Main news of April 7

RUSSIA

* The lower house of Russia's parliament is set to approve outgoing president Vladimir Putin as prime minister on May 8, State Duma speaker Boris Gryzlov said

* NATO is now taking Russia's opinion into consideration when making decisions, a government daily quoted the country's envoy to the alliance, Dmitry Rogozin, as saying

* Russian and Polish deputy foreign ministers will meet in Moscow to discuss U.S. plans to deploy elements of its missile defense system in Poland, a Russian diplomatic source said

* A witness at the trial in absentia of former Yukos official Leonid Nevzlin, charged with organizing murders and attempted murders, said the accused paid a bribe to get Israeli citizenship

* Russia's Foreign Ministry denounced a ruling by a court at The Hague last week which saw a former prime minister in Pristina acquitted for crimes committed in Kosovo in 1998-1999

* Russia's Progress M-63 space cargo ship was successfully 'buried' at a spaceship cemetery in the southern Pacific, a Mission Control spokesman said

* Russian geologists intend to prove that the Sea of Okhotsk's central enclave, as well as all its other parts excluding a small piece in the south, belong to Russia, Russian tabloid wrote Moskovsky Komsomolets said

* The Moscow City Court refused to release businessman Sergei Shnaider, arrested in late January alongside the owner of the Arbat Prestige cosmetics chain on tax evasion charges, on $2 million bail

WORLD

* Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met in Jerusalem to discuss the peace process in their first meeting since a devastating Israeli raid on the Gaza Strip

* Iran's defense minister said the world needs a missile shield to protect against threats from Israel and the United States

* A draft constitution for Kosovo, which declared its independence from Serbia in February, was signed on Monday, Albanian-language Kosovo media reported

* The Olympic torch relay was cut short in Paris after thousands of anti-China protesters made athletes' progress through the city impossible

* UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon voiced concern over delays in releasing presidential election results in Zimbabwe and urged the country's electoral authorities to announce them swiftly

* Iran is studying a U.S. proposal to hold a fourth round of talks on Iraqi security in the near future, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said

* A london jury said princess Diana and her boyfriend Dodi al-Fayed were unlawfully killed in Paris in 1997 by their driver's negligence and the paparazzi's pursuit of their limousine

* Two pilots safely ejected as a South Korean military plane crashed during a routine patrol flight near the border with North Korea, the Xinhua news agency reported

* Washington and Prague will sign a bilateral treaty on the stationing of a U.S. radar base on Czech soil in early May, a Czech news agency reported

* Warsaw is ready to hold talks with Russia and Washington on the proposed U.S. anti-missile shield if it is deployed in Poland, the deputy foreign minister said

* Belgrade will ask the International Court of Justice, the UN's main judicial organ, to assess the legality of Kosovo's declaration of independence, Serbia's Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic said

* Archaeologists in Australia unearthed stone tools that are at least 35,000 years old, national media said

BUSINESS

* Uzbekistan started gradually reducing its natural gas deliveries to Tajikistan over payment arrears, state-controlled Uztransgaz said

* Russia's foreign debt calculated by international methodology increased 48% year-on-year in 2007 to $459.6 billion, the Central Bank said

* Russia's satellite navigation services market will be worth 160 billion rubles ($6.6 billion) by 2015, the general director of the Russian Institute of Radio Navigation said

* Fitch Ratings assigned Russia's largest mobile phone operator Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) a long-term issuer default rating of BB+ with a stable outlook