Main news of January 18

A roundup of what has happened in the past 24 hours

WORLD

* The public release of recorded conversations between the Russian air traffic controllers and the crew of the crashed Polish presidential plane is unprecedented, Russian Transport Minister Igor Levitin said

* Russian air traffic controllers were under pressure, made a number of errors and failed to warn the Polish pilots that they were off course, a Polish commission investigating the Smolensk air crash said

* Russian President Dmitry Medvedev reiterated his support for the creation of an independent Palestinian state

* Latvian Interior Minister Linda Murniece, who placed former Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov on a blacklist of people whose presence in the country is "undesirable," said she had made the decision based on information from the country's security services

* Russian President Dmitry Medvedev began his tour of the Middle East with talks with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank

* Poland has imposed an entry ban on Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and several state officials following a post-election crackdown on the opposition in Minsk, the PAP news agency said

* Nagorny Karabakh has no future as part of Azerbaijan, Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan said

RUSSIA

* Russian cosmonauts Dmitry Kondratyev and Oleg Skripochka are preparing to conduct this year's first spacewalk scheduled for Friday, Russia's Mission Control said

* A court in the Siberian town of Gorno-Altaisk will resume hearings in the trial against the leader of a local branch of Jehovah's Witnesses for circulating extremist materials, the court's spokesman said

BUSINESS

* A tax regime for the Kara Sea oil and gas project should proceed from the huge investment and high risks the project involves to guarantee profit, the vice president of Russia's oil giant Rosneft, Peter O'Brien, said during an interview on Russian radio

SPORTS

* Russia's Anna Chakvetadze and Maria Kirilenko are through to the second round of the Australian Open tennis tournament in Melbourne