Main news of May 16

RUSSIA

* The members of a doomsday sect who quit the dugout in central Russia where they had been waiting for the end of the world for around six months are to pack their bags and leave for home with the planet still intact

* Russia's new Superjet 100 medium-haul passenger airliner will make its first test flight in late May, the head of the Sukhoi aircraft-manufacturing holding said

* The Russian Navy will participate for the first time in a large-scale submarine rescue exercise conducted by NATO countries and their allies, a Navy spokesman said

* Russia's Foreign Ministry criticized as counterproductive a move by the UN General Assembly to adopt a Tbilisi-sponsored resolution on the return of refugees to Georgia's breakaway republic of Abkhazia

* Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has urged countries set to take part in a Mideast peace conference in Moscow to agree on a timetable for the meeting as soon as possible

* A court in the west Siberian city of Novosibirsk has sentenced a taxi driver to nine years in prison for beating to death a man who accidentally scratched his car, a court spokesman said

* A committee defending the rights of sexual minorities has sent a letter to President Dmitry Medvedev asking him to allow a gay pride parade in central Moscow, Ekho Moskvy radio said

WORLD

* A total of 360 schoolchildren, buried under the ruins of their high school in Beichuan County, Sichuan Province, have been pulled out alive following a powerful quake Monday, local media said

* The official death toll following Myanmar's Cyclone Nargis, which hit the Southeast Asian country two weeks ago, has risen to 77,738, and 56,000 are missing, national television reported

*  A spokesman for the Iranian Supreme National Security Council said Iran has submitted to the Russian and Chinese Foreign Ministries a package of proposals on nuclear non-proliferation and other international security issues

* Ukraine has become the 152nd member of the World Trade Organization, the largest global trade body

* Over 250 kg (551 lbs) of heroin has been seized at a confectionery factory on the outskirts of the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires, police said

* Belarusian companies subject to U.S. sanctions could face a number of problems but will not be seriously affected, the country's first deputy prime minister said

* The Georgian Interior Ministry has dismissed as a 'provocation' Russian reports that a Georgian intelligence service agent had been detained in southern Russia

* At least two Georgian policemen were injured in explosions that went off in the zone of the conflict between Georgia and its breakaway republic of South Ossetia

* Georgia will continue to block Russia's entry to the World Trade Organization until Moscow withdraws its support for the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia, the country's reintegration minister said

BUSINESS

*  Russia will start exporting Ansat light multipurpose helicopters in 2009, a helicopter industry official said

* An Exxon Mobil subsidiary operating the Sakhalin-1 oil and gas project in Russia's Far East has rejected environmentalist groups' warnings that the project is endangering the local population of gray whales