Moscow /St Petersburg - A car exploded near a metro station in St Petersburg on Tuesday, killing three people, including a 3- year-old child, Russian news agencies said.

The blast went off near the Udelnaya station at 8:55 am, a local Emergency Situation Ministry spokesman said.

"A preliminary investigation shows that a man, his wife and their child were killed in the blast. The car driver has got wounds and is hospitalized," news agency Interfax quoted a Russian secret services source as saying.

Phnom Penh - The trial of a Russian businessman charged with sexually abusing 18 underage girls began Tuesday after a series of delays in getting legal representation for the defendant, national media reported Tuesday.

Alexander Trofimov, 41, was arrested in 2007 on charges of abusing the girls while working in the coastal town of Sihanoukville, The Phnom Penh Post reported.

Trofimov, was convicted in March this year of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and is currently serving a 13-year sentence in a Phnom Penh prison.

If convicted of the remaining charges, Trofimov could face a further seven to 15 years in prison, the newspaper reported.

Lima  - Russia was seeking to revive "privileged" ties with Latin America, which had been neglected after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Monday.

"The time has come to restore these relations. These are the states with which we would like to have special, privileged relations," he said.

Minsk/Moscow - The leadership of Belarus lifted a ban on two regime-critical newspapers after almost three years, the advisor to authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko said on Monday in Minsk.

The decision was taken out of domestic interests, but the country hopes for better relations with the West after the step, a source said.

The two papers affected - the Nasha Niva and the Narodnaya Volya - were banned in early 2006 due to "serious breaches." However, those wanting to purchase the papers will have to register by name and have the papers delivered.

Moscow- Russia is prepared to make plans to deploy missiles in its Kaliningrad exclave "disappear" if the United States drops plans to base part of its missile defence system in Poland and the Czech Republic, Russia's prime minister said Monday.

If the new administration of US president-elect Barack Obama drops deployment plans for a missile shield in what Russia considers to be within its sphere of influence, then "questions of our retaliatory measures will disappear by themselves," Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told journalists at a forum in St Petersburg.

Kiev - Ukraine's decision to honour millions of people who died of famine in the 1930s has drawn cries of historical revisionism from Russia, which disputes claims that the Stalin-era government targeted Ukrainians with policies that allowed the famine.

Historians generally agree that the famine was a side effect of a campaign by dictator Josef Stalin's communists against rich farmers in the former Soviet Union.