Mufti of Chechnya Sultan Mirzayev clarified on Monday that the jihad officially declared against Wahhabism on August 4 in the main mosque of the village of Tsentoroi is directed against “distorters of Islam” who call themselves Wahhabis, and not against the residents of Saudi Arabia, where Wahhabism is the official religion.

Greek police have arrested a man who claims to have received an SMS message from his brother on board a Cypriot Boeing that crashed in Greece. The arrested person was accused of disseminating false information. According to police, the list of passengers on the crashed plane does not include the name of the person who allegedly sent the message, UPI reports. agency The RIA Novosti names the arrested person - Sotiris Voutas.

The city administration unites the Lefortovo palace and park ensemble and the Kolomenskoye natural landscape museum into a united art historical-architectural and natural landscape museum-reserve. All buildings and structures of Lefortovo will become his property, RIA Novosti reports. Currently, Lefortovo Park is under the jurisdiction of the city authorities.

Well-known businessman Viktor Vekselberg, considered a possible candidate for the post of governor of the Kamchatka Territory, is going to buy a mansion in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, GAZETA.GZT.RU reports . One of the deputies of the regional Duma, who wished to remain anonymous, said that Vekselberg’s representatives have been searching for a suitable mansion in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky for a week.

Russian paratroopers conducted training in China in preparation for the upcoming Russian-Chinese joint exercise "Peace Mission 2005". This was reported by the Interfax agency with reference to the head of the press center of the exercise headquarters on the Russian side, Colonel Vyacheslav Sedov. “Russian military personnel were successfully landed at the Chinese Weibei training ground,” Sedov noted. He explained that 86 paratroopers were dropped from Il-76 military transport aircraft.

NBP supporters infiltrated the opening ceremony of the MAKS-2005 international air show , Interfax reports . According to journalists, several people wearing T-shirts with the symbols of the National Bolshevik Party scattered leaflets and shouted anti-government slogans during the opening of the salon. Several violators of public order were detained by law enforcement officers. Let us remind you that the international air show MAKS-2005 opened in Zhukovsky on Tuesday.

American nanotechnologists have used carbon nanotubes to reproduce the material that covers the limbs of geckos, reports WorldChanging.com. It is known that lizards are able to run up steep walls, and some time ago biologists were able to explain this by the special structure of the skin on the animal’s paws: it forms special bristles that reversibly “stick” to most surfaces.

Some of the 121 people killed in the Cypriot airliner crash on Sunday were still alive, although likely unconscious, when the plane hit the ground. This conclusion was reached by experts investigating the cause of the disaster, Reuters reports. The head of the expert commission said that at least six passengers had blood circulation in their internal organs until the destruction of the airliner.

Moscow authorities have ordered an increase in the territory intended for development within the framework of the Big City project. “Big City” will expand to Khoroshevskoye Highway, and from the west it will be limited by Filevsky Boulevard and Zarechnaya Street. Thus, the project area has been expanded by two hundred hectares, Vedomosti writes .

China criticized the proposal of Chad and a number of other countries on the so-called “Taiwan Participation in the UN,” XINHUA Online reports. Let us recall that earlier several countries, including Chad, proposed to consider at the next session of the UN General Assembly the issue of Taiwan's participation in this organization and a more active role of the UN in maintaining peace in the Taiwan Strait.

Georgy Zaseev, suspected of preparing and carrying out an explosion in the city of Gori, said that the terrorist attack “was ordered by instructors who were in the Russian peacekeeping forces in Tskhinvali,” Interfax reports . In front of a video camera of the press service of the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs, Zaseev said that he carried out the terrorist attack together with residents of South Ossetia Georgiy Valiev and Joseph Kochiev, who were detained on July 17.

On the eve of the start of the school year, 1,200 Russian schools, colleges and schools do not meet fire safety requirements, reports the RIA Novosti news agency . As Gennady Kirillov, the chief state inspector for fire supervision of the Ministry of Emergency Situations of Russia, said at a press conference on August 16, such data was received by rescuers by August 1. By that time, 85 thousand schools and vocational schools had been inspected for fire safety.

Tens of thousands of electricity customers in the northeastern states of the United States were without power on Monday. The cause of the massive outages was a severe hurricane that cut power lines, AP reports. The states of Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Jersey were affected by the disaster. In the last two, 50 and 70 thousand consumers were left without electricity, respectively.

By Tuesday evening, approximately 50 percent of Jewish settlers had left the Gaza Strip, Haaretz reported, citing the office of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Earlier it was reported that more than two-thirds of the residents were evacuated from the settlements. As stated in the office, the withdrawal of settlements is going according to plan. There are almost no Israeli residents left in the northern Gaza Strip.

August 15, 2005 - this date was designated in the Iraqi Transitional Administrative Law as the deadline for submitting the country's draft permanent constitution to parliament for discussion. And now the dead-line has passed, and the Iraqi political forces have not come to an agreement on the main document of the country.