Moscow

Russia has foiled a plot to kill the governor of Russia’s second city of St Petersburg who is a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, Interfax news agency reported late on Friday. Citing an unidentified law-enforcement source, Interfax said three people had been detained on suspicion of being involved in the plan to assassinate Valentina Matviyenko.

Russia’s atomic energy agency said on Tuesday it has signed a deal to build a nuclear-research reactor in Burma, whose military rulers have been criticised by the West for repressive and undemocratic practices. The centre will include a 10MW nuclear reactor with low enriched uranium consisting of less than 20% uranium-235, the atomic energy agency, known as Rosatom, said.

Former United States president Bill Clinton embraced Boris Yeltsin’s widow with one of his trademark hugs on Wednesday as he paid his last respects to the man with whom he formed a diplomatic double act in the 1990s. Yeltsin’s widow and two daughters sat beside his open coffin as a stream of serving and past Russian politicians and foreign guests filed past.

Russia’s new defence minister, a former tax bureaucrat, has gone back to school for a crash course on the country’s massive military machine at an elite defence academy, the Izvestia newspaper reported on Tuesday. Anatoly Serdyukov, who once worked as a furniture salesman, faces a barrage of intensive classes.

The stand-off over Iran’s nuclear ambitions should be resolved exclusively through peaceful means, Russian and Chinese leaders said in a resolution signed in Moscow on Monday. The United States and some European states suspect Iran of using its atomic power programme as a cover for attempts to build a nuclear weapon.

At least 63 people died early on Tuesday when a fire ripped through a retirement home in southern Russia, the Interfax news agency reported quoting local officials. About 33 more were injured in the fire that broke out in Kamyshevatskaya village in the Kuban region, officials said, adding that a total of 97 people were staying at the facility.

At least 61 people were killed on Monday when a gas explosion ripped through a Russian coal mine, a spokesperson for the regional governor told the media. ”Sixty-one miners are dead and 88 have been rescued and brought to the surface,” the spokesperson said by telephone. He said 183 people were in the mine at the time of the blast.

A trio of top European Union officials was in Moscow on Monday to try to bridge the gap between Russia and the European Union over the future of Kosovo. The EU foreign-policy officials will also touch on Russia’s role as an energy supplier, and a Russian ban on imports of Polish meat that has frozen talks on an EU-Russian partnership agreement.

Iran, accused by some Western nations of seeking to develop a nuclear weapon, on Wednesday denied a British newspaper report that North Korea was giving it technical help to fulfil its ambition. The United Nations Security Council voted to ban military supplies and weapons shipments to North Korea after Pyongyang carried out its first nuclear test in October.

United States plans to set up an anti-missile system in the Czech Republic are ”a clear threat” to Russia, a Russian general said Monday, quoted by ITAR-TASS news agency. ”Our analysis shows that the location of the US base would be a clear threat to Russia,” General Vladimir Popovkin, who commands a division of the Russian army in charge of space technology, was quoted as saying.

A Russian nationalist lawmaker has proposed a law switching the country back to the pre-revolutionary Julian calendar as a way of reasserting Russia’s national identity. Alexander Fomenko said the modern Gregorian calendar used throughout the Christian world was thrust on Russia a century ago in a ”cruel Westernising project”.

Russian newspapers poured scorn on Thursday on a vast anti-terrorism operation launched nationwide on Wednesday, asking whether the whole scare was just an exercise or even a politically motivated trick. Several newspapers cast doubt on Federal Security Service chief Nikolai Patrushev’s claim to have received a foreign tip-off about an imminent attack on public transport.

Moscow says an anti-Kremlin businessman living in Israel could be behind the radiation poisoning of Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko, but the allegation only further complicates a spectacularly bizarre murder case. The prosecutor general said it had found links between the fatal poisoning of Litvinenko and Leonid Nevzlin, a former executive in the Yukos oil company who fled criminal charges in Russia.

Russia’s foreign minister said on Tuesday a new draft United Nations Security Council resolution on Iran over its nuclear programme largely met Moscow’s concerns and could become the basis of a consensus decision. ”The new resolution … has to a large extent taken into account our approaches,” Sergei Lavrov said in an interview.

Marat Safin said on Sunday that helping Russia to seal the Davis Cup with victory over Argentina had helped sweeten a bitter season and given him motivation to continue in his career. The former world number one started the year ranked 12th thanks largely to winning the 2005 Australian Open, but fell to outside the top 100 before climbing back up towards the top 20.