* North Korea confirmed receipt of its funds from a previously-frozen Macao bank account and pledged to start talks on nuclear disarmament with the United Nations nuclear watchdog, agencies said, citing the country's official news agency
* French President Nicolas Sarkozy called on the international community to take a tough stand on Sudan if the country refuses to cooperate on finding a solution to the crisis in war-torn Darfur
* Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Yakovenko said Russia was opposed to increasing international pressure on Sudan over the situation in Darfur
* An Israeli soldier captured by Islamists a year ago said in an audiotape played on Palestinian television that he needed medical aid and urged Israeli authorities to free Palestinian prisoners to secure his release
* Robert Zoellick was approved as World Bank president
* Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov said his country would participate in the construction of a new natural gas pipeline under the Black Sea, South Stream, designed by Russian energy giant Gazprom and Italy's ENI
* Greece will join South Stream, which will run under the Black Sea from Russia to Bulgaria, the Russian and Greek presidents said
* Russian President Vladimir Putin said the energy markets of Black Sea littoral states should be stabilized by long-term contracts
* Pakistan protested the killing of 10 civilians near its border with Afghanistan during a NATO operation and demanded better coordination among international forces in the future, a senior Foreign Ministry official said
* A 12-nation Black Sea summit in Turkey highlighted the region's rapid growth and pledged to build a beltway road around the Black Sea
* Alexander Medvedev, a deputy chairman of Gazprom's board of directors, said:
- China and South Korea are among potential buyers of the natural gas to be produced at the East Siberian Kovytka gas field
- Gazprom expects to receive record high export revenues in 2007
* Thousands of passengers were stranded at an international airport in Madrid as flight crews of Spain's second-largest air carrier, Spanair, went on strike, cancelling 60 flights.
* Ukraine's nuclear power utility Energoatom said a new reactor it plans to build in the country's south will break with a long-standing tradition of using Russian design and technology
* A senior Russian finance official said export duty for oil could be raised by $20 from August 1 to reach about $223-224 per metric ton in view of the growing Urals price
* Russia can claim an additional 1.2 million square kilometers (0.46 million square miles) outside its economic zone in the Arctic, an area with expected hydrocarbon reserves of about 10 billion tons of fuel equivalent, the director of the Institute of Oceanology at the Russian Academy of Sciences said
