Nightclub fire MY wife and I were taking a walk outside our house. First, some noise in the backyard and loud voices. People standing by the emergency exit of LH (the Lame Horse nightclub), some sitting and coughing, spitting. Talking calmly, though, without panic. Then some guy comes running to the fire station nearby, all black, and starts screaming that there are “thousands of people” in there and they are all burning. At first, we thought he was drunk. But the firefighters must have known about the situation by then and were running around like crazy. As a result, everyone who was at the fire station at the time drove out or simply ran to the site of the fire in a minute. I walked to the compartments from which fire trucks were driving out and closed the gates after them. I'd never seen them leaving the gates open like this before. We went down and walked around the building to the side where the small park is. Right away, I saw a man in rags, with no hair or eyelashes. Only his eyes were burning, but his whole face was covered with soot. But he was moving normally, walking back and forth. I talked to him. He asked if he was burned badly. But I told him that he looked okay. Then another victim, similar to the first one, came up to me and addressed me by my first name. Turned out he was a colleague of mine. He said he didn't remember how he got out. But he, too, asked me how his face was and, in general, how he looked from the outside. (Later, I learned from reports that he was taken to Moscow with 80 percent of his skin damaged.) But at that point it somehow didn't appear that horrible. The victims were walking back and forth, some were sitting on the ground. Some 10 people, all in all. Thick black smoke was coming out from the small windows of LH, but no one was running out from the building itself. And it seemed that it wasn't so horrible after all. The horrible part started in five minutes or so. The firefighters got dressed, connected to the fire hydrants. And that's when they began to drag the people out. – yakimovmihail.livejournal.com India's win INDIA thrashed Sri Lanka by an innings and 24 runs to claim the series and the top spot in the ICC test cricket rankings. In the process, India have successfully continued to guard their fortress against Sri Lankan invasion in test match cricket. Sri Lanka will have to wait for at least another couple of years to give themselves a chance of winning a test match on Indian soil. Sri Lanka have themselves to blame for the loss. Though Sangakkara went a bit overboard in blaming the absence of the referral system (which in his opinion made a difference of 500 runs) for his team's performance, he would have known from inside that they were outplayed by India in batting and bowling. Sri Lanka's fielding, a department that they pride themselves to excel at, hasn't been any impressive in this tournament. Considering that Sri Lanka are yet to win a test match in Australia, South Africa and India (the three top-ranked sides), this defeat says something about their inability to beat better sides away from home.
