One of the leaders of the "Union of Right Forces", the leader of the Duma SPS faction Boris Nemtsov said on Monday that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko "is playing a double game" in the process of creating a union state of Russia and Belarus. It is reported by RIA Novosti.

Veliky Novgorod held preliminary court hearings on the murder of the famous Russian writer Dmitry Balashov, RIA Novosti reports. According to Konstantin Pakin, the defendant's lawyer Yevgeny Mikhailov, at the preliminary hearing in the Novgorod District Court on Monday, he submitted several motions to exclude a number of evidence from the indictment. In the materials of the case in question, Pakin's client, in particular, confessed to committing the murder.

George Yartsev. Photo from Newsru.com The head coach of the Russian national football team Georgy Yartsev announced the composition of the national team for a match with Ireland. At a press conference in Moscow on Tuesday, he said that Ovchinnikov, Malafeev and Akinfeev would be invited by goalkeepers to the team.

Early elections of a new governor of the Sakhalin region in connection with the tragic death of the head of this subject of the Russian Federation, Igor Farkhutdinov, will most likely be held on December 7, 2003 and will be combined with the elections of deputies to the State Duma of the Russian Federation. This was announced at a press conference on Tuesday by the first deputy chairman of the Sakhalin Regional Duma Lyubov Shubina.

An-70. Photo from the site www.rus.air.ru On Monday, August 25, Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov signed an order according to which the financing of work under the program of the AN-70 average military transport aircraft will not be provided for by stateborne defense-offs for 2004, as previously planned.

In the Moscow District Military Court, at the retrial of the criminal case on the murder of Dmitry Kholodov, a journalist from the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper, the indictment continued on Tuesday. According to a RIA Novosti correspondent, the announcement of the indictment began on Monday. The court session is held at an exit session in the building of the 45th Airborne Regiment in Sokolniki, from which all six defendants come.

On Monday, the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm announced the dates for the announcement of Nobel Prize winners and the amount of remuneration. A press release published on the Foundation's official website states that the Nobel Prize winner in Medicine will be named on October 6, in Physics on October 7, in Chemistry and Economics on October 8, and the Peace Prize winner on October 10. By tradition, the date of the Literature Prize will be announced later.

Over the weekend, the server of the SCO Group Corporation suffered from a denial-of-service attack, according to CNET News.com, and was offline until Monday morning. Company representatives do not know anything about the origin of the attack. The last DDoS attack on the server took place in May, when SCO stepped up its military operations against IBM Corporation and the Linux community.

Four more organizations put their signatures under an agreement on the joint activities of the People's Patriotic Coalition, formed by the leader of the Congress of Russian Communities, Sergei Glazyev. According to RIA Novosti, today the All-Russian public movement "Union of Orthodox Citizens", the People's Republican Party of Russia, the party of the National Patriotic Forces of Russia, as well as the Federal Lezgi National Cultural Autonomy have joined.

Former Prosecutor General Yuri Skuratov will go to the parliamentary elections as part of the Communist Party.

Alexey Kudrin. Photo from the site www.lenta.ru In the budget-2004, the project of which will submit a number of structural budgetary reforms, including the formation of a stabilization fund, on Tuesday, the government on Tuesday. About this, as Interfax reports, said Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Finance of the Russian Federation Alexei Kudrin, opening an operational meeting in the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation on a draft budget for 2004 on Tuesday.

On the administrative border of Dagestan and Chechnya, there was a skirmish between Dagestan and Chechen policemen. This was reported to RIA "Novosti" by the duty officer of the "Dagestan border" department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Dagestan. "At the Gerzel checkpoint, a skirmish broke out between the policemen," the officer on duty said.

Grani.ru collage On Monday, Minister of Antimonopoly Policy and Support of Russian Entrepreneurship Ilya Yuzhanov announced the decision of the Ministry of the Ministry of Defense on the creation of the TNK-BP LTD holding. "On August 25, MAP satisfied several petitions for transactions, the purpose of which is to create a new oil and gas holding - TNK -BP LTD.

On Monday, law enforcement officers of the Internal Affairs Directorate of the Adler District confiscated a Kalashnikov assault rifle and 30 rounds of ammunition from a tourist in the village of Krasnaya Polyana, Krasnodar Territory. As Interfax was told by a source in law enforcement agencies of the Adlerovsky district, weapons and ammunition were confiscated in a tent at the Achishkho shelter.

In recent months, Iran has been cooperating more actively than before, according to a new IAEA report, but so far the agency cannot claim that Tehran is not producing enriched uranium. Iran, reports Reuters, admitted to the IAEA that it conducted similar experiments in the early 1990s. Now Tehran claims that there are no developments for the production of enriched uranium in the country.