Russian and Ukrainian special services have arrested a group of suspects over an alleged plot to assassinate Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Russia’s state television reported today.

FORMER Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has called for Russia’s elections to be rerun due to fraud, as the opposition vowed new rallies contesting the results despite mass arrests.

Exit polls cited by Russian state television are showing Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s party tallying less than 50% of the vote in Russia’s parliamentary election.

RUSSIAN spy Anna Chapman has revealed some secrets in her first TV interview: She has a passion for shooting and wants a lion cub as a pet — though she remained coy on the job that made her an international tabloid star.

Festival organisers have released the schedule for this weekend’s Electric Picnic festival.

Electric Picnic has today announced several additions to its lineup for the September event in Stradbally, Co Laois.

The Russian Football Union are to launch an investigation into reports of inappropriate behaviour by the national squad during the World Cup play-offs.

Russian officials opened a terror investigation today, saying that a home-made bomb planted on the tracks of the high-speed Moscow-to-St Petersburg route caused a derailment that killed at least 26 people and injured dozens more.

A gas explosion in the Siberian city of Irkutsk tore through a wooden residential building, killing seven people, including a child.

A journalist with state-run Russian television has been found dead in a Moscow apartment with a belt around his neck and numerous stab wounds.

Police say the head of Dagestan’s television station has been shot and killed in the restive southern Russian province.

President Vladimir Putin’s party won more than 60% of the vote in Russia’s parliamentary election today, an exit poll said.

Russia’s military has successfully tested what it described as the world’s most powerful non-nuclear air-delivered bomb, Russia’s state television reported, the latest show of the nation’s military muscle amid chilly relations with the United States.

One of Russia’s two deep-diving miniature submarines today began its descent more than two-and-a-half miles beneath the ice to the ocean floor beneath the North Pole, RTR television reported.

Poisoned former spy Alexander Litvinenko’s deathbed message accused Russian President Vladimir Putin, but pro-Kremlin MPs and state-controlled television networks today pointed the finger of blame at a prominent Putin enemy in Britain - tycoon Boris Berezovsky.

FIRE raged through one of St Petersburg’s biggest buildings yesterday, bringing down the main cupola atop the stately church in Russia’s former Imperial capital and sending clerics scurrying to save treasured icons.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert decided today to launch an expanded ground offensive in southern Lebanon, after expressing dissatisfaction over an emerging ceasefire deal, government officials said.

Israel’s army chief was briefly treated at a Tel Aviv hospital for exhaustion and stomach complaints today, Israel TV’s Channel One reported.

A persistent spell of extreme cold has caused more deaths among Russians stranded on frigid streets but failed to freeze the spirits of thousands who plunged into ice water for an annual ritual marking a Russian Orthodox Christian holiday.

The Russian and Ukrainian natural gas companies today agreed to resume gas shipments to Ukraine, but details of the deal were not known.

The toxic spill that poisoned a Chinese river and forced Chinese authorities to cut off drinking water for millions has crossed the Russian border, Russian media reported today.

The prime minister of Russia’s conflict-torn province of Chechnya was in a serious but stable condition today after a car crash outside Moscow that officials insisted was a traffic accident despite initial concerns about a possible assassination attempt.

Britain, France and the United States expect the UN Security Council will approve a tough resolution demanding that Syria co-operate with the investigation into the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

A British remote-controlled vehicle cut loose a Russian mini-submarine that had been snarled on undersea cables for three days deep in the Pacific, and it surfaced today with its crew safe.

Crews are racing to save a Russian mini-submarine trapped in the remote Pacific with seven sailors on board and oxygen supplies dwindling, navy officials said today.

The derailment of a train travelling from the Chechen capital Grozny to Moscow today was apparently caused by an explosion on the tracks, the Federal Security Service said.

Flowers dotted the streets and freshly-dug graves scarred the earth across the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan as residents mourned what witnesses said were hundreds killed by security forces last week – the worst unrest since the former Soviet republic won independence in 1991.

Gunfire persisted today in the eastern city where Uzbek security forces fired on protesters last week – a clash that reportedly left several hundred dead - and new reports emerged that violence in nearby towns killed hundreds more, further threatening the stability of the government.

Kyrgyzstan’s ousted President Askar Akayev said tonight he was prepared to resign if given “relevant” legal protections.

SABINA MAMAYEVA’S father remembers helping his wounded daughter after she escaped from the mayhem of the Beslan school siege.

Funeral processions filled the rainy streets of Beslan, carrying coffins large and small, as townspeople buried scores of victims of a carefully-planned school siege that prosecutors linked to a Chechen rebel leader.

A SHAKEN President Vladimir Putin went on national television this weekend to make a rare and candid admission of Russian weakness in the face of an "all-out war" by terrorists.

ONE Russian journalist commenting on the TV coverage said that in the first two days Russians, who relied on television for their news, might have not even have known that hundreds of hostages were being held in Beslan.

Ammunition explosions ripped through a military depot in southeastern Ukraine for a second day today, sending flames leaping dozens of feet into the air and showering surrounding villages with shells and shrapnel.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was inaugurated today, officially starting his second term with a solemn ceremony in an ornate Kremlin hall nearly two months after winning re-election as leader of the vast nation.

A SUICIDE bomber blew himself up on a crowded Jerusalem bus yesterday, killing eight people and wounding 59 in an attack Israeli officials said proved the need for the disputed separation barrier it is building.

A suicide bomber blew himself up on a crowded Jerusalem bus today, killing seven people and wounding 59 in an attack Israeli officials said proved the need for the disputed separation barrier it is building.

The vast glass roof covering a Moscow water park collapsed today, killing at least seven people, injuring nearly 70 and trapping others under the rubble, Mayor Yuri Luzhkov said.

The vast glass roof covering a Moscow water park collapsed today, killing at least two people and injuring about 60, the Interior Ministry said.

The main pro-Kremlin party competing in Russia's parliamentary elections was leading with a wide margin over the second-polling party, the Communists, the first exit poll results showed last night.

China launched its first manned space mission today, sending an astronaut hurtling into orbit and becoming the third country in Earth’s history to do so - four decades after the Soviet Union and the US.

Two military helicopters collided over an airfield in Russia’s Far East today, killing five people and injuring one, in the second fatal copter crash in a week, Russian news agencies reported.

A FIRE in a boarding school for the deaf in southern Russia killed 28 children and seriously injured 17 others yesterday, as rescuers raced from bed to bed to awaken students who could not hear alarms.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s attempt to indict Iraq over weapons of mass destruction and links to the terrorist group al-Qaida will comfort the converted, but may not persuade doubters that Washington has a cast-iron case for war.