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Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has said he met the Russian intelligence agents deported from the US in a spy-swap row in July.
He they had sung together songs about the Motherland, adding that he had no doubts “they will have interesting, bright lives”.
However, Mr Putin did not say where the meeting took place.
The 10 Russians admitted in a US court earlier this month to being agents for a foreign country.
Deported from US

Ships involved in the effort to secure BP's blown-out oil well are preparing to resume work after a tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico weakened.
Workers had been preparing to evacuate the site, and one of the rigs drilling a relief well had been detached.
But Tropical Storm Bonnie diminished into a “disorganised area of showers and thunderstorms” before reaching the area, forecasters said.
The cap that has stopped the oil for the past week was left in place.
Tropical Storm Bonnie had caused flooding in Haiti, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, but there were no reports of significant damage as it passed over Florida.
It was downgraded to a tropical depression earlier, and the US National Hurricane Center said on Saturday that it was “unlikely” the system would worsen, with a “near zero” chance of a tropical cyclone developing.
A BP spokeswoman said the the Development Driller III, which is boring into the seabed to make a relief well, had detached itself and moved away from the spill site in the build up to the storm.
She said it was now heading back, and all other vessels were preparing to resume operations.
BP hopes to use two relief wells to pump material into the damaged well and permanently seal it.
The oil firm placed a containment cap on the well last week and closed it off, stopping the flow for the first time since April, when an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig set the crude gushing.

Source:BBC

Two US nationals have been captured by Taliban insurgents in eastern Afghanistan, reports say.
They say the Americans were seized in Logar province after an exchange of fire with the militants on Friday.
A spokesman for the provincial governor told the BBC that the men were armed civilians. Some media reports suggested they were soldiers.
The local governor said US forces were offering a reward in return for the two Americans.
So far there have been no official comments by the US military.
The spokesman for the Logar governor said the two men had ignored warnings and set out on their own from their base on Friday evening into a known Taliban-held area.
After an exchange of gunfire the two were captured.
One unconfirmed report later said that one of the captived had been killed.
Local radio stations aired US statements offering a 20,000 (12,956) reward for the information leading to the safe release of the Americans, Reuters reports.
This comes, in what is already turning into the bloodiest summer for foreign forces in Afghanistan since their invasion in 2001, the BBC's David Loyn in Kabul says.
Four US soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in the south of the country on Saturday and another killed in a separate incident.
And in another incident in Helmand four insurgents were killed in a gun battle with Nato forces on Friday.
Local people say a number of civilians were also shot in the exchange of fire, but there is no independent confirmation of this.

Source:BBC

The former newspaper proprietor turned headline maker Conrad Black faced a pack of reporters as he arrived outside the Chicago court, flanked by his elegant wife Barbara Amiel.
He swept into the court without answering the shouted questions.
The man who once owned the Daily Telegraph and Chicago Sun Times is fighting to overturn his 2007 conviction for defrauding investors in the Hollinger Media Group of more than 6m (3.9m).
Two days ago he was released on bail, after his friend and wealthy philanthropist Roger Hertog posted the required 2m.

A US senator has asked the Scottish government to reconsider its decision not to send officials to a hearing into the release of the Lockerbie bomber.
In a letter, Frank Lautenberg said he was “pleading” with First Minister Alex Salmond to help shed light on claims that BP had influenced the release.
Mr Salmond has declined an invitation to send his justice secretary and a medical expert to Washington.
Former UK Justice Secretary Jack Straw has also chosen not to attend.
Credible record
Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, who was convicted of blowing up a Pan Am jumbo jet over the town of Lockerbie in 1988 in which 270 people were killed, was freed by the Scottish government on medical grounds last August.
In his letter to Mr Salmond, the New Jersey senator expresses frustration at what he portrays as the UK and Scottish governments blaming each other for this row.
He says the grief of victims' families has been “amplified” by allegations of improprieties surrounding the release.
Mr Lautenberg said: “I am pleading for direct representation from the Scottish government at our hearing next week to help us seek answers.
“Your co-operation in sending a knowledgable person will help establish a credible record of what transpired.”
US politicians are concerned that the decision to free Megrahi may have been tied to an oil deal involving BP.
On Friday, Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill defended his decision not to attend the US hearing.
He said he was “accountable to Scotland” and had “no information to provide” on any BP oil deal.
Meanwhile, in a letter to the US committee, the UK Foreign Secretary William Hague has acknowledged that BP did lobby the previous Labour government in favour of a prisoner transfer agreement between Britain and Libya.
But Mr Hague points out that Megrahi was freed by the Scottish government on entirely separate, compassionate grounds because the prisoner was deemed to be terminally ill.
Prime Minister David Cameron met Mr Lautenberg and three other senators from New York and New Jersey, where many of the Lockerbie bombing victims came from during his visit to Washington this week.
He said he had seen no evidence that the Scottish government – which made the decision to free terminally ill cancer patient Megrahi on compassionate grounds – had been “swayed” by lobbying from BP.

Source:BBC

Four American service personnel have been killed in a bombing in southern Afghanistan, Nato says.
A statement from Nato's International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) said the attackers used an improvised explosive device, but gave no further details of the incident.
Military officials confirmed those killed were American.
Dozens of international personnel have been killed in Afghanistan this month, most of them American.
June saw more than 100 international troops killed – the bloodiest month of the nine-year-old war.
No-one has yet said they carried out the latest attack, but analysts say the bomb used was similar to the explosives deployed by Taliban fighters.

Source:BBC

Share this page Oil pipeline prompts fears for Nebraska farms' water A proposed pipeline to pump oil from Canada to Texas would cut across America's agricultural heartland. Some farmers fear it could threaten the water supply to an entire region, the BBC's Ben Bevington reports from Nebraska.”If oil gets into the water we're done,” said Nebraska farmer Randy Thompson, as he stood in one of his corn fields.
“You can't drink oily water and you can't irrigate crops with it.”
A Canadian company, TransCanada, is seeking US government permission to build a pipeline that would carry more than half a million barrels of oil per day across Nebraska and over the Ogallala aquifer, which provides drinking water to two million people in the region.
Once completed, the 1,600-mile Keystone XL pipeline would stretch from the tar sands of Alberta in Canada across five Great Plains states to refineries on the Gulf coast in Texas.
It would cross Mr Thompson's land, and he worries that it would threaten the water he uses in his pastures and farmland here in the Great Plains.
In addition, critics say tar sands oil production destroys forests, generates huge emissions and leaves behind toxic pools of waste.
The project has some members of the US Congress and environmental activists questioning whether the US should allow a pipeline that would increase use of tar sands oil.
“We're adding to the carbon pollution for the globe, and we're making a multi-billion-dollar investment to expand our reliance on the dirtiest source of transportation fuel currently available,” Democratic California Congressman Henry Waxman, chairman of the House committee on energy and commerce, wrote in a letter opposing the pipeline.
“I think that's a step in the wrong direction.”
However, oil companies say state-of-the-art refinement techniques minimise emissions.
Nebraska 'heartbeat'
“We respect Representative Waxman's views but disagree with his assertions,” TransCanada spokesman Terry Cunha told the Canadian Press.
“Expanding the regulatory review process to include a lifecycle analysis of greenhouse gas emissions, as Representative Waxman suggests, would unnecessarily delay the project and jeopardize the many critically important benefits it will bring to the United States.”
In Nebraska, the proposed pipeline would be buried 4ft (1.2m) underground.
Mr Thompson says that would mean it sits in groundwater most of the year because the water table is so high.
“The heartbeat of our state is water supply,” he said. “I'm concerned it could get contaminated.”
Mr Thompson's family has farmed this stretch of land on the River Platte for 35 years. He says he is not seeking a showdown with the oil industry, and wonders why the pipeline cannot simply be re-routed.
“I just don't understand why we'd put our aquifer at risk,” he said.
“Of course they'll try to make it safe. But recent events in the Gulf of Mexico with BP prove nothing is 100% fail-proof. Anything man-made will eventually fail.”
'Wake-up call'
TransCanada says it will be able to detect leaks and quickly shut down any faltering section of pipeline.
The firm is confident that the state department, which has jurisdiction over the cross-border pipeline, will approve the project in the coming months.
The first section of the Keystone project was approved by the Bush administration and now pumps oil from Alberta to a refinery at Wood River in southern Illinois.
Yet the BP spill has complicated the Obama administration's decision on whether to approve the rest of the pipeline – the Keystone XL extension – running from Alberta to Texas.
The oil coming down the pipe is not pumped out of the ground but extracted from tar sands mined in Alberta, and questions remain whether relying on tar sands oil will help the US achieve the clean energy future President Barack Obama envisions.
“The disaster of the Gulf spill has really been a wake-up call for the nation,” said Susan Casey-Lefkowitz of the Natural Resources Defence Council in Washington, DC.
“It's not just about finding some new source of oil that would somehow be safer, it's about getting off oil altogether.
“And so to build new infrastructure of pipelines and refineries to expand this very dirty tar sands oil from Canada is a huge mistake.”
There is still huge demand for oil in the US, and the tar sands oil is used mostly for transportation fuel that cannot easily be replaced by renewable energy sources.
Supporters of the pipeline project say the US needs to find a reliable supply from a stable and friendly country.
Whether the Keystone XL pipeline goes ahead or not, Canadian tar sands oil is to the US by the end of this year.

Source:BBC

Share this page Canadian fighter pilot ejects moments before crashing
A Canadian Forces pilot has survived after ejecting himself from a fighter jet moments before it crashed during practice for an airshow.
The pilot has been admitted to a hospital in Alberta, Canada, with undetermined injuries.
Witnesses say Capt Brian Bews was performing low-flying manoeuvres in the CF-18 fighter jet when he ejected and parachuted to the ground.
He was practising a run for an airshow at Lethbridge County Airport.
The federal government has begun an investigation at the crash site.
“He is alive and we believe right now that his injuries are non-life-threatening,” Canadian Forces Captain Nicole Meszaros told CBC News.Photographer Ian Martens told local media that Capt Bews had looked as if he were unconscious when parachuting from the jet.
“I noticed it start to bank a little bit off to one side, which I kind of thought was unusual and I saw a couple of pops and all of a sudden this plane just banked and slowly dropped into the ground into this huge orange ball of fire,” Mr Martens said.
Capt Bews joined the Canadian Forces over a decade ago and has been piloting the CF-18 jet since 2004.
The Canadian government announced plans last week to spend 9bn (5.6bn) on a new fleet of F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter jets, which will replace the ageing CF-18s.

Source:BBC

Restrictions imposed on US-led forces in Afghanistan to reduce civilian casualties have also led to a decline in insurgent attacks, a report says.
The document by America's National Bureau for Economic Research analysed incidents involving more than 4,000 civilian casualties in Afghanistan.
The curbs on aerial bombing and mortar fire were introduced last year by the recently-sacked Gen Stanley McChrystal.
The general is ending his army career at a ceremony in Washington on Friday.
The commander of multinational forces in Afghanistan was fired by President Barack Obama last month over a magazine interview in which he made disparaging remarks about the president and senior colleagues.
Gen McChrystal's successor, Gen David Petraeus, is reportedly considering loosening the restrictions on international forces.
The authors of the report by the Massachusetts-based National Bureau of Economic Research say they analysed 15 months of data on military clashes and incidents totalling more than 4,000 civilian deaths in a number of Afghan regions in the period ending on 1 April.
They say that in areas where two civilians were killed or injured by Nato's International Security Assistance Force (Isaf), there were on average an extra six violent incidents between insurgents and US-led troops in the following six weeks.
The report concludes that civilian deaths frequently motivate villagers to join the ranks of insurgents.
“In Afghanistan, when Isaf units kill civilians, this increases the number of willing combatants, leading to an increase in insurgent attacks.”
“Local exposure to violence from Isaf appears to be the primary driver of this effect.”
The curbs were imposed by Gen McChrystal in an effort to win more Afghan hearts and minds.
Those rules ban air and mortar strikes on houses unless allied troops are in immediate danger.
But some soldiers have complained that the restrictions make their jobs more dangerous.

Source:BBC