The Federation Council yesterday postponed its scheduled debate on the resignation of Yuri Skuratov as Russia's prosecutor general. According to Russia's constitution, the council--the parliament's upper chamber--must rule on President Boris Yeltsin's decision to accept Skuratov's decision, who stepped down earlier this month after complaining... MORE

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright yesterday praised the government of Cyprus for its decision early last month to forego deploying Russian-made S-300 air defense missiles on Cyprus. Her remarks followed talks in Washington with visiting Cypriot Foreign Minister Ioannis Cassoulides. Albright characterized the Cypriot decision... MORE

Cyprus has been divided since Turkish troops invaded the island in 1974 following a coup attempt by Greek-Cypriot supporters of a union with Greece. A break-away Turkish-Cypriot state on the northern part of the island has been recognized only by Ankara, which maintains more than... MORE

Russian President Boris Yeltsin said today that he warned President Bill Clinton not to launch airstrikes against Yugoslavia even if it doesn't meet a deadline on a truce with rebels in Kosovo. "We will not allow you to touch Kosovo," Yeltsin said he told Clinton... MORE

Reacting to the capture of terrorist leader Abdullah Ocalan, Kurdish militants staged violent protests yesterday in many Western countries and in Russia and Armenia. The banned Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) has long operated clandestinely in the West, and has openly maintained a representation of the... MORE

Six car bombs--one of them intended to kill President Islam Karimov and cabinet ministers--exploded yesterday in central Tashkent between 10:52 a.m. and 12:00 local time. A preliminary casualty toll recorded fourteen killed and 128 injured among ordinary residents. The first and most powerful bomb damaged... MORE

Interviewed in the latest issue of the liberal Russian weekly "Obshchaya gazeta," Azerbaijani Defense Minister Safar Abiev made public Baku's goal of a "special partnership, to be formalized in a bilateral agreement, between Azerbaijan and NATO." Defining Azerbaijan as a "constitutive element of the new... MORE

FIMACO is by no means the only financial scandal brewing in Russia at the moment. The Audit Chamber, an independent state watchdog agency set up by the parliament, reported last week that the country's State Pension Fund had lost more than US$1 billion from 1995... MORE

Volodymyr Horbulin, Secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, yesterday rebuked the Deputy Secretary Aleksandr Razumkov's position on Ukraine's relations with NATO. Horbulin told the press that Razumkov had "erred both in form and in substance" when speaking on that subject to the recent... MORE

During his press conference yesterday, former Central Bank official Sergei Aleksashenko also revealed that a number of large Russian corporations--including the diamond-holding Almazy Rossi Sakha, the state oil company Rosneft and the oil giant Yukos, along with financial institutions such as Promstroibank--are minority shareholders in... MORE