Main news of October 7

RUSSIA

* Russian President Dmitry Medvedev told Israeli interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that Russia would continue to play a constructive role in the Middle East peace process

* Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said following a meeting with his Venezuelan counterpart Nicolas Maduro in Moscow that weapons sold to the Latin American state were only to improve its defense capability

* Russia has responded positively to a request from Iceland for a loan, Russia's Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said

* Customs officers in Russia's Far East have detained on suspicion of poaching a Sierra Leone-flagged vessel carrying more than 40 metric tons of crab, a border guards spokesman said

* Despite heavy rain hundreds of people gathered in Moscow to commemorate investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya gunned down near her home in the Russian capital in 2006

* The education minister in the Orenburg Region in Russia's Urals resigned over the fatal collapse of part of a school earlier this month, local authorities said

WORLD

* The U.S. Department of Defense denied reports that Iran forced a U.S. warplane to land in Tehran

* The Vatican was accepted into Interpol after the unanimous approval of its membership by the organization's supreme governing body

* NASA said that its scientists had calculated a meteorite's trajectory and tracked its entry into Earth's atmosphere for the first time in the history of space exploration

* The launch of India's first unmanned mission to the Moon has been scheduled for October 22, an Indian space official said

* EU observers in Georgia will be monitoring the withdrawal of Russian peacekeepers from the buffer zone next to South Ossetia, a source in the Russian Defense Ministry said

* A public opinion poll held in Ukraine has said that 50% of the country approves of Russia's recent recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia

* Opposition politician Gulamhusein Alibeyli, who is running in the October 15 presidential race in Azerbaijan, told EU monitors that no serious violations had been observed during the country's ongoing election campaign

BUSINESS

* Toyota, the world's number two carmaker by sales volume, saw vehicle sales in Russia rise by 31.59% in the first nine months of the year, to 145,400 vehicles, the company said

* Major Russian oil producer Surgutneftegaz said it would invest $98 billion rubles ($3.75 billion) into a field in Russia's Far Eastern republic of Yakutia by 2011

* Gazprom Sbyt Ukraine, a subsidiary of the Russian energy giant, will deliver about 5 billion cubic meters of natural gas to industrial consumers in Ukraine this year, the company's general director said

* Gazprom plans to sign a deal with Ukraine on gas supplies for 2009 in November, after sealing contracts with Central Asian states, the UNIAN agency reported, citing a source in Russia's gas monopoly