Moscow/Kiev - A Russian Boeing 737 landed with its landing gear up on Thursday, suffering substantial damage but leaving passengers and crew unharmed.
The aircraft operated by the Russian airline KD Avia made the landing at the main airport of the Baltic port city Kaliningrad after a uneventful flight from Barcelona, Spain.
Moscow - The tragedy of the Russian school accident when five schoolgirls were killed in a stairwell collapse deepened Thursday when it became known that their teacher committed suicide.
Russian police were cited by the Interfax agency as saying that the teacher, 43 and herself the mother of two children, hanged herself.
The director of the school, located in the Orenburg district, 1,500 kilometres south-east of Moscow, had described how the teacher was "completely devastated" by Wednesday's stairwell collapse.
Besides the five schoolgirls in the 11th grade, six other youngsters were injured in the accident.
Berlin - Moscow will not let itself be drawn into a confrontation with the West, a senior Russian diplomat said Wednesday, one day before a top-level Russian-German meeting.
"We haven't broken off dialogue. We haven't pulled back the hand (of friendship)," ambassador to Berlin, Vladimir Kotenyev, said in an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
"We favour cooperation at international level with all players. Russia is not going to let itself be drawn into a confrontation."
Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel was set to meet with Russian leaders on Thursday in St Petersburg, Russia for annual talks.
Deauville, France - European Union defence ministers were due to meet in the French coastal town of Deauville on Wednesday as the bloc's observers began a delicate ceasefire monitoring mission in Georgia.
Some 350 observers from 22 EU countries are tasked with ensuring that Russian troops withdraw to the positions they held prior to the August conflict, as agreed in a September 8 peace deal brokered by French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Initial reports out of the South Caucasus indicated that the observers were having some difficulties being allowed into the buffer zones around South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Tbilisi/Moscow - EU observers started their mission Wednesday to monitor the Russo-Georgian ceasefire agreement one and half months after conflict flared between the two countries over Georgia's breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Russian troops still in Georgia prevented the observers from entering the security zone they set up around South Ossetia.
"It is not a categorical ban on the EU mission; it's just that the details of the monitoring mission have not been cleared up yet," a Russian military spokesman told Interfax news agency.
Moscow/Kiev - A Russian Boeing 737 landed with its landing gear up on Thursday, suffering substantial damage but leaving passengers and crew unharmed.
Moscow - The tragedy of the Russian school accident when five schoolgirls were killed in a stairwell collapse deepened Thursday when it became known that their teacher committed suicide.
Tbilisi/Moscow - EU observers started their mission Wednesday to monitor the Russo-Georgian ceasefire agreement one and half months after conflict flared between the two countries over Georgia's breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
