Kiev/Chisinau  - The known death toll from some of the worst flooding in a century in the Ukraine and Moldova rose to 22 as the two countries battled on Monday to control the damage.

Ukrainian television showed images of rivers overflowing embankments, and two critical hydroelectric dams under threat of collapse due to still-rising waters.

Close to 20,000 persons were temporarily homeless, having been evacuated from the hardest-hit areas concentrated along the Dniestr River flood plain, and the Carpathian Mountain section of Ukraine, officials from the Ministry of Emergency Situations (MES) said.

Kiev  - Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko on Thursday accused a former close advisor of complicity in a plot to kill him by poisoning.

David Zhvania, a key figure in Ukraine's 2004 pro-democracy Orange Revolution, had been personally involved in a plot to kill him the same year, Yushchenko told reporters, according to an Interfax news agency report.

Kiev - Ukrainian Communists used their bodies to block a landings by marines and armoured vehicles participating in a NATO exercise, the Interfax news agency reported Thursday.

The incident took place in Ukraine's southern Crimea province as naval infantry units from Ukraine, Georgia, and Macedonia attempted an amphibious landing on a beach of Donuzlav lake.

Some three dozen Communist activists despite the early 5am hour were on hand on the lake's shore waving red banners, the Russian naval ensign, and the Russian tricolour.

Kiev- Jewish community leaders in southern Ukraine have protested to the central government over a real estate project planned on a Holocaust grave site, the Interfax news agency reported Wednesday.

The Jewish Council of Odessa, a Black Sea port city, in an open letter to Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, said plans to revamp the town's Tolbukhin Square should be stopped out of respect to possibly tens of thousands of persons killed and buried there during the Second World War.

Kiev- Ukrainian police confiscated videotape shot by a Russian television crew for a programme about a dispute within the Orthodox Christian church, Korrespondent magazine reported Friday.

The incident took place at Borispil airport in the Ukrainian capital Kiev after Artem Shirokov, a reporter for the Moscow-based TVTs television channel, attempted to board an aircraft home.

Ukrainian customs officers searching Shirokov's effects took into custody five videotapes shot by the Russian journalist and his crew of interviews with leaders of Ukraine's Orthodox Christian church.

Kiev  - The World Bank on Friday revised upwards Ukraine's predicted inflation rate for 2008 to 21.5 per cent, the Interfax news agency reported.

The bank had been predicting 17 per cent inflation, but galloping food and energy prices made that expectation unrealistic, said Ruslan Piontovsky, a bank spokesman.

The bank also suggested overall Ukrainian GDP growth will be at a relatively strong 6 per cent on the strength of demand for key Ukrainian export products such as steel, foodstuffs, and chemicals.

But growth would fall to between 4 and 5 per cent during 2009 and 2010, Pointkovsky said.