As The World Turns
Polish president dies in plane crash
Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his wife died Saturday along with 130 others when their plane crashed while coming in for a landing in western Russia, officials said.BBC:
A plane carrying Polish President Lech Kaczynski has crashed near a Russian airport, officials say.
Russian media reported that 87 people were killed in the crash near Smolensk, and a regional governor was quoted as saying there were no survivors.
Polish officials said Mr Kaczynski was on board along with his wife Maria and several senior government figures.
They were in Russia to mark the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre, when the Soviets killed thousands of Poles.
Kyrgyzstan state funds completely plundered ... almost
Typical.
The head of Kyrgyzstan's new interim government yesterday revealed that her country was broke and said that the former president who was overthrown in a street-led revolution this week had left only $80m in the budget.
In an interview with the Guardian, Roza Otunbayeva appealed for urgent international aid so that the impoverished Central Asian nation could meet its immediate bills. "Tomorrow we should pay pensions. This is a really serious problem," she said.
Otunbayeva said that the ousted president Kurmanbek Bakiyev had plundered the economy, installing his sons in key government positions and flogging off strategic state industries for a fraction of their true value.
She said the country's leading telecoms firm had been sold to an offshore company in the Canary Islands, belonging to a friend of the president's son Maxim. "We had an absolutely scandalous situation where Kyrgyzstan had become a family-run regime," she said.
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