their radicalization along the lines of the restive North Caucasus, a patchwork of predominantly Muslim republics in southern Russia.

Tatar activists are already fighting back. Before Russia annexed Crimea, Lenur Islyamov was a businessman with family and assets in Moscow. Last fall, he traded his business suits for military-style clothing to lead a resistance movement that imposed a blockade on the peninsula in retaliation for Russia's persecution of the Tatars.

In September, the activists began stopping goods from crossing into Crimea. Three months later, the Ukrainian government stepped in and banned all trade. "Everyone, including Ukraine, left us with no other choice," said Islyamov, whose assets in Moscow and Crimea have been seized. "Most of us don't want to go to war — we want to make sandwiches, take our children to school, go shopping — but we've been forced to do this."

Deliberate power outages have also become widespread. In November, unknown attackers blew up electricity pylons in Ukraine and tied Crimean Tatar flags to them, leaving 2 million people without heating. No one claimed responsibility for the explosions, but Tatar activists were suspected.

Tatars in Crimea cheered the power cuts, saying the blackout returned the world's attention to the situation in Crimea. Muzafar Fukala, community leader of the village of Voinka, said losing light was "nothing" compared to the hardships Tatars had survived in the past.

"I'm prepared to live in a complete blackout until this scum leaves," he said, referring to supporters of the annexation. To avoid police harassment, Fukala spoke to the AP in the home of friends in a neighboring village.

Both the border blockade and the power outages have put a big hole in the Kremlin budget at a time when plummeting oil prices have left Moscow with little to spare on shoring up its newest acquisition. Russia had to fly in supplies and thousands of generators, and speed up the construction of underwater power lines.

Islyamov is also working to set up a "battalion" of 500 Tatar activists to be stationed just a few miles from the border. Tatar activists in military fatigues, some of them carrying automatic weapons, now stand in the winter cold by the roadside of their tent camp. They used to search cars crossing into Crimea and back until blockade leaders announced that Ukrainian border guards and customs officials would now do so instead.

In November, Chechen intelligence officers called on Islyamov's 17-year-old son in Moscow, where he studied, and threatened him unless he denounced his father publicly. Several hours later, Islyamov arranged for his son to leave Russia.

Officials in Crimea in charge of ethnic minorities didn't respond to the AP's requests seeking interviews and comment. Officials in the Crimean government have accused Tatar leaders who opposed the annexation of betraying the interests of the Tatars and being agents of Ukraine. Under Russian law, people can be punished for calling for the return of Crimea to Ukraine.

The Crimean Tatars have a long history of repression. In May 1944, all 200,000 Tatars, who then made up a third of Crimea's population, were put on trains and shipped to Central Asia in the space of three days. Thousands died during the grueling journey or starved to death in the barren steppes upon arrival.

Unlike other peoples deported during World War II by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, the Tatars were not allowed to return to their native land until the 1980s. A visit to a Tatar home today opens a window to a parallel world far from the throngs of flag-waving Russians who gave Putin a Hollywood star reception on the streets of the Black Sea port of Sevastopol on his visit last summer. Tatars here all watch ATR, a Crimean Tatar channel owned by Islyamov, which was banished from Crimea and now broadcasts from exile in mainland Ukraine. They talk of "better times" and a future "victory," alluding to the eventual return of Crimea to Ukraine.

In almost equal measure, Crimean Tatars feel betrayed by Kiev, after Ukrainian troops stationed on the peninsula surrendered to Russian forces in February 2014 without putting up any resistance. Later on, most of these troops took Russian citizenship and joined the Russian armed forces.

Left on their own, the Tatars at first made a foray into the new Crimean government. Islyamov, who had Russian citizenship, was dispatched in April 2014 by the Mejlis, the Tatars' self-governing body, to become a deputy prime minister. Less than two months later, he resigned. He said Russian leaders were not interested in Tatar problems and every conversation turned into a dispute about Russian supremacy.

"We saw that Ukraine had ditched us, that it was inevitable that Russia was going to swallow Crimea and the global community was doing nothing," he said. When pro-Russian politicians tried to push through a motion in the local legislature for a vote about Crimea's future, the only visible force opposing them was the Crimean Tatar minority. Six people, including Elnara Asanova's husband, Ali Asanov, are now on trial in the capital, Simferopol, on charges of rioting dating back to fist fights between rival rallies of the pro-Russian party and Crimean Tatars on Feb. 26, 2014. Not a single pro-Russian protester has faced charges.

Tatar businesses with purported ties to the blockade leaders have faced closures or legal onslaught, according to local journalist Zair Akadyrov. "The blockade is drawing more attention from the law enforcement agencies to Crimean activists because everyone gets unwittingly associated with that movement" on the border," he said.

Bekir Umerov, who owns a two-story home improvement store on the outskirts of Simferopol, is one of the few Tatar businessmen in Crimea willing to speak publicly. His troubles began after the authorities found out he was a brother of Ilmi Umerov, a prominent Tatar community leader from Bakhchisarai. For a year and a half, Bekir Umerov's store has been saddled with audits and checks from fire inspectors, the consumer rights agency and the economic crimes department.

"They've told me several times they are not interested in my documents, but they have been tasked to run the store into the ground because of the political views of my brother and my own," Umerov said. He feels his only option is to rent out the store before officials find cause to close it down.

The reaction of the Crimean authorities to any display of allegiance to Ukraine sometimes borders on farce. A shop assistant at Umerov's store says inspectors once asked them about a mailbox that happened to be in the yellow and blue colors of the Ukrainian flag.

More and more Tatars in Crimea and outside now say they want more than a return to Ukraine's fold, after its passive stance toward Russian annexation. What they want is Tatar autonomy within Crimea. However, unlike other nations of the former Russian Empire with a troubled past, Crimean Tatars do not have a history of armed resistance. Nariman Dzhelyal, who leads the Crimean Tatar self-governing body since its leader has been barred from entering Crimea, argues that any suggestion of a guerrilla resistance is "complete nonsense."

"The landscape does not help," he said, suggesting that Crimea's windswept steppes offered no place for potential guerrillas to hide. "And there are no weapons."

Israel's Olmert becomes first Israeli PM to go to prison

February 15, 2016

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel's former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert started serving a 19-month prison sentence for bribery and obstruction of justice on Monday, becoming the first Israeli premier to be imprisoned and capping a years-long legal saga that forced him to resign in 2006 amid the last serious round of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

Olmert walked into the Maasiyahu prison in central Israel hours after he released a video making a last-minute plea to Israelis meant to salvage his legacy. In the video, he appealed on the nation to remember his peace-making efforts as leader and denied any wrongdoing in the bribery conviction against him.

The three and a half minute video, released by his office and filmed at his home a day earlier, shows a weary-looking Olmert. He says it is a "painful and strange" time for him and his family and that he is paying a "heavy" price, but also adding that he has accepted the sentence because "no man is above the law."

"At this hour it is important for me to say again ... I reject outright all the corruption allegations against me," Olmert said in the footage. He said that in hindsight, the Israeli public might view the charges against him and the seven-year legal ordeal that enveloped him in a "balanced and critical way."

"I hope that then many will recognize that during my term as prime minister, honest and promising attempts were made to create an opening for hope and a better future of peace, happiness and well-being," he said.

Olmert, 70, was convicted in March 2014 in a wide-ranging case that accused him of accepting bribes to promote a controversial real-estate project in Jerusalem. The charges pertained to a period when he was mayor of Jerusalem and trade minister, years before he became prime minister in 2006, a point he reiterated in his video statement Monday.

He was initially sentenced to six years in the case, but Israel's Supreme Court later upheld a lesser charge, reducing the sentence to 18 months. That was extended by a month earlier this year for pressuring a confidant not to testify in multiple legal cases against him.

Olmert is also awaiting a ruling in an appeal in a separate case, in which he was sentenced to eight months in prison for unlawfully accepting money from a U.S. supporter. Israel has sent other senior officials to prison, including Moshe Katsav, who held the mostly ceremonial post of the country's president and who is now serving a seven-year prison term for rape.

But having the once popular Olmert behind bars was met with mixed emotions by many Israelis, who viewed the milestone as a proud moment for Israel's robust justice system but also a sorrowful one. "When you look at a person like this, who is the salt of the earth, who is so talented, who is so charming, who is so capable, the fact that he is going to prison is something sad," Dan Margalit, a columnist with the daily Israel Hayom and a former Olmert confidant, told Israeli Army Radio.

Olmert was forced to resign in early 2009 amid the corruption allegations, which undermined the last serious round of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and cleared the way for hard-liner Benjamin Netanyahu's rise to power.

Olmert led his government to the Annapolis peace conference in November 2007 — launching more than a year of ambitious, but ultimately unsuccessful U.S.-brokered peace talks with the Palestinians. Olmert has said he made unprecedented concessions to the Palestinians during those talks — including a near-total withdrawal from the West Bank and an offer to place Jerusalem's Old City under international control — and was close to reaching an agreement at the time of his resignation.

Despite his lengthy career as a public servant, former prison officials said Olmert would be treated like any other inmate, despite being held in a special wing for security reasons. Haim Glick, a former Israeli prison service official, told Israeli Channel 2 TV that Olmert would need to participate in roll call, be in his cell by 10 p.m. and have limited phone use.

"He will receive good treatment like the rest of the prisoners but not any better than them," he said.

Planet formation around binary star

Charlottesville VA (SPX)
Feb 16, 2016

Using ALMA, astronomers have taken a new, detailed look at the very early stages of planet formation around a binary star. Embedded in the outer reaches of a double star's protoplanetary disk, the researchers discovered a striking crescent-shape region of dust that is conspicuously devoid of gas. This result, presented at the AAAS meeting in Washington, D.C., provides fresh insights into the planet-forming potential of a binary system.

Astronomers struggle to understand how planets form in binary star systems. Early models suggested that the gravitational tug-of-war between two stellar bodies would send young planets into eccentric orbits, possibly ejecting them completely from their home system or sending them crashing into their stars. Observational evidence, however, reveals that planets do indeed form and maintain surprisingly stable orbits around double stars.

To better understand how such systems form and evolve, astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) took a new, detailed look at the planet-forming disk around HD 142527, a binary star about 450 light-years from Earth in a cluster of young stars known as the Scorpius-Centaurus Association.

The HD 142527 system consists of a main star a little more than twice the mass of our Sun and a smaller companion star only about a third the mass of our Sun. They are separated by approximately one billion miles: a little more than the distance from the Sun to Saturn. Previous ALMA studies of this system revealed surprising details about the structure of the system's inner and outer disks.

"This binary system has long been known to harbor a planet-forming corona of dust and gas," said Andrea Isella, an astronomer at Rice University in Houston, Texas. "The new ALMA images reveal previously unseen details about the physical processes that regulate the formation of planets around this and perhaps many other binary systems."

Planets form out of the expansive disks of dust and gas that surround young stars. Small dust grains and pockets of gas eventually come together under gravity, forming larger and larger agglomerations and eventually asteroids and planets. The fine points of this process are not well understood, however. By studying a wide range of protoplanetary disks with ALMA, astronomers hope to better understand the conditions that set the stage for planet formation across the Universe.

ALMA's new, high-resolution images of HD 142527 show a broad elliptical ring around the double star. The disk begins incredibly far from the central star - about 50 times the Sun-Earth distance. Most of it consists of gases, including two forms of carbon monoxide (13CO and C180), but there is a noticeable dearth of gases within a huge arc of dust that extends nearly a third of the way around the star system.

This crescent-shaped dust cloud may be the result of gravitational forces unique to binary stars and may also be the key to the formation of planets, Isella speculates. Its lack of free-floating gases is likely the result of them freezing out and forming a thin layer of ice on the dust grains.

"The temperature is so low that the gas turns into ice and sticks to the grains," Isella said. "This process is thought to increase the capacity for dust grains to stick together, making it a strong catalyst for the formation of planetesimals, and, down the line, of planets."

"We've been studying protoplanetary disks for at least 20 years," Isella said. "There are between a few hundred and a few thousands we can look at again with ALMA to find new and surprising details. That's the beauty of ALMA. Every time you get new data, it's like opening a present. You don't know what's inside."

HD 142527 will be the subject of an upcoming paper led by Rice postdoctoral fellow Yann Boehler, who is working in Isella's group.

Source: Space Daily.
Link: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Planet_formation_around_binary_star_999.html.

Volcanoes Light Up Atmospheres of Small Exoplanets

Moffett Field CA (SPX)
Feb 16, 2016

Geologic activity on a planet is believed to be very important for life, but it can be hard to spot its signs from far away - especially on smaller, rocky planets akin to Earth.

What if there was a large volcanic eruption on such an Earth-like planet - could we spot that? A group of graduate students at the University of Washington's astrobiology program considered this question after it arose during a class discussion about the search for life outside our solar system.

"All life needs energy," said doctoral student Joshua Krissansen-Totton. "At first we thought about plate tectonics. It's not necessary for life, but looking into it, we thought it might be a good indicator of places that are habitable. But it's very hard to spot that, so we looked more closely at volcanism."

The resulting article, "Transient Sulfate Aerosols as a Signature of Exoplanet Volcanism," was published in the journal Astrobiology in June. The work was funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute's Virtual Planetary Laboratory.

Subtracting light

A common way of spotting Earth-sized planets is through the transit method. A telescope, such as NASA's Kepler space telescope, monitors a star for a long time looking for a planet to pass in front of it. Spotting small planets is easiest when they orbit dwarf stars because of the smaller ratio between the star's radius and the planet's radius. A larger star has enough light to easily obscure the tiny transit. However, spotting these small planets in this way says nothing necessarily about their atmospheres.

The scenario is arguably easier with very large planets. A spectrometer picks up the spectrum of light coming from the direction of a star and astronomers can look for a change in light signature when a planet passes in front to deduce the chemical composition of the planet's atmosphere. The first such measurements were done in 2002 using gas giant HD 209458 (Charbonneau et al., 2002).

Our current technology doesn't allow us to do this with an Earth-sized planet at exoplanet distances, but Krissansen-Totton and his collaborators came up with another solution. When a volcano erupts, it tends to puff out the atmosphere as sulfur leaves the volcano and creates sulfate aerosols in the upper atmosphere through interactions with other molecules. Perhaps it's possible to see an atmosphere expanding and then contracting again on a small planet, even from a fairly large distance.

Pinatubo and Sarychev

In this paper, the researchers considered two scenarios. The first was looking at a volcanic eruption about the size of the 1991 Pinatubo eruption. This particular eruption was the second-largest in the 20th Century, following a 1912 eruption in Alaska. They also considered a more common volcanic scenario, such as the relatively small 2009 Sarychev eruption in Russia that caused some disruptions to flights due to an ash cloud.

The researchers tried simulating the capabilities of two forthcoming observatories: NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (to launch in 2018) and the ground-based European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) in Chile, scheduled to light up in 2024.

When the researchers created a model using these scenarios, they discovered that a Sarychev eruption would be very hard to spot on an Earth-sized planet orbiting a Sun-like star about 10 parsecs (32 light-years) away. The larger Pinatubo eruption, however, did create a rapid increase and gradual decrease in the planet's radius that could more easily be spotted with the telescopes.

Recent planetary find

This is all the more exciting, Krissansen-Totton added, with the recent discovery of GJ 1132b. This planet is slightly larger than Earth and hovers so close as to orbit its parent star in a mere 38 hours, making it a real scorcher in terms of temperature. The planet also happens to be relatively near to Earth - just 12 parsecs (39 light-years) away. Krissansen-Totton said there would be limitations in understanding such a planet's atmospheric composition.

"There's a good chance it'll have a thick Venus-like atmosphere," he said. "On Venus, nothing is visible below 90 kilometers because of its cloud layers; explosive eruptions on a Venus-like exoplanet would be obscured by cloud."

Volcanoes are a fairly common feature in the Solar System. In icy form, we have seen eruptions on Saturn's moon Enceladus. There also is evidence of volcanic eruptions (whether in the past or present) in locations such as Venus and even Pluto, the latter of which was seen close-up for the first time this year by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft.

"Many people think hydrothermal settings are crucial in the origin of life," Krissansen-Totton said. "So we're more interested in seeing planets with volcanic activity."

Source: Space Daily.
Link: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Volcanoes_Light_Up_Atmospheres_of_Small_Exoplanets_999.html.

Proto-planet has 2 masters

Houston TX (SPX)
Feb 16, 2016

A Rice University researcher will discuss images that may show the formation of a planet - or a planetary system - around a distant binary star at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., today. Andrea Isella, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, will present images of the binary system known as HD 142527, captured by the new Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope in Chile.

Isella said the binary system has long been known to harbor a planet-forming corona of dust and gas, but ALMA images are providing more detail than ever and allowing for better analysis of the system's contents and mechanics. Isella studies the formation of planetary systems. In his talk, he will discuss the importance of mapping them and why exoplanetary systems - those outside the solar system - "exhibit such an impressive variety of properties."

The binary star is approximately 450 light years away in the Scorpius-Centaurus association, a cluster of young stars containing objects similar to HL Tau, the subject of the first high-resolution images taken as part of ALMA's long-baseline campaign in 2014. (Long-baseline interferometry allows multiple antennas to act as one. The size of the telescope is determined by the space between the antennas. During the long-baseline campaign, ALMA antennas achieved a maximum separation of 10 miles.) Images of HL Tau revealed ring structures in the dust and gas cloud around the star, an indication that planet formation is under way.

Images of HD 142527 show a broad ring around the double star. Most of it consists of gases, including isotopologues of carbon monoxide, but a huge arc around nearly a third of the star system consists of dust and ice, Isella said. "Where the red in the image is brightest, the density of the dust peaks," he said. "And where we find a dense clump of dust, the carbon monoxide molecules disappear."

Isella and his colleagues suspect gas molecules freeze in the dust. "The temperature is so low that the gas turns into ice and sticks to the grains," he said. "This is important for planet formation. The solid dust needs to stick together to form a bigger body that will eventually attract more rock and gas gravitationally.

"If you try to smash rocks together, they don't stick together very well," he said. "If you smash snowballs together, they do. So when you form an ice mantle around the grains, you increase their capability to stick together."

He said the crescent-shaped dust cloud may be the result of gravitational forces unique to binary stars.

Until recent years, Isella said, astronomers thought it unlikely that planets could form and survive around binary systems. "The theory was that they could hardly find stable orbits," he said. "Most of the planets would either be scattered or fall into the stars. Then people started to discover planets around binary stars, so clearly they had to tweak the theory. The observation of systems like HD 142527 yields a fantastic opportunity to study the physical processes that regulate the formation of planets around binary systems."

HD 142527 will be the subject of an upcoming paper led by Rice postdoctoral fellow Yann Boehler, who is working in Isella's group.

Isella expects many revelations from the flood of high-resolution data provided by ALMA and other new radio telescopes, which capture images of stellar objects obscured by gas and dust that cannot be seen by optical means.

Isella and his colleagues also plan to discuss the early HL Tau images at the AAAS gathering. "We've been looking at these objects for at least 20 years," he said. "There are between a few hundred and a few thousand they can look at again with ALMA. They are starting with the brightest ones, because they are the easiest to observe.

"HL Tau was the brightest object of this type in the sky, and it has been well-observed, so they used it to make sure the instrument was working OK. But the rings they found in the system were completely unexpected.

"That's the beauty of the Atacama array," he said. "Every time you get new data, it's like opening a Christmas present. You don't know what's inside."

Isella will speak as part of the "Planet Formation Seen With Radio Eyes" session at AAAS at 8 a.m. EST Feb. 13.

Source: Space Daily.
Link: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Proto_planet_has_2_masters_999.html.

Natural gas explosion in Russian apartment building kills 4

February 16, 2016

MOSCOW (AP) — Russia's emergency services say an explosion of natural gas in a five-story apartment building has killed four people, including a child.

The emergency services say the explosion before dawn on Tuesday in Yaroslavl, a city 250 kilometers (160 miles) northeast of Moscow, destroyed five apartments and damaged 20 others in the building. The number of people injured is unclear.

All residents of the building have been evacuated, a total of about 130 people. The Interfax news agency quoted emergency services official Artyom Belousov as saying that the location of six people is still unknown.

Most apartment buildings in Russia are supplied with natural gas for cooking. The cause of Tuesday's explosion is under investigation.