RUSSIA

* Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reiterated Russia's call for a ban on the sale of offensive weapons to Georgia

* The Russian national side has returned to the FIFA top 10, taking ninth place in the latest rankings published on the website of international soccer's governing body

* Russian striker Roman Pavlyuchenko is expected to be out for three weeks with a partially torn knee ligament and will miss Russia's upcoming World Cup qualifiers against Germany and Finland

* Siberia's Chita District Court extended custody of jailed Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky until February 9, 2009, the deputy head of a local Khodorkovsky support group said

* A lawyer for the family of an Ingush journalist shot dead by police said a security official had been charged over the death, although the southern Russian republic's Interior Ministry could not confirm the information

* Court officials have stopped around 5,500 Muscovite debtors from leaving the country since the beginning of the year, the head of the Moscow department of the Federal Service of Court Bailiffs said

WORLD

* Russia completed the withdrawal of its peacekeepers from a buffer zone near South Ossetia, two days ahead of the agreed deadline, the commander of the Russian peacekeepers in the region said 

* Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said at an international conference in France: 

- Russia will complete the withdrawal of its peacekeeping troops from the buffer zones near South Ossetia and Abkhazia by the end of the day

- a new agreement on European security must lay out criteria for arms control and military force levels

- and called for tougher financial regulations to tackle the global financial crisis

* At least 11 people died, including a woman and a newborn baby, and 10 other were injured when a four-story building collapsed in Egypt's second largest city of Alexandria, the MENA news agency said

* Turkey's parliament extended for one year a mandate to conduct cross-border operations in northern Iraq against the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants

* Five people have been confirmed dead and 19 injured in an armed attack on a bus transporting students of a police school in southeast Turkey, the country's interior minister, Besir Atalay, said

* The death toll following an earthquake that hit southern Kyrgyzstan over the weekend has risen to 75 after a nine-year-old girl died in hospital, the country's emergencies minister, Kamchybek Tashyev, said 

* The Ukrainian president said he was giving members of parliament more time to form a new ruling coalition or agree to dissolve parliament, but he did not say how long they had

* The UN General Assembly approved Serbia's request that the UN International Court of Justice assess the legality of Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence

* Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi has reaffirmed his plans to step down from office next March, four years before his term ends, national media reported 

BUSINESS

* The U.S. stock market has suffered a $700 billion paper loss in a single session, as measured by the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 Composite Index, which tracks the stocks of 5,000 U.S.-based companies

* The Russian stock exchanges MICEX and RTS suspended trading from 11:05 a.m. Moscow time (07:05 GMT) after their indexes plunged shortly after opening, spokesmen for the exchanges reported

* Russia's state-owned Vnesheconombank (VEB) said it had struck a deal to buy a 98% stake in troubled Svyaz Bank for the symbolic sum of 5,000 rubles (about $192)

* Russian investment group Alrosa and railroad monopoly Russian Railways have signed a deal to buy a 90% stake in Russia's KIT Finance Investment Bank, the company said

* The International Monetary Fund revised Russia's 2008 GDP growth forecast from 7.1% to 7% and raised its inflation projection for the country from 13.8% to 14% amid the ongoing global financial crisis 

* A subsidiary of Polymetal, Russia's largest silver producer and one of the country's largest gold producers, has won a $1.2 million tender for a gold field in Russia's Far East, the company said 

* Sales of foreign cars in Russia rose 40% year-on-year in January-September 2008 to 1.6 million vehicles, the Association of European Businesses (AEB) said

* Trade between Russian and the Central Asian Republic of Turkmenistan has reached around $4 billion in the past 18 months, a senior Russian official said