RUSSIA is considering sending a spacecraft to a large asteroid to knock it off its path and prevent a possible collision with Earth, the head of the country’s space agency said yesterday.

Author Alexander Solzhenitsyn was buried today in a Russian Orthodox ceremony that included goose-stepping honour guards and a religious choir singing dirges.

RUSSIAN prime minister Vladimir Putin led hundreds of mourners paying last respects yesterday to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the dissident writer who chronicled the horror of the Soviet prison camps.

A toxic spill from a Chinese factory is now threatening the Russian city of Khabarovsk, where 580,000 people now face pollution and the possibility that their heating may have to be switched off despite sub-zero temperatures.