Myanmar democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, on a landmark visit to the United States, called Thursday for the release of jailed members of the Russian punk band Pussy Riot.
Georgia's interior minister resigned Thursday after the release of videos this week showing the torture and rape of prison inmates sparked fury and a wave of nationwide protests.
Belarus was bailed out of last year's dire economic crisis by its giant neighbour Russia but as the ex-Soviet state heads to parliamentary polls the economy is once again flirting with disaster.
Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich enjoyed "privileged access" to Russian President Vladimir Putin but held no significant influence over him.
Yoko Ono, the artist and widow of Beatles musician and songwriter John Lennon, will bestow a peace award in the couple's name to Pussy Riot, the Russian punk rockers.
Belarus will on Sunday elect a new parliament in polls largely boycotted by the opposition, almost two years after protests against President Alexander Lukashenko's re-election sparked a mass crackdown.
In the far north of Siberia, Russian scientists have stepped up research on a once-secret deposit of diamonds whose scale dwarfs anything ever discovered and could turn world markets "upside down".
A woman took command of the International Space Station for only the second time Monday as three US and Russian colleagues made a safe return from the orbiting space lab to the Kazakh steppe.
Russia launched an investigation after an army unit accidentally fired mortar shells into the grounds of a boarding school in the troubled North Caucasus region of Dagestan.
Western countries will seek to turn the screw further on Iran at a meeting of UN atomic agency board of governors from Monday following the watchdog's latest damning report on Tehran's nuclear programme.
President Vladimir Putin impressed leaders by holding an Asian summit on an island off a revamped Pacific city but the surface shimmer hid underlying problems in the Russian Far East and the country as a whole.