Eurasia Press & News

MOSCOW (Reuters) – A top manager of the now defunct YUKOS business empire was sentenced on Friday by a Russian court to life in prison for ordering a series of high profile murders, a verdict he dismissed as the result of a show trial organized by the Kremlin.

ISMAILIA, Egypt (Reuters) – Egyptian police shot dead an unidentified African migrant and detained two others while they were trying to cross illegally into Israel on Friday, a security official and a medical source said.

KABUL (Reuters) – Violence in Afghanistan has reached its worst level since 2001 with more than 260 civilians killed in July alone, a group of 100 aid agencies said on Friday, calling on all sides to do more to protect the lives of non-combatants.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The former U.S. peace mediator for Bosnia, Richard Holbrooke, on Thursday dismissed a claim by Radovan Karadzic that the United States had offered a deal that would spare him prosecution for war crimes.

NABLUS, West Bank (Reuters) – Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas ordered his security services on Thursday to release all pro-Hamas activists arrested in the occupied West Bank this week, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa said.

SARAJEVO (Reuters) – Radovan Karadzic’s appearance before a U.N. judge in The Hague on Thursday starts a process that many Bosnians hope will help them understand better what happened during the 1992-95 war.

MOSCOW (Reuters) – California will no longer exist on the Russian map. Russia’s north-western region of Nizhny Novgorod has decided to eliminate the tiny village of California due to the lack of inhabitants, Itar-Tass news agency reported on Thursday.

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian President Dmitry Medvedev expressed frustration on Thursday over his government’s inability to break the vicious circle of red tape and corruption which he said was hampering small businesses.

ZAGREB (Reuters) – Israel’s ambassador in Croatia on Thursday condemned the funeral given to a World War Two concentration camp head, saying it insulted the memory of those killed in the camp run by Croatia’s Nazi-allied Ustasha regime.

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) – Abu al-Abed Abu Karsh sees Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s political demise as almost irrelevant. For many Palestinians, Israeli governments come and go without ever bringing peace closer.