Finland is calling on Russia’s secret police, the FSB, to stop levying extortion fees for crossing the border with Finland. The demand includes both the illegal fees that had been charged by FSB border guards at the Svetogorsk crossing adjacent to Imatra, as well as so-called legal ones.

The chauvinistic Russia’s foreign ministry on Wednesday bristled at Ukrainian officials’ push for declaring a Russian-provoked  Great Famine that killed up to 15 million people as genocide. Up to 15 million Ukrainians died in the 1932-33 Great Famine, which was provoked by Russians as part of their campaign to

Germany and Israel are at odds over an incident involving attack on a German naval vessel patrolling the Lebanon coast as part of an international peacekeeping force, reported Reuters. While German Defence Ministry spokesman Thomas Raabe says that six Israeli F-16 jets had flown very low over the

Iraqi Mujahideen fighters attacked a US checkpoint located in the al-Mal’ab in ar-Ramadi, about 110km west of Baghdad,  inflicting dead and wounded on the Americans. Two American ambulances were seen racing to the stricken checkpoint, the Al Basrah  reported.

GAZA CITY (AFP) — Seven Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire in a raid on the Gaza Strip Monday during festivities marking the end of Ramadan, in an operation President Mahmoud Abbas slammed as a “massacre”.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in a bid for political survival, struck an alliance Monday with a tough-talking politician who has called for stripping Arab Israelis of their citizenship, executing lawmakers for talking to Hamas and bombing Palestinian population centres.

TEHRAN (AP) — Iran’s nuclear capability has increased “tenfold” despite Western pressure to roll back the country’s nuclear programme, the country’s firebrand president said Monday.

BAGHDAD (AP) — The prime minister on Monday announced a military crackdown to tame the country’s staggering armed violence, taking special aim at continuing lawlessness in the southern city of Amarah, where police have fled the streets as Mehdi Army fighters hunt them down in a brutal Shiite-on-Shiite settling of …

UNITED NATIONS (AFP) — UN chief Kofi Annan has full confidence in his embattled special envoy to Sudan, whose status remains unchanged despite an expulsion order against him from Khartoum over his comments on the Darfur crisis, his spokesman said Monday.

SAQQARA — The arrest of tomb robbers led archaeologists to the graves of three royal dentists, protected by a curse and hidden in the desert sands for thousands of years in the shadow of Egypt’s most ancient pyramid, officials announced.