MOSCOW - The Russian Foreign Ministry says Russia plans no military actions in response to the increased presence of U.S. ships in the Black Sea.

Foreign Ministry official Andrei Nesterenko made the comments Friday just before the flagship of the U.S. Navy’s Mediterranean fleet arrived in the key Georgian port of Poti.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin earlier had openly questioned the presence of NATO and US ships and pledged an unspecified response. Nesterenko says international treaties regulate the presence of naval ships in the Black Sea.

Source: yahoo

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BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) — European Union leaders will assess the impact of their fraying relations with Moscow at a summit chaired by French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Monday. But they face limited options to punish Russia for invading Georgia and recognizing the independence of its Abkhazia and South Ossetia provinces.

Taking a cue from the NATO alliance, the 27 European leaders are expected to strongly support Georgia’s territorial integrity, to signal that normal relations with Moscow are impossible with Russian troops violating a cease-fire agreement, and to offer more humanitarian, economic and moral support for Georgia, the embattled pro-Western Caucasus state.

EU officials said the bloc’s leaders will likely opt for diplomatic pressure to isolate Russia as an unreliable partner and neighbor.

“Russia’s commitment to a relationship of understanding and cooperation with the rest of Europe is in doubt,” Sarkozy wrote in a pre-summit letter to the EU leaders. “It’s up to Russia today to make a fundamental choice” and to engage neighbors and partners in settling disputes peacefully, he wrote.

A copy of the letter was obtained by The Associated Press.

Sarkozy, who country now holds the EU presidency, wrote that the leaders must “seriously examine relations between the European Union and Russia,” adding that he counted on a “clear and united message” to Moscow.

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(CNN) — Hurricane Gustav began to lash the southern Louisiana coastline early Monday as it moved closer to an expected midday landfall, according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

While forecasters said it could intensify a bit before moving inland, it will not likely be the Category 4 storm that had been predicted — a possibility that added urgency to mass evacuation orders in recent days.

Nearly all of the roughly 2 million people in coastal Louisiana and the New Orleans area had cleared out ahead of Hurricane Gustav on Sunday night.

Road, rail and air links out of New Orleans began to close as the first storm bands began to strike the city. But more than 1.9 million people had fled New Orleans and its surrounding parishes by Sunday night, and fewer than 10,000 people were thought to remain in New Orleans, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal said, citing the city’s police chief.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin had demanded an evacuation of the city, which still is recovering from 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. Forecasters warned Gustav — a Category 3 storm Sunday night — could hit Louisiana with devastating effect by early Monday afternoon.

Jindal said New Orleans’ levees should “barely hold or barely be overtopped” if the storm, as predicted Sunday evening, hit southwest of the city.

But even a slight shift to the east could bring “very significant flooding in these areas,” he said.

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MANILA, Philippines - Authorities say a homemade bomb has exploded at a bus terminal in the southern Philippines, killing four people and injuring more than a dozen.

Regional police chief Andres Caro says Monday’s blast targeted the bus terminal in Digos city in Davao del Sur province.

The explosion comes as government troops have been fighting Moro Islamic Liberation Front rebels on the opposite side of the main southern region of Mindanao.

It is not clear if the blast is related to the government’s offensive against the rebels.

The provincial hospital in Davao del Sur says four people died in the explosion and 21 were injured, some of them seriously.

Source: yahoo.com

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BEIJING, China (CNN) — An earthquake hit southwest China Saturday, killing 22 people, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.

The United States Geological Survey measured the quake as a 5.7-magnitude.

The quake hit Panzhihua City in Sichuan province. By Saturday night, 17 people were reported dead and about 100 others injured in Sichuan, Xinhua said. In neighboring Yunnan province, five people died and 35 others were injured, the news agency said.

In addition, nearly 1,000 houses were destroyed and cracks appeared in walls of more than 400 houses, according to Xinhua.

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HAVANA - Gustav roared into the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico as a ferocious Category 4 hurricane Sunday after destroying homes and roads in Cuba. The mayor of New Orleans ordered residents to flee the “storm of the century” by morning.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Gustav weakened slightly over Cuba but was expected to regain strength as it moves over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and toward the U.S. Coast, possibly becoming a top-scale Category 5 hurricane on Sunday.

Forecasters said Gustav was just short of Category 5 strength when it made landfall Saturday on mainland Cuba near the community of Los Palacios in Pinar del Rio — a region that produces much of the tobacco used to make the nation’s famed cigars.

At least 300,000 people were evacuated from Gustav’s path as screaming 140 mph (220 kph) winds toppled telephone poles and fruit trees, shattered windows and tore off the tin roofs of homes.

Cuban Civil defense chief Ana Isla said there were “many people injured” on Isla de la Juventud, an island of 87,000 people south of the mainland, but no reports of deaths. She said nearly all the island’s roads were washed out and some regions were heavily flooded.

“It’s been very difficult here,” she said on state television.

Forecasters said Gustav could hit Category 5 — the highest on the Saffir-Simpson scale used to rate tropical cyclones — with winds above 155 mph (249 kph) on Sunday. It was expected to make landfall Monday along the U.S. Gulf coast, and authorities issued a hurricane watch from eastern Texas to the Alabama-Florida border.

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BAQOUBA, Iraq - The government offices in Iraq’s Diyala province are encased in thick blast walls, a shield against suicide bombings. Nearby buildings are pockmarked from fighting between U.S. troops and Sunni insurgents.

Diyala has proven one of the toughest pieces of Iraqi real estate to control despite several major U.S. and Iraqi military operations.

The stakes are high. The corridor between the provincial capital of Baqouba and Baghdad, 35 miles to the southwest, has been a key conduit for the trafficking of weapons and foreign fighters into the Iraqi capital.

Diyala’s proximity to Iran also makes it a strategically important to the United States, which accuses Tehran of supporting Shiite militias.

But signs of stability are emerging in Baqouba and surrounding areas as a new U.S.-backed Iraqi offensive enters its second month. The unanswered question is whether the latest attempt to pacify Diyala will succeed where others faltered.

The U.S. military has pinned its hopes on improved Iraqi security forces, with the government sending thousands of additional troops to the province for the new push.

“The Iraqi surge is the major differentiator with previous operations,” Michael Knights, a military and security analyst with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said in a telephone interview.

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(CNN) — Nine of the 12 men whose decapitated bodies were found Thursday in the state of Yucatan have criminal records, Jose Alonso Guzman, attorney for the state, said Friday.

Yucatan’s governor, Ivonne Ortega Pacheco, said the killings appeared to be the result of disputes between drug cartels.

Police were alerted to the bodies — 11 in Chichi Suarez and one in Buctzotz — late Thursday afternoon by an anonymous caller, Guzman said.

The heads have not been found, said Yetel Castillo of the department of communication for Yucatan.

According to The Associated Press, photos of the crime scene showed headless corpses stacked on top of one another in a field outside the city of Merida. Some of the bodies had tattoos and were jumbled amid blankets and tarps.

It appeared to be the largest single group of beheadings in recent years in Mexico, AP said.

The tactic has become more frequent in gangland-style killings, and the largest previous instance of decapitations occurred in 2006, when gunmen tossed five human heads into a bar in central Mexico, the agency added.

Source: CNN.com

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KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghan officials said Thursday that a deadly U.S.-led special forces raid on a remote western village last week was based on misleading information provided by a rival clan.

It was the latest twist in a tangled debate over what happened. U.N. officials say the raid killed up to 90 civilians, most of them children. A NATO official said U.S. and Afghan troops were fired on first, touching off a battle of several hours that killed 25 militants and five civilians.

The U.S. government is pressing for a joint U.S.-Afghan probe in hopes of reaching a common conclusion. Two Pentagon officials said Thursday a U.S. review concluded civilian deaths were far fewer than claimed by others. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the report had not been made public, said the findings were given to Afghan leaders.

Evidence from all sides has been scant, with no conclusive photos or video emerging to shed light on what happened in Azizabad on Aug. 22. But the claim of high civilian casualties, also made by Afghan officials, is causing new friction between President Hamid Karzai and his Western backers.

Karzai has castigated Western commanders over civilian deaths from military operations, saying they create anger among Afghans that the Taliban and other insurgents use as leverage to turn Afghans away from the government.

Claims of civilian deaths can be tricky, however. Relatives of Afghan victims are given condolence payments by Karzai’s government and U.S. military, providing an incentive to make false claims.

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(CNN) — Russia defended its recognition of two independence-seeking Georgian provinces as a U.S. ship carrying aid docked in Georgia on Wednesday.

The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Dallas bypassed its original destination, the Georgian port of Poti, which is controlled by Russian troops still in the country despite a cease-fire deal to end conflict between the two countries.

The Dallas carried 80 pallets with more than 76,000 pounds of relief supplies, the U.S. Sixth Fleet public affairs office said in a statement, including hygiene items, food, milk and juices.

The cutter is delivering aid as part of a larger U.S. program that has delivered supplies worth at least $20 million to Georgia.

More than 50 U.S. military flights have also landed in Georgia. And a U.S. Navy ship — the USS McFaul — recently arrived at the Batumi port with 155,000 pounds of bottled water, milk, baby food and other items, the U.S. Navy said.

The United States says it has also delivered sanitation facilities, tents, bedding and dry and canned goods to Georgia.

Russia has criticized the U.S. program to deliver $20 million of aid to Georgia. One general labeled the move “devilish,” according to The Associated Press.

Russia’s recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia Tuesday raised the stakes in a stand-off between the West and Moscow over the future of the provinces and of Georgia.

Russian military entered Georgia proper from the provinces in early August after Georgian troops attacked separatists in South Ossetia. Russia called it an extension of their peacekeeping duties. The West and Georgia called it an invasion.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said recognizing South Ossetia and Abkhazia “was not a step taken lightly, or without full consideration of the consequences.”

In an op-ed that appeared Tuesday night on The Financial Times Web site, he said Georgia was fighting a “vicious war on its minority nations.”

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