Police probe Prague gas blast

CZECH police say they will open an investigation into a powerful gas blast that injured 43 people when it ripped through a four-storey building in Prague's historic centre.

"Investigators have not yet been able to make it to the scene of the blast, as the rubble is still being cleared and the work could continue until tomorrow," Prague police spokesman Jan Danek told AFP.

Danek added that Monday's blast would likely require a lengthy enquiry but denied there were signs pointing to anything but an accident.

Czech media reported two people were still hospitalised on Tuesday following the explosion, said to be the most serious of its kind in the Czech Republic in recent years.

The blast, which occurred on the ground floor of an office block in a popular tourist area, heavily damaged the building, blew out windows in nearby streets and shook apartment blocks across the Vltava river.

Police evacuated 230 people from the area, fearing further gas leaks, and 43 people were injured, mostly with cuts from shattered glass.

Two Kazakhs, two Portuguese, one German and one Slovak were among those hurt.

The Generali insurer on Tuesday revised up its estimate of damage done to the 19th-century building to 30 million koruna ($A1.48 million).

Gas was still turned off on Tuesday in around 20 buildings in the area, home to the ornate National Theatre whose modern section was also damaged by the blast.

Another gas blast in February completely destroyed an apartment block in the eastern town of Frenstat pod Radhostem, killing six people including three children.

A male resident who was facing eviction for not paying rent is suspected of intentionally causing that blast, in which he died.

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Lives at risk, Vic paramedics say

VICTORIAN paramedics say emergency response times are blowing out and putting lives at risk.

The paramedics, who are in the middle of negotiating a new enterprise bargaining agreement with Ambulance Victoria, say Premier Denis Napthine's refusal to budge from the 2.5 per cent wage increase is fuelling a crisis in the ranks.

Ambulance Employees Australia state secretary Steve McGhie says the current offer amounts to a one dollar a week wage increase for paramedics and is insulting, considering how many lives they save.

"Emergency call takers and despatchers are in the eye of the storm of our worsening ambulance crisis. The crisis is right there on their computer screens every moment of every day," Mr McGhie said.

In March, the Productivity Commission revealed that average ambulance response times to Code 1 emergencies in Victoria had blown out to almost 19 minutes.

Some rural ambulance stations are seeing average response times as long as 30 minutes, and many patients across Melbourne and Victoria are being forced to wait hours for an ambulance.

"These communications staff point to a slew of incidents in which staff shortages have left patients waiting hours for an ambulance," Mr McGhie said.

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US consumer confidence rebounds in April

US consumer confidence picked up in April after falling the prior month, the Conference Board has reported.

The Conference Board's consumer confidence index rose to 68.1 points from a revised 61.9 in March.

Consumers' expectations about the short-term economic outlook and their income prospects improved, but the research firm cautioned that the effects of the January 1 payroll tax hike and the sharp government spending cuts that began March 1 were weighing on sentiment.

Confidence rose slightly in the present situation, but consumers were considerably more upbeat about the outlook over the next six months.

The expectations index jumped to 73.3 in April from 63.7 in March.

"While expectations appear to have bounced back, it is too soon to tell if confidence is actually on the mend," said Lynn Franco, director of the Conference Board's economic indicators.

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Russia art museums feud over revival plan

RUSSIA'S two greatest art museums are engaged in an unsightly public feud over an idea to revive a Moscow museum of Western art that was shut down by Stalin in the late 1940s.

The State Museum of New Western Art gathered the impressionist and early modern art collected by renowned Russian art collectors Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov in the late Tsarist era.

But it was closed on Stalin's orders in 1948 as the Soviet authorities rejected anything reeking of "cosmopolitanism" in a drive to play up the importance of Soviet art.

Its collection was divided between the Pushkin Art Museum in Moscow and the famed Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, where the pictures can be seen to this day.

The redoubtable director of the Pushkin Museum, Irina Antonova, 91, last week personally asked President Vladimir Putin during his annual phone-in with Russians to consider reopening the museum in Moscow with its original collection.

However the idea did not in the least impress the Hermitage museum, which under the plan could see some of its most prized Matisse, Degas and Picasso pictures transferred back to Moscow.

"This new attempt to break up the Hermitage is a crime against the stability of the whole museum landscape in Russia, whose unity and riches have been preserved with such difficulty," fumed Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky, quoted by the government Rossiyskaya Gazeta daily.

Antonova however launched a stout defence of her position saying the recreation of the museum was a question of "historical fairness".

"The state destroyed this museum. The state has the chance to revive it. This is my opinion," she said.

In response to Antonova's request, Putin on Tuesday asked the government to draw up by June 15 a report on the viability of recreating the Western art museum in Moscow.

Morozov and Shchukin amassed two of the greatest collections anywhere of European art.

But like other private collections, their holdings were nationalised after the Russian revolution and used to form the basis of the Museum of New Western Art (GMNZI) which was founded in 1928.

The dispute has highlighted the rivalry between the Pushkin Museum and the Hermitage, with the much older Saint Petersburg institution keen to affirm its supremacy over the Moscow museum which was opened only in 1912.

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Tymoshenko jailing unlawful: court

THE European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Ukraine's detention of former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko is unlawful, in a decision the opposition leader's camp saw as a key step towards her release.

Tymoshenko herself said she hoped the decision by the Strasbourg-based court would put paid to the "dirt and black lies" against her.

"The court considered that the detention had been arbitrary and unlawful during the entire period," the judges said.

The European Union is mulling a trade and association accord with the ex-Soviet republic and has clearly said it wanted Kiev to release the charismatic Tymoshenko.

Her daughter described the court's decision as a "first victory" and her lawyer argued that her nemesis President Viktor Yanukovych now had no option but to release her.

Tymoshenko herself, who has dismissed all charges against her as politically motivated, welcomed the ruling in a statement from jail.

"I am happy all the dirt and black lies the authorities have been drowning me in over the past years have been removed," she said, adding that the decision meant the court had "de-facto" acknowledged her as a political prisoner.

"I do not know what Viktor Yanukovych will do after this decision," she said. "Most likely, nothing. But after the decision of the European court I am already morally free."

"Free despite all their bars, cells, walls, fences and tinted windows," she said.

The judges also found that the legality of her detention had not been properly reviewed by the Ukrainian judiciary and that she had no possibility to seek compensation.

However they threw out a complaint over alleged ill-treatment during her transfer to hospital last year.

Tymoshenko, who lost a disputed presidential election to Yanukovych in 2010, was jailed for seven years on what she says are trumped-up charges of overstepping her authority while premier to sign a gas deal with Russia.

Western governments have condemned her jailing as the result of selective persecution by the authorities and it has led to a sharp deterioration in ties with the European Union, which Kiev wants to join.

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Peru finds hot air balloon pilot's body

PERUVIAN rescuers have found the body of the pilot of a hot air balloon that plunged into the Pacific, but another person remains missing, police say.

Five women were rescued from the sea as they clung to pieces of the balloon after it went down Sunday. They and the missing man were on board as tourists taking a ride over the sea.

Police official Luis Praelli said the pilot had been identified through the national identity card found on his person.

The search for the missing man goes on, he said.

The balloon went down a few miles off the coast of Canete province in southern Peru.

The tourists did not have life vests on, and the balloon did not have a GPS system to track it down, authorities say.

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Physicists zoom in on antimatter behaviour

PHYSICISTS have announced a breakthrough in their quest to answer one of science's great questions: do the same laws of gravity apply to antimatter - the obscure counterpart of matter as we know it?

Though antimatter is thought to have existed in equal quantities to matter at the moment of the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago, it is rare today and scientists who wish to study antimatter particles have to manufacture them.

In the Universe, antimatter particles are thought to exist mainly around black holes and in cosmic rays.

For more than 50 years, scientists have debated whether gravity would attract or repel antimatter particles -- whether they would fall down like conventional matter or "up" due to a kind of antigravity.

While the question remains unsolved for now, a team of scientists wrote in the journal Nature Communications they had developed the beginnings of a test that should lead to a conclusive answer.

"This is the first word, not the last," said Joel Fajans, a member of the research team at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research's (CERN) Alpha experiment.

"We've taken the first steps toward a direct experimental test of questions physicists and non-physicists have been wondering about for more than 50 years."

Antimatter particles have opposite properties to ordinary matter particles, including their electric charge. A positively-charged positron, for example, is the antiparticle equivalent of the negatively-charged electron.

When an opposing pair meets, particles and anti-particles annihilate each other in a flash of energy, which means that if an even balance had continued to persist after the Big Bang, the Universe would never have come into being.

But how this imbalance came about is a great riddle for particle physics.

"We certainly expect antimatter to fall down, but just maybe we will be surprised," said Fajans, a University of California physics professor.

"In the unlikely event that antimatter falls upwards, we'd have to fundamentally revise our view of physics and rethink how the universe works."

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Obama defends FBI over Boston suspect

PRESIDENT Barack Obama has defended the FBI from suggestions it might have prevented the Boston marathon bombing by acting on warnings about one of the suspects.

Russia had advised US authorities about ethnic Chechen Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011 and the possibility he was slipping into the grips of hardline Islam, and the FBI probed and interviewed him, although the case was eventually closed.

Tsnarnaev and his younger brother Dzhokhar are accused of going on to carry out the April 15 bombing, which killed three and wounded more than 264 at one of the world's premier sporting events.

But Obama said US authorities had done the best they could in the face of threats that include what he called "self-radicalized individuals."

"Based on what I've seen so far, the FBI performed its duties, the Department of Homeland Security did what it is was supposed to be doing. But this is hard stuff," Obama told a news conference, adding that Russia had been very cooperative in the post-bombing probe.

Still, he acknowledged lingering suspicions between the intelligence and law enforcement agencies of the two former Cold War foes.

"You know, old habits die hard," Obama said.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev died in a shootout with police as he tried to flee the Boston area three days after the bombing. His younger brother was wounded and captured.

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