Main news of February 4

RUSSIA

* Russia will try and block Kosovo's independence at an international level, if the Serb province announces its sovereignty, Konstantin Kosachyov, a senior Russian MP, said

* Jailed former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky is now in his seventh day of a hunger strike to demand a former colleague suffering from AIDS receive medical treatment, a prison official said

* The British Council dismissed all employees at its St. Petersburg office, more than two weeks after the office closed on orders from Russian authorities, a spokesman said

* Russia's President Vladimir Putin visited a military unit in the southern republic of Daghestan, several of whose provinces suffered militant incursions from neighboring Chechnya in 1999

* The Progress M-62 space cargo ship was undocked from the International Space Station and temporarily turned into a space lab, a Mission Control spokesman said

* The Moscow City Court upheld a lower court's verdict for tycoon Boris Berezovsky, found guilty of embezzling over 214 million rubles from flagship air carrier Aeroflot and sentenced to six years' imprisonment

WORLD

* Serbia's pro-Western incumbent Boris Tadic was narrowly re-elected as president in a vote seen as a key test of the country's relations with Europe

* Kosovo will declare independence in February, the breakaway Serb province's president, prime minister and parliament speaker said after a meeting in Pristina with Albania's foreign minister

* Serbia's Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic said his country is not making a choice between its long-standing ally Russia and the European Union

* A former Ukrainian prime minister said the opposition will halt its obstruction of work by parliament only after the announcement of a referendum on the former Soviet republic joining NATO

* Iran successfully launched a sounding rocket as a preliminary step toward sending its first homemade research satellite into orbit, national media said

* A suicide bomber has killed a woman in a shopping mall in the city of Dimona in southern Israel, national media said

* Turkish warplanes bombed 70 Kurdish guerrilla targets in northern Iraq in a 12-hour operation, the Turkish General Staff said

* At least one Palestinian was killed and six people injured in armed clashes at the Rafah checkpoint on the Gaza-Egypt border, national media reported

* A crew of NASA astronauts arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the repeatedly-delayed Atlantis space shuttle launch now set for February 7, a space agency spokesperson said

* Chinese authorities sent 50,000 radios to the country's snowed-in southern provinces to keep people informed on relief work and weather forecasts, the Xinhua news agency said

* A tugboat with a Russian-British crew, captured by gunmen off Somalia's coast three days ago, is reportedly being held at a port outside the capital Mogadishu, Russian rescue officials said

* The families of Russian diplomats in Chad were evacuated amid turmoil in the capital, stormed over the weekend by rebels attempting to overthrow the government, the Foreign Ministry said

* A rare U.S. double eagle gold coin that could be worth up to $15 million was found by an Egyptian couple as they cleaned out their flat, the Qatar Ar-Raya newspaper said

BUSINESS

* Russia's Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov said the government will spend 81 billion rubles ($3.3 billion) over the next three years on facilities for the 2014 Winter Olympics to be held in Sochi

* LUKoil Overseas, which handles foreign projects of Russia's leading independent crude producer LUKoil, said its oil and condensate output increased 10.8% year-on-year in 2007 to 5.17 million metric tons

* LUKoil, Russia's largest independent crude producer, said its oil output increased by an estimated 1.5% year-on-year in 2007 to 96.6 million metric tons (708 mln barrels)

* Novatek, Russia's largest independent natural gas producer, said its output declined 0.7% in 2007, year-on-year, to 28.52 billion cubic meters