Moscow  - Cuban President Raul Castro is due in Moscow on Wednesday for a week-long visit, the Kremlin press service said Monday, in the latest sign of reviving relations between the Cold War allies.

President Dmitry Medvedev extended Castro the invitation while on a visit to Havana in November.

Many see Moscow's warming ties with the small communist island, long an arch-foe of the United States, as a snub of Washington in anger over US missile defence plans and post-war aide to Georgia.

Moscow  - A man the Kremlin warily views as unpredictable is a shoo-in for what is arguably the most powerful non-government appointment in post-Communist Russia, experts said Monday, as church leaders held council to elected a new Orthodox patriarch.

Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, 62, the conspicuous head of the Russian Orthodox Church's external relations department and the church's interim leader, is the candidate most likely to win out of three chosen by senior clergy on Sunday.

Brussels  - The cannot rely too heavily on Russia and Ukraine for its energy needs after a row between the two cut off natural gas supplies to the bloc for two weeks, EU foreign ministers agreed Monday.

Instead, they said, the EU must find energy elsewhere.

"It's too early to draw conclusions from (the gas conflict), but we can see that neither Russia nor Ukraine comes out of it looking good ... In the end it was Russia that turned the gas supplies off, not Ukraine," Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said after talks with EU counterparts in Brussels.

Kiev - Murdered Russian journalist, Anastasia Baburova, was buried in Ukraine on Monday, with family and friends attending a ceremony in the city of Sevastopol.

Unknown assailants gunned down Baburova in Moscow a week ago as she attempted to prevent the shooting of an associate, Russian human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov.

Markelov died immediately in the apparent contract hit. Baburova was shot while attempting to apprehend one of his attackers, and died hours later in a Moscow hospital.

Ukrainian police presence was heavy at the funeral in the Black Sea port city in Ukraine's ethnically-Russian Crimean peninsula.

Brussels - NATO ambassadors held talks with their Russian counterpart on Monday for the first time since the alliance froze relations with Moscow in the aftermath of August's conflict in Georgia.

NATO spokesman James Appathurai said no formal agenda had been set for the meeting, which was to last "about an hour" at the alliance's headquarters in Brussels.

NATO placed high-level meetings of the NATO-Russia Council (NRC), which governs relations with its Cold War enemy, on hold to protest Russia's invasion of Georgia.

Peshawar, Jan. 22: Pakistan's North Western Frontier province Governor Owais Ahmad Ghani has termed the United States-led allied forces as invaders and hoped that the forces would leave the region sooner or later.