Hundreds of demonstrators shivered and cheered through the freezing pre-dawn today in the capital of Belarus, trying to keep up momentum in a drive to overturn a landslide election that gave a new term to authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko.

Thousands of Georgians jammed the main streets and squares of the capital Tbilisi today to mark the second anniversary of the Rose Revolution protests that drove out the country’s longtime leader and brought Mikhail Saakashvili to office.

Azerbaijan’s opposition, emboldened by international criticism of the parliamentary vote and the government decision to annul the count in two districts, prepared for a massive protest rally tomorrow that it hopes will give it irreversible momentum.

The brother of Georgia’s late Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania today dismissed the authorities’ assertion that he died from carbon monoxide poisoning and insisted that Zhvania was assassinated.

Russia’s security chief said today that his agency has uncovered US, British, Kuwaiti and Saudi spy activity that was being conducted under the cover of non-governmental organisations.

US President George Bush yesterday told a cheering crowd of tens of thousands of Georgians that they were proving to the world that determined people can rise up and claim their freedom from oppressive rulers.

SINCE Georgia’s November 2003 Rose Revolution against Eduard Schvardnadze’s government, a series of other former Soviet governments have fallen after popular revolutions, often with the backing of the US and other Western nations.

Shaken Georgian leaders have made a plea for calm after Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania was found dead in a friend’s apartment, a blow to President Mikhail Saakashvili’s ambitious pledges to wipe out corruption and resolve two simmering separatist conflicts.

Georgian Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania, who helped lead the revolution that toppled the corruption-tainted regime of Eduard Shevardnadze, died today from what officials said apparently was a gas leak from a heater.

IT was easy to be sceptical of President Vladimir Putin’s accusations that the US was meddling in the Ukrainian Presidential elections.

The Ukrainian presidential election result was frozen today until the Supreme Court considers an appeal by the opposition candidate, who claims the vote was rigged.

UKRAINE has not experienced the kind of intense political dramas seen in Russia and some of the other former Soviet states in the last 15 years, but now its turn may have come.

Georgian opposition leader Mikhail Saakashvili claimed victory in the country’s presidential elections and vowed to root out corruption after an exit poll showed him with an overwhelming lead.

Georgia’s highest court today invalidated the fraud-tainted parliamentary vote that sparked the peaceful removal of President Eduard Shevardnadze, leaving the old parliament in place until new elections.