Yesterday in Luxembourg, Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül met with the foreign ministers of Finland, which is presiding over the European Union and Germany, which is taking over the presidency in the next six months - Erkki Tuomioja and Frank-Walter Steinmeier, as well as European Commission (EC) Commissioner for Enlargement Olli Rehn. On November 8, Mr. Ren will present a report on the progress of reforms being carried out in Turkey to bring it closer to EU standards.

Yesterday, Swedish Culture Minister Cecilia Stego Cilo was forced to resign. For 16 years, she evaded paying the mandatory subscription fee for television and paying taxes for hiring a housekeeper. This is the second member of the new government led by Frederick Reinfeld to resign. Two days earlier, Trade Minister Maria Borelius left the cabinet after being convicted of similar violations.

The new chairman of the board of directors of RUSAL, Andrew MICHELMORE, told Vremya Novostei correspondent Anna LANDER that changes in the composition of the board were planned long before the announcement of the deal to merge RUSAL with SUAL and Glencore. -- Is your appointment to the post of Chairman of the Board of Directors of RUSAL related to the deal announced last week to merge the company with SUAL and Glencore assets? Will you be involved in immediate preparations for the merger?

In the north and center of European Russia, weather conditions will be dictated by the Atlantic cyclone in the next 24 hours; it is already approaching the Murmansk region, and is expected in the Polar Urals on Wednesday.

Russia and NATO today do not consider themselves likely adversaries. At least this is officially declared. Russia and the North Atlantic Alliance actively cooperate within the framework of the Russia-NATO Council, but their positions on a number of key military-political issues can hardly be called similar. One of the problems is the deployment of a new missile defense system in Europe and Moscow's negative attitude towards this project.

Oleg Deripaska resigned as head of the board of directors of RUSAL The leadership of RUSAL has changed: during the formation of the united company, which will include RUSAL, SUAL and the alumina assets of the Swiss Glencore, Oleg Deripaska will be replaced as chairman of the board of directors by the former head of the Australian WMC, Andrew Michelmore, who was hired by him six months ago. However, Mr. Deripaska will retain his membership on the board of directors of RUSAL.

Israeli police collected materials on President Katsav “President Moshe Katsav must resign immediately,” said Israeli government legal adviser Menachem Mazuz yesterday after reviewing the investigation into the 60-year-old Israeli president. “If Katsav had seen the evidence presented by the police, he would have immediately resigned so as not to embarrass Israeli society by the very fact of his being in such an important position,” Mazuz said.

Valentina Matvienko does not want to become Putin's successor, but dreams of a second term as governor Following the example of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Governor of St. Petersburg, Valentina Matvienko, annually holds a large “reporting” press conference. Yesterday she summed up the results of her three years of managing the city. The townspeople learned practically nothing new from her speeches - except that she has not changed her hairdresser for 25 years.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will visit Kyiv on November 7-8. According to official representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Mikhail Kamynin, the parties are working to ensure that the meeting between Sergei Lavrov and his Ukrainian counterpart Boris Tarasyuk “is not a failure.” In Kyiv, Mr. Lavrov will take part in the work of a subcommittee within the interstate commission. Ivan SOLOVIEV

Public organizations of Abkhazia yesterday handed over to the president and chairman of the parliament of the unrecognized republic an appeal to begin negotiations with Russia on the recognition of Abkhazia as an independent state and on the establishment of long-term contractual relations with Russia. Independence, the appeal says, must be recognized on the basis of the right of peoples to self-determination and the results of the referendum in Abkhazia held in 1999.

Stereotypes of perception The question of the role of religion in modern development, which, it would seem, should become increasingly anachronistic in the age of unprecedented scientific and technological progress and super-technologies, has again found itself at the center of political discussion. Statements that we live in an era of “clash of civilizations” have become a commonplace, and a religious factor is increasingly being discerned behind various conflicts.

Russia ignored the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative The third conference of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) will conclude today in Oslo. Despite words of support for this event in the final communiqué of the G8 summit in St. Petersburg, the organizers failed to recruit new participants. And the country richest in natural resources - Russia (which also hosted the G8 group this year) - completely ignored the conference.

The value of YUKOS assets will be determined by companies that have worked with state monopolies more than once A consortium of five Russian companies led by ROSECO (it also includes NP Consult, Russian Assessment, KO-INVEST and the BINOM Appraisal Firm) will evaluate YUKOS assets during the bankruptcy procedure. As stated in the press service of YUKOS bankruptcy manager Eduard Rebgun, this company won a competition in which there were 13 participants (their names are not disclosed).

Tu-204 takes on the features of a small Airbus Design Bureau named after. A.N. Tupolev began designing a modification of the Tu-204 passenger aircraft, which in terms of technical and economic characteristics will be close to the Airbus A320 and A321. Until now, the domestic aviation industry has not produced direct analogues of these medium-range aircraft. Aircraft of the A320 family, manufactured by the European concern Airbus, are already being actively supplied to Russia.

The government and investors are concerned about the image of Russia Anniversaries are celebrated in different ways. The leadership of the Russian cabinet of ministers and Western businessmen gathered at the 20th meeting of the Foreign Investment Board to say to each other's faces, as they themselves admitted: “honestly and directly,” that they are not satisfied. And we found out that at first glance everything was fine.