* The U.K. Embassy in Moscow said British authorities treated the Litvinenko affair as a criminal case of key importance and rejected Lavrov's allegations
* The U.K. Foreign Office responded to Moscow's accusations of politicizing the Litvinenko affair by saying Britain had no plans to aggravate diplomatic relations with Russia over the Litvinenko case
* Deputy Russian Interior Minister Arkady Yedelyov said:
- There is strong evidence that Alexander Litvinenko visited Chechnya to eliminate witnesses linking London-based tycoon Boris Berezovsky to late terrorist warlord Shamil Basayev
- There is evidence that militants who attacked the capital of a North Caucasus republic in 2005 were linked to Western secret services
* U.S. President George W. Bush told German television that Russian leader Vladimir Putin's remarks about Washington's plans to deploy a missile shield in Europe were harsh rhetoric
* An Islamic Web site posted a video showing kidnapped BBC journalist Alan Johnston accusing Western countries of causing violence in the Muslim world, and saying his captors were treating him well
* Customs officials in Russia's Urals region launched an investigation into an attempt to smuggle abroad technical documents that could be used to produce weapons of mass destruction, a customs service spokesman said
* Kazakh Prime Minister Karim Masimov said Russia's Gazprom and Kazakhstan's KazMunaiGaz signed a series of agreements to set up a joint venture to process Kazakh natural gas
* Ukraine's parliament set a 50% minimum voter turnout requirement and banned absentee ballots for the early parliamentary election
* Iran proposed giving the International Atomic Energy Agency access to its nuclear facilities previously uncontrolled by the organization, Spanish radio said citing diplomatic sources
* Russia's customs service denied media reports that it had suspended the export of human clinical specimens, and stressed it had only imposed certain restrictions
* Russian customs proposed that special "meat checkpoints" be set up at border ports to prevent smuggling
* The upper house of the Japanese parliament extended by six months a sanction banning North Korean ships from entering the country's ports
* Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov said the construction of a pipeline to pump Central Asian gas along the Caspian Sea coast and through Russia would begin in the second half of 2008
* Fuel for Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant can be shipped from West Siberia within three days, an expert at the Novosibirsk nuclear fuel production facility said
* Russian nuclear fuel manufacturer TVEL said an agreement had been reached with French firm Areva to jointly produce fuel for a British nuclear plant
* The two-unit Temelin nuclear power plant, the largest in the Czech Republic, plans to start using Russian nuclear fuel in 2009, Russian nuclear fuel manufacturer TVEL said
* Rosinter Restaurants Holding, a leading restaurant operator in Russia and other former Soviet republics, will float its shares on the RTS stock exchange at $32 per share, the company said in a statement
* Legislators in the Amur Region and the Kamchatka Territory in Russia's Far East elected new governors
* NASA confirmed that the launch of its Atlantis shuttle to the International Space Station will take place on June 8, after a three-month delay
* The Russian Ground Forces commander said Russia would hold a counterterrorism military exercise with China and other members of the "Shanghai Six" in August
* Former Bosnian Serb general Zdravko Tolimir was detained and handed over to the United Nations criminal tribunal on former Yugoslavia to face war crimes charges
