Main News of November 7

A roundup of what has happened in the past 24 hours

WORLD

* A Swiss laboratory said that tests have yielded evidence of polonium in the remains of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, but that the radioactive isotope was not detected in sufficient enough quantities to definitively conclude he was poisoned

* Ukraine's deputy prime minister said that his government is unhappy at the drop in the amount of natural gas that Russia is delivering to Western Europe through Ukrainian pipelines

* Kyrgyzstan is considering nationalizing a controversial foreign-controlled gold mine that has been at the heart of destabilizing political tensions, the country’s president has told the BBC in an interview

* Tajikistan’s President Emomali Rakhmon was declared the landslide winner of an election that international observers say was marred by fraud and a total lack of genuine competition

 

RUSSIA

* Egypt is considering spending up to $4 billion on advanced weaponry from Russia following the partial suspension of military aid and equipment deliveries from the United States, a Palestinian online newspaper said

* A Russian Soyuz TMA-11M spacecraft carrying a three-man crew and a symbolic torch for next year's Sochi Winter Olympic Games docked with the International Space Station

* Russian and Italian warships started joint training missions in the Mediterranean Sea as part of the Ioniex-2013 exercise, a spokesman for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet said

* Russian investigators said that they believe a lawyer currently acting on behalf of the suspected killers of crusading reporter Anna Politkovskaya bribed witnesses in an unrelated trial

* About 85,000 websites ended up on the Russian Internet blacklist over the past year, 98 percent of them blocked without a valid reason, a new study said