Madrid - Spanish champions Real Madrid announced Wednesday afternoon that defender Pepe would miss that night's Champions League home game with Juventus.

The Portuguese defender failed a late fitness test after pulling the quadriceps muscle in his left thigh in Sunday's 1-1 draw in an away game with Almeria. He has still not properly recovered.

Real coach Bernd Schuster will now have to decide whether to bring

in German central defender Christoph Metzelder, as he did against Almeria, or play Gabriel Heinze in the centre alongside Fabio Cannavaro. He would then put Marcelo at left-back instead of Heinze.

Berlin - A Russian forward deployment of short-range Iskander missiles is "the wrong signal," German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in Berlin Wednesday.

Moscow said earlier in the day the weapons would be moved to its Baltic Sea enclave of Kaliningrad, close to Poland.

Speaking after meeting with Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moller, Steinmeier rejected what he called the "new mentality of blocs."

Colombo - Sri Lanka's Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama on Wednesday congratulated US president-elect Barack Obama on his election victory and expressed confidence that Obama would support Sri Lankan counter-terrorism efforts.

"We are confident of your support for our efforts to forge a sustainable peace in Sri Lanka through the pursuit of democracy and countering terrorism", Bogollagama said.

Warsaw - Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Wednesday dismissed a Russian threat to deploy missiles near the Polish border to counter a planned US missile defence system.

"I wouldn't attach too much weight to these types of declarations," the Polish Press Agency quotes Tusk as saying.

Hours earlier, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said Moscow would deploy short-range missiles in its Baltic Sea enclave of Kaliningrad.

Washington - US President George W Bush on Wednesday congratulated Barack Obama on becoming the first African American ever elected to the White House and promised a smooth transition over the next two months.

"No matter how they cast their ballots, all Americans can be proud of the history that was made yesterday," Bush said in a brief statement at the White House Rose Garden. "Many of our citizens thought they would never live to see that day."

Mogadishu/Paris - A group of armed Somali men have kidnapped six foreigners - four aid workers and two pilots - near the town of Dusamareb in central Somalia on Wednesday, the French government confirmed on Wednesday.

In a statement issued in Paris, the foreign ministry said that two French citizens working for a French NGO were among those abducted.

The Belgian State Department had said earlier that one of the kidnap victims was a Belgian national.