MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia would respond pragmatically to any further NATO expansion by strengthening its defenses and economic might, Russian news agencies quoted Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as saying on Wednesday.

BUCHAREST (Reuters) – President George W. Bush urged NATO allies on Wednesday to send more troops to Afghanistan, but France distanced itself from expectations in the alliance that it could deploy 1,000 extra soldiers.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – An Israeli court-martial charged a military tracker from the Jewish state’s Arab minority on Monday with spying for Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

PRISTINA (Reuters) – Serbia said on Monday it would conduct its May elections in the former Kosovo province as well, in a fresh challenge to the newly independent state and its international overseers.

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia will send humanitarian aid to Kosovo’s Serb-populated enclaves in early April, a Russian diplomat said on Monday, saying Moscow had not coordinated the move with the region’s ethnic Albanian leadership.

NIKOLSKOE, Russia (Reuters) – A Russian doomsday cult sheltering in a bunker say credit cards and food packaging bar codes are satanic, the official negotiating the release of children from the group said on Monday.

LONDON (Reuters) – The exiled leader of the Islamist Palestinian Hamas group, Khaled Meshaal, said on Monday that an Israeli soldier captured in 2006 and held in Gaza is alive and being well treated.

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – The Dutch foreign minister met ambassadors from Muslim countries on Monday to try to cool tempers over a film by a Dutch lawmaker critical of the Koran and ask for protection for Dutch citizens and property.

BUCHAREST (Reuters) – Once a laggard among former Soviet allies in joining the European Union and NATO, Romania hopes the military alliance’s summit in Bucharest this week will earn the Black Sea state a bigger role in southeastern Europe.

TEHRAN (FNA)- Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki expressed hope that Syria’s presidency over the Arab Summit will help put an end to the ongoing crisis in Palestine.