After more than a year in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin paid his first visit to the Foreign Ministry on Friday and criticized diplomats for what he said was a lack of foresight.

The only completed prototype of the Russian-Ukrainian military-transport aircraft An-70 crashed Saturday at Omsk airport in Western Siberia.

A disturbing precedent is being set: If a federal law rubs regional leaders the wrong way, don't enforce the law, just revise it.

Let me just say that a certain amount of drinking is sine qua non for a reporter in such tense locales as Dagestan.

The same City Hall geniuses who brought us unheated apartments and 20-hour-per-day blackouts have decided to apply coal ash on the streets to prevent skidding on the ice.

Vladimir Putin agreed to meet Monday with representatives of NTV television after its on-air stars staged a public protest against the Prosecutor General's Office, NTV said.

Former Kremlin aide Pavel Borodin has been denied bail a second time by a U.S. judge following his arrest in New York last week on a Swiss warrant.

Officials in Chechnya said Saturday that a man had been detained in connection with the kidnapping almost three weeks ago of U.S. aid worker Kenny Gluck.

Former President Boris Yeltsin has kept himself busy since leaving office at the end of 1999 — so much so, he says, that he ""almost didn't notice"" the passing of 2000.

Coal Stockpile OrderThe Emergency Situations Minister has ordered officials in the freezing and power-short Primorye region to set up a reserve of coal for power plants. AIDS Cases GrowThe number of new HIV and AIDS cases in Russia tripled in 2000, with Moscow and the Moscow region having some of the highest concentrations of infection, Interfax reported. Work Site AccidentAn Italian construction worker was killed and a worker from Moldova seriously injured in an accident on a Moscow building site Saturday, news reports said. New Deputy PremierUkrainian President Leonid Kuchma has appointed the director of a state-owned steel mill as deputy prime minister, replacing one of the country’s most prominent politicians who had spearheaded energy sector reforms. Sibir EmergencyA Sibir airlines jetliner carrying 112 people on their way from Siberia to Moscow made an emergency landing Friday in the second such incident in a week at the Tolmachevo airport in Novosibirsk, a spokesman for the Emergency Situations Ministry said. An-70 Crash LandsFour people were hurt when a prototype An-70 military transport aircraft crash landed on a snow drift shortly after takeoff from Omsk in Western Siberia. Oilman KilledAlexander Volkovsky, president of the Russo-Balt Petroleum company, was shot to death in St. Petersburg, the city’s prosecutor’s office said. 4 Die in Bus FireFour people died and six were seriously injured when a fire broke out on a crowded intercity bus in Eastern Siberia, an emergency official said.