A bulletin board in the Ukrainian town of Pripyat still bears an edition of the Sovietsky Patriot newspaper, dated three days before the nuclear explosion that turned the city into one of the world's most baleful ghost towns.
Once home to some 50,000 people whose lives were connected to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Pripyat was hastily evacuated one day after a reactor at the plant 3 kilometers away exploded on April 26, 1986. The explosion and the subsequent fire spewed a radioactive plume over much of northern Europe.
Once a model Soviet workers' town - neat high-rise apartment buildings and streets converging on a plaza that housed a hotel and a cultural centre - Pripyat is now a model of technology gone catastrophically wrong.
