Word: baku
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...Baku, capital of the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, a malfunctioning electrical cable ignited gases trapped in a subway tunnel, sparking an explosion that killed 288 people and injured 200 more; most of the victims died from carbon-monoxide poisoning. Officials blamed the accident on outdated Soviet equipment...
Moscow dispatched technical experts to Baku after some 300 Azerbaijanis perished there on Saturday in the world's worst subway disaster when a malfunctioning electrical system sparked a fire. TIME's Yuri Zarakhovich reports that it was not the fire itself, but noxious fumes that killed most of the victims. The fumes were emitted by below-standard subway construction materials that should never have been used. "That train car had just been serviced," says Zarakhovich, "and this tragedy can be attributed to technical incompetence. It's not that the materials were bad -- they were used improperly." Zarakhovich says little money...
...Journalism about the Old World. As a youth in Soviet-dominated Pinsk, Poland, which is now in Belarus, Kapuscinski saw friends and teachers disappear -- part of Stalin's mass deportation and resettlement program that aimed to replace diverse nationalities with homo sovietus. This misfortune, as a dour professor in Baku tells the author, threatens present-day peace and stability from the Caucasus to the Pacific. "Now," he says, "one cannot move anyone without also moving someone else, without doing him injury...
Take Anna, a 33-year-old mother of two from Baku, who once worked as a chemical analyst in a hospital. She now lives in a caravan site outside of Be-er Sheba, where little employment is available for even the native Israelis who live in the area...
...collapse, the Kremlin tended to favor the Azeris in the conflict, largely because Azerbaijan was the last bastion of communist orthodoxy in the Caucasus. Soviet army and Interior Ministry troops alternately tried to keep the peace or assisted the Azeris in military operations. Though the Azeri government in Baku accuses Russia of helping Armenia, it is the Azeri fighters in the region who are far better equipped with Soviet military weaponry than their opponents...