* Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan urged during a telephone conversation that a comprehensive settlement plan for the Middle East crisis be reached apart from UN resolution 1701, the Foreign Ministry said
* The Lebanese military campaign has ended in victory for Israel by shifting the situation on the northern border in its favor, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Eddy Shapira, said
* Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych said:
- The Cabinet must reach a decision on the country's accession to the World Trade Organization by year's end
- Ukraine's government intends to abide by agreements on natural gas imports from Russia in effect since the beginning of the year
* Two miners were killed in a blast in a West Siberian coal mine and one is still missing, a regional official said
* Two men were killed and three people wounded after unidentified assailants opened fire on a minibus in southern Russia, police said
* Doctors said a six-year-old Russian girl had been killed and a Russian man wounded in an explosion that ripped apart a trolleybus in Moldova's breakaway region of Transdnestr Sunday
* Prosecutors in Uzbekistan said they had started an investigation into five refugees controversially extradited from neighboring Kyrgyzstan over a bloody uprising in Andijan last May
* Russia and Germany have signed a final agreement on the early repayment of part of Russia's Soviet-era debt to the Paris Club of Creditor Nations, a German Foreign Ministry spokesman said
* Russian Communications Minister Leonid Reiman said the government was prepared to allow state-controlled telecoms holding Svyazinvest to sell its minority stake in the Moscow City Telephone Network
* Ukrainian telecoms operator Kyivstar said its net profit rose 140% in the first six months of 2006 year-on-year to $243.901 million
* Russia's Rosneft said a consortium of banks had notified the state-owned oil company that it would exercise an option to float additional shares in the company
* Moscow's Arbitration Court upheld an appeal by VimpelCom, Russia's second-largest cell phone operator, against the communications watchdog, Rossviaznadzor, which denied the company a license to operate in the Far East
* The duty to draw up crude export schedules currently carried out by the Federal Energy Agency could be delegated to state-owned pipeline monopoly Transneft, the Industry and Energy Ministry said
* Russia's security services said five people had been arrested after a gang forging high-quality Russian rubles and U.S. dollars was broken up in southern Russia
* A total of 81 kilograms (180lb) of heroin from Afghanistan have been seized, two traffickers killed and five wounded in a special operation in five ex-Soviet republics, a senior Tajik border official said
