BREST, June 22 (RIA Novosti) - Russia and Belarus denounce any attempts to revise the results of World War Two, a joint declaration by the presidents of both countries said on Sunday.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko signed on June 22 a declaration aimed at strengthening collective security and developing bilateral relations. Both presidents met on the Day of Memory and Grief, the day when the Great Patriotic War between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany began in 1941.

Some European states are currently questioning the results of World War II, treating participants in Nazi Legion formations and nationalist rebel forces during wartime as war veterans.

"A selective politicized approach must be set off against honest scholar debates. It is only on this basis that Europe can draw proper lessons from its difficult history, avoiding the repetition of tragic mistakes of the past," the joint declaration said.

The parties also decided to coordinate their approaches towards solving important international issues "in the interests of forming a fair and democratic world order with the UN's central role and the supremacy of international law," the declaration said.

MOSCOW, May 7 (RIA Novosti) - Promises made by U.S. leaders cannot be trusted, former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph published on Wednesday.

"The Americans promised that NATO wouldn't move beyond the boundaries of Germany after the Cold War, but now half of central and eastern Europe are members, so what happened to their promises? It shows they cannot be trusted," he said in Paris.

He also said that Washington's claims that a missile defense system it is planning to build in central Europe was aimed exclusively at countering the threat from so-called rogue states could not be believed either.

The Pentagon's missile shield deployment plans continue to be a major bone of contention in relations between the U.S. and Russia. Moscow considers the project a threat to its national security.

Gorbachev said the missile shield plan jeopardized world peace and could lead to a new Cold War.

He continued that that "erecting elements of missile defense is taking the arms race to the next level. It is a very dangerous step".

"I sometimes have a feeling that the United States is going to wage war against the entire world," the former Soviet leader said.

"The United States cannot tolerate anyone acting independently. Every U.S. president has to have a war," he concluded, also saying that the world had squandered the chance in the decade after the Cold War to "build a new world order."

MOSCOW, April 23 (RIA Novosti) - A Soviet military cemetery in Kiskorpad, that was recently bought in an auction by a private owner, will be returned to the city in a month, an official at the Hungarian embassy in Moscow said Wednesday.

The cemetery, where more than 200 Soviet soldiers killed during fighting against the Nazis in 1945 are buried, was sold due to an administrative error after being incorrectly included in neighboring land deeds.

"Within 30 days the necessary documents will be prepared, and the land will be returned to the local authorities," Laslo Ovary said.

Budapest had earlier assured Moscow that it would stick to the intergovernmental agreement regarding the security of military cemeteries.

Earlier on Wednesday a senior Russian military official, Major General Alexander Kirilin told Hungarian officials that "the cemetery had been maintained in absolutely excellent condition and a new road would be built."

A Russian embassy spokesman, Irina Zvonova said the restoration work at the cemetery has been completed.

In May 2007, the removal of a monument to Soviet soldiers in another ex-Soviet country Estonia led to clashes between protestors and local police, leaving one dead, over 150 injured and more than 1,000 arrested.

The human rights group Amnesty International condemned the situation in Estonia and called on its leadership to respect the rights of ethnic Russians.

Soviet forces liberated Hungary from German forces, which occupied the country, in 1945, the year that WWII in Europe officially ended.

MOSCOW, April 23 (RIA Novosti) Georgia lost Abkhazia forever/ Azerbaijan holds back completion of Bushehr plant/ Moscow benefits from Beijing's Olympic problems/ Experts discussing possible dangers to Soyuz space crew

Kommersant

Georgia lost Abkhazia forever

President Vladimir Putin's last instructions to the government regarding Abkhazia essentially have to do with irreversibly integrating the self-proclaimed republic into Russia's economic space. After being given a chance to openly use Russian investments, build resort hotels, open branches of Russian banks and receive Russian tourists, Abkhazia will never be part of Georgia again.
Most Georgia politicians realize that they have lost Abkhazia. Former parliament speaker Nino Burdzhanadze certainly knows it, too. She did not resign because her team was not on the election list. The Georgian 'iron lady' never thrashed about, not even when opposition members went on hunger strike in her outer office or when President Mikhail Saakashvili made several important personnel decisions without asking for his faithful aide's opinion. But she clearly does not want to be one of the country's leaders at a time when part of its territory is slipping away and share the responsibility for the national tragedy with Saakashvili.
It is needless to describe the fate that would befall a government at a time when the Georgians realize that Sukhumi has become a different country. People's outrage will lead to a kind of upheaval that the "Rose Revolution" crowds will seem tame by comparison. This, partly, is what the Kremlin counting on while pursuing its policy of Abkhazia's step-by-step integration.
Saakashvili, in turn, knows only too well, what will happen to him personally if he fails to reverse the situation now. He will go politically bankrupt. He will have nothing to show to his own people for his years in office, not even a prospect of an early accession to NATO. With a breakaway Abkhazia, Georgia's accession to the Membership Action Plan any time soon will be out of the question, let alone in December 2008.
As a result, Saakashvili might be forced to step down long before the end of his tenure. That is why he is showing a lot of activity these days, beating the alarm, calling Putin, [George] Bush, requesting an extraordinary meeting of the UN Security Council under the pretext of some vague spying plane story. But frankly speaking, there is little chance that the international community will be able to talk Moscow into abandoning its current policy.

Nezavisimaya Gazeta

Azerbaijan holds back completion of Bushehr plant

Russia may fail to complete the Bushehr nuclear power plant in Iran by September 2008, because Azerbaijan's customs officials have been keeping a Russian truck convoy carrying heat insulation equipment for the plant on the border since March 29.
Azerbaijan claims the cargo lacks a special permit, but analysts view this as Baku's desire to demonstrate loyalty to the United States and strength to Russia.
Natik Akhundov, press secretary of Azerbaijan's State Customs Committee, said yesterday that Atomstroyexport needs a special permit for the transit of equipment across Azerbaijan to Iran.
Atomstroyexport is Russia's nuclear power equipment and service export monopoly, building the Bushehr nuclear power plant.
"The cargo was registered in line with Russian and international customs requirements, and all documents were prepared in advance," said Irina Yesipova, spokesperson of the Russian company.
Experts said the delay might postpone the commissioning of Bushehr's first stage. Initially, Russia pledged to complete construction in 1999.
Atomstroyexport sent the first batch of nuclear fuel to the plant in February 2008 and announced that its trial use would begin in July or August, so that the plant would be ready for commissioning in September.
Natalia Sviridova of the 2K Audit-Business Consulting company said the cargo was detained for purely technical reasons.
"We know how to solve the problem now that Azerbaijani authorities have named the reason," she said. "It will be settled very soon."
But Agvan Mikaelyan, director general of the FinExpertiza audit and consulting group, said there were political reasons behind Azerbaijan's decision to detain the Russian convoy.
"The recent lifting of sanctions from Abkhazia and South Ossetia has clearly alarmed Baku authorities, who have a headache of their own in Nagorny Karabakh," Mikaelyan said. "By detaining a cargo that is politically important to Russia, Baku wanted to show the consequences of a potential change in Russia's stance on Karabakh."
Mikaelyan said Azerbaijan was also showing loyalty to the United States, which is irritated by Iran's nuclear program.

Izvestia

Moscow benefits from Beijing's Olympic problems

A possible boycott of the upcoming Beijing Olympics will not affect Russian interests because Moscow is not involved in the current standoff between the West and China.
Instead of losing, Russia could even benefit from the situation.
China, which is drifting closer to Russia, could make concessions, heed Moscow's interests in such sensitive regions as Central Asia and back down on fuel and energy exports.
Beijing and the West are debating the Tibet issue and human rights. China also has its hands tied on the Taiwan issue. Consequently, Beijing will not think about developing the sparsely populated Siberia and the Russian Far East in the foreseeable future.
Moscow will profit from China's problems in relations with Taiwan, tensions around the Beijing Olympics, unrest in Tibet and separatism in the Xinjiang-Uighur Autonomous Region.
Russian negotiators should keep all this in mind when dealing with their Chinese counterparts.

Izvestia

Experts discussing possible dangers to Soyuz space crew

On Saturday the Soyuz TMA-11 capsule carrying U.S. astronaut Peggy Whitson, Russian flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko, and South Korean bioengineer Yi So-yeon from the International Space Station (ISS), made a bumpy re-entry, landing 420 km (260 miles) off target in the steppes of northern Kazakhstan.
On Tuesday evening, a source in the Russian space industry said on condition of anonymity that the descent module had almost become depressurized, and that the crew could have been killed.
An anonymous senior Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) official said there was not yet enough information to find out what had caused the craft to descend along a ballistic trajectory.
He said people always reacted emotionally to all aspects of manned space missions, and that the expert had made a hasty assessment.
"This is a very unpleasant situation because human lives come first. Several descent modules have reentered the atmosphere hatch-down. But it would be pointless to discuss possible risks in the Soyuz TMA-11 case because this would hinder the investigation," the official told the paper.
The number of annual Soyuz launches will increase from two to three or four after all U.S. space shuttles are grounded next year. No more space tourists will fly to the ISS, which will be crewed by six astronauts.
Launch prices negotiated by NASA and Roscosmos could total $2 billion; but they could plunge if the United States becomes convinced that Russian spacecraft are unreliable.
Subtle media maneuvers could greatly affect this issue where much is at stake. The anonymous expert claimed that U.S. space systems were used to locate the ISS crew. But the Roscosmos official disagreed because Russian search-and-rescue teams had located the Soyuz capsule.

RIA Novosti is not responsible for the content of outside sources.

NEW YORK, April 23 (RIA Novosti) - A 69-year-old woman in Florida discovered an eight-foot alligator wandering around her kitchen, local media said on Wednesday.

Sandra Frosti said she heard a noise in her home in Oldsmar, north of Tampa, late Monday night and when she went to check it out she saw the reptile next to the refrigerator.

"All I did was look at it and go, 'Oh my God,'" she explained. "I turned around-did not use the phone in there. I went back into the bedroom, closed the door, and phoned 911," a local Tampa bay news portal cited Frosti as saying.

"There's an alligator in my kitchen!" she told emergency services over the phone.

The operator initially thought she meant an iguana, but when a trapper arrived they indeed saw an eight-foot gator weighing about 230 pounds. The animal had apparently broken through the back porch, and entered through an open sliding glass door.

On entering Frosti's home the gator strolled into the living room, down the hall and into the kitchen.

Local officials believe the animal was after the family cat.

No one inside the house was injured, apart from the alligator who cut itself on a plate in the kitchen but was safely removed.

ABU-DHABI, April 16 (RIA Novosti) - A court in Yemen has annulled an arranged marriage between an 8 year-old girl and a man 22 years her senior, the Yemeni Times newspaper said.

Nojoud Muhammed Nasser, who is in the second grade at primary school, filed for divorce from her 30-year-old husband, Faez Ali Thamer in April, stating she was forced into signing a marriage contract by her parents.

"My father beat me and told me that I must marry this man, and if I did not, I would be raped and no law and no sheikh in this country would help me," Nojoud testified in court: "They asked me to sign the marriage contract and remain in my father's house until I was 18. But a week after signing, my father and my mother forced me to go live with him."

"Whenever I wanted to play in the yard he beat me and asked me to go to the bedroom with him," she went on.

Nojoud's ex-husband admitted beating her and having sex, but said: "I have done nothing wrong, as she is my wife and I have the right."

The girl eventually ran away and applied to the court for a divorce petition. The court annulled the marriage instead of simply issuing a divorce to prevent reinstatement claims from Thamer.

"I am happy that I am divorced now. I will be able to go back to school," the girl told journalists after the court case.

Her lawyer said the girl will never return to her parents, and will live with her uncle, who became Nojoud's guardian after her father and husband were arrested.

The case of Nojoud, the first of its kind in Yemen, has sparked controversy around the 1998 amendment to Yemeni law which banned marriage between couples under 15. The amendment permitted parents to conclude marriage contracts between minors as long as the couple does not have sexual relations until they reach 15.

NOVO OGARYOVO, April 18 (RIA Novosti) - Russia will back the Israeli and Palestinian leaders in their efforts to reach a peace deal, Russia's outgoing president said on Friday.

Vladimir Putin, back in Moscow after visits to Libya and Sardinia, met Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the presidential residence. Putin said that Russia welcomed joint peace efforts of Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and "will support them in every possible way."

Russia, a member of the Quartet of Mideast mediators, plans to host a peace conference in June, as a follow-up to last November's U.S.-hosted Middle East peace talks.

Putin first voiced the idea of holding a Mideast peace conference in the Russian capital in 2005, and received the backing of several Arab countries prior to the Annapolis talks.

Abbas said expects major breakthroughs to be reached at the Moscow conference.

"We believe the Moscow conference will be a success, and progress will be made in the Mideast settlement," the Palestinian leader told Putin.

Abbas had said on Thursday that several barriers continue to block the implementation of commitments made in Annapolis.

The Annapolis summit saw a resumption of talks between the Palestinian National Authority and Israel after a seven-year hiatus. The sides pledged to do everything possible to draft a peace settlement by the end of 2008, as well as to come to an agreement on the form of a future independent Palestinian state.

Israel announced a tender earlier on Friday for the construction of 100 houses in Jewish settlements on the West Bank, despite provisions of the roadmap for peace banning settlement activity in Palestinian territories.

Abbas' Fatah party controls the West Bank after being ousted by the hard-line Islamic group Hamas, considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. and some EU states, from the Gaza Strip in a bloody conflict last June.