A new Criminal Code of Armenia came into force on August 1, 2003. The clauses 135, 136 and 318 of this law provide criminal liability for slander and insult of a state official and a judge.

Protest rallies were held yesterday in Zugdidi (western Georgia), Tbilisi, and Gori. The protesters demanded from authorities to pay off arrears of social payments.

As the republican Interior Ministry reported yesterday, several unidentified criminals fired at Dalilov from sub-machine guns in the village of Prigorodnoye on Thursday.

Forced migrants from the Chechen Republic ask to help them reinstate 325 people in the lists of refugees. They were struck off the registration in the Federal Migration Service without any ground.

Russian servicemen without military insignia broke into the Asayevs' yard at 3 a.m. Without any charges they seized Shamkhan Asayev, his brother Magomed and the three brothers-in-law and took them away in an unknown direction.

The Council of Europe motivates the necessity of sanctions against Armenia by the thought that otherwise it will be difficult to guarantee fair elections in neighboring Azerbaijan and Georgia which are to take place this autumn.

The warden of the compact residence "Slavyanka-Fulat" situated in the stanitsa Troitskaya Zina Magomadova appealed to the Ingush office of the Society for the Russian-Chechen Friendship with a request to help her solve the problem of water supplies in the camp.

Representatives of non-government organizations protesting against the construction of the pipe-line Baku-Tbilisi-Jeikhan held a press conference in Baku yesterday.

A new federal law "About Alternative Civil Service (ACS)" will come into force on January 1, 2004. However, this law has a number of faults: the mechanisms of its maintenance are not completely worked out, there is a contradiction between some of its clauses, - all these things hinder the proper development of the ACS institution in Russia.

The Azerbaijan diaspora of the Krasnodar region has already gained support on this issue from 22 regional national communes, including Russian one.

The tournament was organized by the public organization "Step into the Future" and financially supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Staff officials believe the robbery was premeditated because the second round of the election to the Commissioner for Human Rights in the Russian Federation is to be held in September.

The Court of Appeal demanded that former Interior Minister Abdulla Allakhverdiev should prove that Azerbaijan National Independence Party Chairman Etibar Mamedov, one of the presidential contenders for the election lying ahead in October, was making for the Armenian occupation of the Lachinsky region of Azerbaijan or refute his words in the next issue of the Palitra newspaper.

The leadership of Azerbaijan assumes that the forthcoming change of the Russian OSCE Minsk group co-chairman will not affect the process of the Karabah conflict settlement.

The GYLA and other human rights advocacy organizations protest against the ruling adopted by the CEC on August 25, which defines the principles of coverage of the election process by the state and private mass media.

The Committee of the Russian Communist Party in the Rostov region says that people are displeased with the fact that this year they have been deprived of their privileges for housing and public utilities payments for the second time already.

A city resident addressed officials of the Novocherkassk Department for Struggle against Organized Crime. She said that her daughter was in the Arabian Emirates where she was forced to work as a prostitute. They started to check this information and found out that the girl managed to go abroad under the patronage of an Azerbaijan citizen.

The last OSCE monitoring was foiled by shooting on August 19.

Over 300 thousand people fled from Azerbaijan to Armenia during the Karabah conflict in 1988-1991. Many of them still have no permanent residence.

"A doctor who had taken on the responsibilities of the hospital head three weeks before the explosion can not be responsible for what happened", reads the statement.