The Russian Information Agency Novosti begins Hotline coverage for Saturday, April 24, 2004.
MOSCOW
* Alexander Rumyantsev, head of the Federal Nuclear Power Industry Agency, will appear in a Mayak 24 radio company live cast. The program, "The People and Power: Questions and Answers", offers a special issue, "Chernobyl Lessons", on a sinister anniversary. The Unit Four reactor blasted at Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986.
* Speaker Sergei Mironov of the Federation Council, parliament's upper house, will receive on the Council premises a team of CIS Inter-parliamentary Assembly observers after their sojourn in Serbia-Montenegro.
* The Motherland Popular Patriotic Union, led by Sergei Glazyev, will hold its 2nd congress to sum up last month's federal presidential election, debate party Regulations amendments, and tackle certain other issues.
VELIKY NOVGOROD
* The Novgorod Region, in Russia's northwest, is to open a spring Memory Watch on local World War II battlefields. 65 search teams from all over Russia will look for unburied and unidentified soldier remains. The Watch finishes on May 8.
WASHINGTON, D. C.
* IMF and World Bank leading offices are to have a spring session, Alexei Kudrin, Russia's Finance Minister, attending. Scheduled for the day are his conferences with Alan Larsen, US Assistant Secretary of State for economics; James Wolfenssohn, World Bank President; and Hans Eichel, Germany's federal Finance Minister.
CYPRUS
* Cypriots will go to the polls on a referendum, United Nations brainchild meant to clarify prospects for reuniting the Greek and Turkish parts of the island.
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