Giant Pet Sow Abandoned in Moscow
A piglet that was marketed as a "pocket pig" before blossoming into a massive, 120-kilogram sow was abandoned by its owners in a popular Moscow park in what will doubtless become a cautionary tale to mini-pig aficionados everywhere, Komsomolskaya Pravda reported Tuesday.
Nyusha the Vietnamese potbelly was the star of the neighborhood near Izmailovsky Park in the capital's east for five years, the tabloid said.
But she was abandoned in the park when her owners, a family from the Tula region in central Russia, moved away.
Locals tried to house Nyusha in the apartment building's stairwell, but the overfed swine found herself ill-equipped to climb the stairs and too heavy to ride the elevator, the report said.
Nyusha was eventually taken away to a pet shelter, though not before gorging on a last meal at the apartment complex of bread, apples and cucumbers provided by the building's residents. It took five porters to move her.
The previous owner was given Nyusha as a birthday present, the report said. She was supposed to be a mini-pig. (MT)
Anthrax Cargo Endangers Village
A shipment of an anthrax vaccine for cattle that is believed to have sunk in a Siberian river remains missing, stoking fears of contamination in a local village.
Consumer safety watchdog Rospotrebnadzor has switched to monitoring hospitals and livestock in the republic of Sakha, also known as Yakutia, after "maximum search efforts" have yielded no results in trying to locate a boat with the vaccine cargo that went down in the Aldan River early this month, said Izabella Samoilova, deputy chief of the agency's regional branch, Interfax reported.
"There are two possibilities now: The cargo has drifted away or somebody has found it," Samoilova was quoted as saying. "The second option is more dangerous because opening the ampules by oneself … can lead to various ailments."
The agency has also warned residents of the Tommot village, near which the boat sank, to keep their children away from the Aldan River and drink only boiled water. (MT)
ECHR to Review Navalny's Case
The European Court of Human Rights will review opposition activist Alexei Navalny's appeal to overturn his house arrest in Russia and plans to ask the Russian government to demonstrate the merits of its case, according to a document posted on Navalny's blog.
In a letter to Navalny's lawyer Olga Mikhailova, the court said it has "decided to give priority" to the opposition activist's appeal, according to a post Monday on his LiveJournal HYPERLINK "http://navalny.livejournal.com/"blog.
The Russian government will be "invited to submit written observations on the admissibility and merits of the case," said the letter, a copy of which was included in the post.
Navalny, a prominent opposition figure and anti-corruption blogger, has been under house arrest since February in connection with a fraud investigation against him.
Another of his lawyers, Vadim Kobzev, has accused investigators of putting pressure on Navalny by conducting a recent early morning search of his apartment. (MT)
Man Killed in Metro
A man was killed after falling onto the tracks of a Moscow metro station Tuesday morning in the second such incident in less than a week.The man was killed instantly after he fell onto the tracks in front of an incoming train at Shipilovskaya station on the Lyublinsko-Dmitrovskaya line, Interfax reported.
The press service of the Moscow branch of the Interior Ministry told the news agency that transportation toward downtown Moscow was interrupted for 18 minutes on the line after the incident.
Last week, another passenger was killed after falling onto the tracks of Belorusskaya metro station.
Some 150 people are killed every year from falling onto the tracks of the Moscow metro, RIA Novosti reported.
