Moscow - Spartak Moscow have sacked their Danish coach Michael Laudrup after just seven months due to poor results, the Russian football club announced on Thursday.

Laudrup, 44, who took the Spartak job in September 2008, had to leave the day after Spartak lost a cup match 3-0 against Dynamo Moscow, with manager Valeri Karpin now acting as caretaker.

Spartak finished a modest eighth last season and also had a poor start into the domestic league with one win from four games for 10th place.

Moscow  - Russia has branded a planned two-day NATO military exercise in Georgia as a provocation, and called for it to be postponed, according to the Interfax news agency.

Russia's ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, said the planned manoeuvres in May would cause serious concern in Moscow.

Eight months on from last August's conflict between Russia and Georgia, relations between Moscow and NATO are still strained.

Moscow/Paris - A long and bitter custody battle over a Franco-Russian three-year-old girl turned political on Tuesday when Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov demanded that she be returned to her Russian mother. "We are going to do everything necessary to protect our citizens," Lavrov was quoted as saying by news agency Interfax about Elise, who was turned over to her French father on Monday - three weeks after her Russian mother had snatched her from him.

Moscow - Two Russian biathletes who tested positive at the recent national championships were named by Russian news agency RIA Novosti Tuesday as Andrey Prokunin und Veronika Timofeyeva. The agency cited confidential sources for its report but there was no comment from the Russian biathlon federation.

A-samples of the two skiers tested positive for the blood-booster EPO, it was reported. Follow-up B-samples will be returned next week.

Chisinau/Moscow - A 23-year-old man who was arrested by police in anti-government protests in Moldova earlier in the week has died in hospital, according to reports Sunday. The man had been beaten in detention, leading to his death, the Interfax news agency reported, quoting the protestor's parents. Police denied knowledge of the case.

Moldova's opposition meanwhile on Sunday called another large rally.

Protests in the capital Chisinau against the Communist election win on Tuesday turned violent, with some 270 people injured and about 200 arrested.

Moscow - Russia on Sunday re-opned its cosmonauts museum after three years of renovation and expansion work. The Moscow museum, opened on the annual Cosmonauts Day, is four times as large as the previous faciltiy.

Moscow mayor Yuri Luskhov said at the opening ceremonies that Russia now had a museum where people could grasp the "magnificence of space." There was nothing comparable to it anywhere else in the world.