Main news of December 1

A roundup of what has happened in the past 24 hours

RUSSIA

* Russian President Dmitry Medvedev reiterated his country's readiness to scrap the visa regime with the EU

* Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said that a pan-European security treaty would be needed "sooner or later"

* Russia will be forced to build up its nuclear forces if the United States does not ratify the New Strategic Arms Ratification Treaty, Putin told CNN in an interview to air

* Russia and the European Union are expected to sign a document on Russia's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), following bilateral negotiations on the issue ahead of the Russia-EU summit due on December 7 in Brussels, Russian Envoy to the EU Vladimir Chizhov said

* Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called for the countries of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to have common strategies for resolving conflicts

* The forthcoming visit by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to Poland will become a turning point in the relations between the two countries, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said

* The Russian Air Force will procure over 1,500 new aircraft and significantly increase the number of high-precision weapons in its arsenal by 2020, a deputy Air Force commander said

* Army aviation will remain part of Russia's Air Force, and its fleet will be fully upgraded in the future, a deputy Air Force commander said

* Russia will not support OSCE summit documents referring to "the conflict in Georgia," Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said

* Russia will do all it can to stop Georgia from rearming, Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said

* The Russian interior minister has ordered a probe into an attack on a car whose driver refused to give way to a BMW with flashing blue lights, the ministry's press service said

* Members of the upper house of the Russian parliament should draw a lesson from a recent case of the "trading" of positions, House Speaker Sergei Mironov said

* The FBI has launched an investigation against a Russian man suspected of being responsible for around one third of global Internet spam, the Smoking Gun portal reported

* HIV-positive Russians have appealed to the country's leadership to deal with the shortage of HIV drugs, a public activist said

* Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said he would not present Russia's bid to the host the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Zurich

* The website of tycoon Oleg Deripaska's Russian Reporter magazine, a partner of the WikiLeaks website, was out of service for several hours due to a power cut

* Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, and NASA are to sign a protocol on joint projects in manned and unmanned space travel, the Russian agency's head, Alexei Perminov, said

 

WORLD

* Not a single OSCE member state has broken off diplomatic ties with Washington over revelations contained in the recent leak of secret U.S. cables, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said

* Interpol has added WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to its international list of most wanted persons, Interpol said on its website

* Russian President Dmitry Medvedev reiterated his country's readiness to scrap the visa regime with the EU

* Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said that a pan-European security treaty would be needed "sooner or later"

* The Georgian president said Tbilisi was ready to forge a peaceful dialogue with Moscow to resolve the conflict over South Ossetia

* Relations between Washington and Minsk will improve as Belarusian democracy flourishes, a joint statement by the country's Foreign Minister Sergei Martynov and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said

* Chisinau is ready to resume stalled talks on the resolution of the Transdnestr conflict, Moldovan Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Osipov said

* Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev called on the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) member states to adopt a declaration in support of a world free from nuclear weapons

* Uzbek Foreign Minister Vladimir Norov criticized the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) for failing to prevent ethnic clashes in Kyrgyzstan this summer

* Suspected arms dealer Viktor Bout is being kept in solitary confinement after his extradition from Thailand to the U.S. and is unable keep up with media reports, a Russian vice-consul in New York said

* Belarus announced it would eliminate its highly enriched uranium stocks before a nuclear security summit in South Korea in 2012, the country's Belta news agency said

* NASA astronaut Catherine Coleman, who will take off for the International Space Station (ISS) on December 15, jokingly asked the head of Russia's state corporation Roscosmos for permission to take her son with her

* Recent shark attacks in the Red Sea have been caused by ecosystem damage, a local environmental official said

 

BUSINESS

* Russia's energy giant Gazprom and Ukraine's national oil and gas company Naftogaz will set up two joint ventures on gas exploration in Ukraine and on the Black Sea shelf

* Gazprom EP International B.V., Gazprom's overseas projects division, is seeking to acquire gas producing assets in Nigeria, Gazprom EP Director General Boris Ivanov said

* The Russian central bank will invest some of its international reserves in the Australian dollar, First Deputy Chairman Alexei Ulyukayev said

* Home Credit and Finance Bank (HCF bank), the Russian unit of Czech's PPF international financial group, has boosted net profit by 120 percent year-on-year in January-September to 6.702 billion rubles ($213.91 million) to IFRS, the bank said

* Russian food and consumer goods retailer Dixy Group's IFRS net losses fell to 37.3 million rubles ($1.20 million) in January-September 2010 , the company said

* The Russian central bank may sell more than 7% of shares in the country's top lender Sberbank next year, Sberbank head German Gref said

* Germany's energy group E.ON has agreed to sell its 2.7 percent stake in Gazprom to state-owned Russian investment bank Vnesheconombank (VEB), while the remaining 0.8 percent has been sold on the market, E.ON said