Main news of August 13

RUSSIA

* The prince of Monaco arrived by helicopter with Russia's president at an island fortress in south Siberia's Tuva Republic, near the Mongolian border

* Oleg Mitvol, a senior environmental official, who presided over a series of high-profile probes, denied media reports that he was in membership talks with a Kremlin-backed party and planned to run for parliament

WORLD

* India's prime minister said a nuclear cooperation deal reached with the United States in July did not restrict New Delhi's "sovereign right" to carry out weapons tests

* NASA has prolonged the Endeavour shuttle's visit to the International Space Station, where it has been docked since Friday, until August 20, the agency's Web site said

* Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko suspended the cabinet's decree to create state-run atomic-industrial concern Ukratomprom

* China has no intention of selling its international reserves denominated in U.S. dollars, a spokesman for the country's Central Bank said

* Russia is not allowing China to re-export its RD-93 engines for Chinese-made fighters to Pakistan, an Indian newspaper said Monday on its website

* Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko asked the Central Election Commission to reconsider registering Yulia Tymoshenko's bloc for the election campaign, a presidential spokesperson said

* Peacekeepers said Georgia's refusal to join monitoring efforts in breakaway South Ossetia was proving an obstacle to investigations into the alleged dropping of a missile near the region a week ago

* Seventeen illegal migrants were confirmed dead and 19 missing after a small boat overturned in the Indian Ocean near the French-administered island of Mayotte, local media reported

* India's Ambassador to Russia Kanwal Sibal said that the project to build a natural gas pipeline to link Iran, Pakistan and India could secure extra safety guarantees if Russian energy giant Gazprom became involved

* Chairman of Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) Madhavan Nair said the country is planning to launch a reusable spacecraft for the first time in 2010 and to send a mission to Mars as early as 2012

* An independent team of foreign experts launched a probe into the alleged firing of a missile August 6 near the Georgian border with its breakaway province of South Ossetia

* Spain's Supreme Court ruled that the territory of the Hoya Fria military base be returned to the heirs of its former owners, who donated the land to the Franco regime in late 1930's, a court spokesman said

* The widow of the first Georgian president since the collapse of the Soviet Union announced that she had started an indefinite hunger strike in front of Tbilisi's City Hall, in the Georgian capital

BUSINESS

* VimpelCom has bought 100% of shares in Severnaya Korona, a mobile operator based in Siberia's Irkutsk Region, from Sweden's Tele2 AB for $232 million, Russia's second largest cellular operator said

* Russian state-controlled crude producer Rosneft said it had filed an application for an auction to sell an overseas subsidiary of the now bankrupt oil firm Yukos

* Russian electricity monopoly Unified Energy System (UES) is planning to offer additional share issues of its eight wholesale and territorial power generating companies by the end of 2007, a company's spokesperson said