* The Russian and U.S. presidents will discuss the proposed deployment of a U.S. missile shield in Central Europe Thursday, a Russian presidential aide said
* NATO member states consider the re-drafted Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE) a key document and are ready to ratify it, a NATO spokesman said in Brussels
* The U.S. missile defense system should eventually be able to defend all of continental Europe, NATO's secretary general said
* Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said:
- Russia will not raise the issue of its possible withdrawal from the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty at a conference in Vienna in mid-June
- He was surprised at an allegation from a senior U.S. official that Russia has not cooperated enough with Britain in the case of Alexander Litvinenko
* Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law removing investigators from the jurisdiction of the Prosecutor General's Office, in a move to separate supervisory bodies from investigations
* German police used water cannons to disperse G8 protesters who turned violent at the G8 summit, German media reported
* Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert were invited to a meeting of the quartet of Middle East peace mediators on June 25
* South Ossetia, a breakaway republic of Georgia, started drilling its own artesian wells to resume water supplies amid a two-week water crisis with Georgia in extremely high temperatures
* A senior World Bank official, John Litwack, predicted further economic growth and a stronger national currency for Russia in 2007, but said its year-end inflation may surpass an 8% government target by one or two percentage points
* Russian energy giant Gazprom acquired a 12.5% stake in Beltransgaz, the first of four installments under a deal with Belarus' gas pipeline operator, the Belta news agency said
* A U.S. telecommunications satellite, DirecTV-10, was delivered to a space center in Kazakhstan in preparation for a launch scheduled for the first half of July, a leading Russian space company said
* The United States is planning to conduct three test launches of ballistic missile interceptors by the end of September as part of its missile defense program, a spokesman for Missile Defense Agency (MDA) said
* At least 20 Islamic extremists surrendered in the north of Lebanon in what local Palestinian envoys see as a lost cause, the local media said
* U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Matthew Bryza said pipelines in the Caspian region bypassing Russia did not spell confrontation with the country's energy giant Gazprom
* The Basque separatist group ETA has at least 100 well-armed members and an excellent structure for organizing terrorist attacks across Spain, a newspaper reported, citing police sources
*A senior World Bank official said Russia's annual inflation could surpass the government's target of 8% by one or two percentage points in 2007
* The Turkish Army is conducting the largest military operation against Kurdish separatists in the southeast of the country in the past few years, local media reported
* A former Soviet dissident living in London and a 2008 Russian presidential nominee said Wednesday that he doubted he could run in the polls, but that he hoped to consolidate opposition in the country
* U.S. House of Representatives unanimously approved a resolution supporting the Estonian government following recent violence over the removal of a Soviet-era war memorial and protests outside the Estonian embassy in Russia
* The Storskog checkpoint on the Russia-Norway border will be the first stop on Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg's itinerary as he arrives on a visit to Russia
* A German man who jumped a security barrier into Pope Benedict XVI's open 'popemobile' during a public audience on St. Peter's Square was overpowered by security guards Wednesday and sent to a mental hospital, the Vatican press service said.
* Russia is considering the possibility of extending a $1.5 million stabilization loan to Belarus on a stage-by-stage basis, the finance minister said
