Serhiy Odarych, chief editor of the pamphlet My [We], has been wounded by a shot to the leg outside his Kyiv home during the night of July 28-29. Odarych underwent outpatient surgery. He told the Kyiv newspaper Den that his group has "only one opponent--President... MORE

The foundation stone was laid at the weekend, and the sanctification ceremony held, for an Armenian church of the Holy Martyrs in Kashatagh, in the Lachin corridor. To be built at the initiative of the Self-Determination Union led by Parvir Hairikian, the church honors fighters... MORE

The Soviet Azerbaijani authorities had in their time closed or misused mosques with equal abandon. One of the largest of those mosques, Bibi-Heibat, reopened recently in Baku in the presence of President Haidar Aliev, who personally financed the construction of its minaret. (Assa-Irada, July 14)... MORE

Rear-Admiral John Siegler, identified as head of the policy planning staff of the U.S. Central Command, paid a ground-breaking visit to Turkmenistan on July 30-31. He held talks with Defense Minister Danatar Kopekov and with the commander of border troops, Akmurat Kabulov, on "developing U.S.-Turkmen... MORE

Tajik official Alikul Imomnazarov died on July 31 of injuries sustained in a car-bomb attack two days earlier near the presidential palace in downtown Dushanbe. Six others were wounded in that blast. On August 2, Imomnazarov's wife was assassinated at her husband's grave. The perpetrators... MORE

At a meeting yesterday with some seventy leading western investment bankers, Prime Minister Sergei Kirienko promised that Russia would open its markets more widely to foreign investment. He said the government plans new legislation to bring fiscal, legal and regulatory mechanisms into line with international... MORE

The appointment of former Gosplan chief Yuri Maslyukov to the government as Minister of Industry and Trade has upset many. The leadership of the Communist Party, to which Maslyukov belongs, are angry that he accepted the job, since they had ordered him to turn it... MORE

Various Russian officials have continued to react over the last several days to the Clinton administration's July 28 decision to impose sanctions on seven Russian enterprises believed to have improperly exported sensitive military technologies to Iran. A senior representative of the powerful Russian Security Council... MORE

Russian President Boris Yeltsin yesterday invited two Japanese leaders to visit Japan. In a personal letter to former Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, Yeltsin thanked the former prime minister for his contributions to Russian-Japanese friendship (Kyodo, July 30) and invited Hashimoto and his family to visit... MORE

Earlier this year, the penurious Ministry of Defense welcomed the government decision transferring the responsibility for cleaning up the nuclear waste from the Navy's many decommissioned nuclear submarines from the military to the Ministry of Atomic Energy (Minatom). Now it seems that Minatom also lacks... MORE