Russia said on Wednesday the landmark Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) must be replaced with a formal, binding pact when it expires in 2009 and not the informal arrangement that the United States proposes.

Russia’s top general said on Wednesday compromise proposals Washington has offered to Moscow on its planned missile defense shield were not constructive, local news agencies reported.

Russian President Vladimir Putin may on Wednesday make an important announcement about the presidential election, the speaker of the upper house of parliament told reporters.

The party that for a decade has entertained Russians with its brand of anti-Western nationalism is expected to struggle in this Sunday’s parliamentary election.

Falluja, once the heart of Iraq’s bloody insurgency, is hoping to trade mortar bombs for bricks and mortar as it seeks to heal its wounds and return to normality.

NATO air-strikes killed 12 civilian road workers in eastern Afghanistan, a provincial governor said on Wednesday, an incident bound to fuel Afghan resentment against the presence of international forces.

Serbs and Kosovo Albanians were unable to agree on Wednesday on the future of the breakaway province of Kosovo, EU envoy Wolfgang Ischinger said.

General Pervez Musharraf finally quit as army chief on Wednesday, trading the post for a second five-year term as president and fulfilling a promise many Pakistanis doubted he would keep.

Official negligence contributed to the death toll in Afghanistan’s biggest suicide bombing, which killed 72 people, most of them schoolboys, this month, the interior minister said on Tuesday.

Nine people were killed when a suicide bomber posing as a shepherd attacked police north of Baghdad on Tuesday and at least six civilians died in a spate of shootings by U.S. soldiers, security officials said.