Marat Safin and Nicolas Kiefer traded strokes for 4 1/2 muggy hours at the U.S. Open on Tuesday.

Spartak Moscow striker Dmitry Sychyov has mysteriously disappeared from hospital.

U.S. President George W. Bush sought Tuesday to ease Saudi opposition to a pre-emptive U.S. attack on Iraq, pledging to consult allied nations before taking any decision to launch military strikes.

Negotiators at the Johannesburg Earth Summit have clashed over the future of green energy, an issue at the heart of sustainable development, delegates said Tuesday.

Israel's defense minister called off talks set for Wednesday with the Palestinian interior minister on easing a military clampdown, after mortar shells were fired into a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip.

Putin Writes to Pope MOSCOW (MT) -- President Vladimir Putin responded to a letter from Pope John Paul II regarding the expulsion from Russia of Roman Catholic Bishop Jerzy Mazur, the head of Russia's Roman Catholics said Wednesday. ""The answer did not satisfy us,"" Metropolitan Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz was quoted by The Associated Press as saying. He said the letter did not explain the reasons for the expulsions. Three Catholic clergymen who were previously working in Russia have had their visas canceled or not renewed since February, when the Vatican elevated the status of the Roman Catholic presence in Russia -- a decision that was perceived as hostile by the Russian Orthodox Church. U.S. Immigration MOSCOW (MT) -- Stringent immigration procedures being introduced in the United States are not directed at Russians, the Foreign Ministry said Wednesday, Interfax reported. ""The new immigration regime will not apply to Russians in the near future.

As Kim Jong Il's armored railroad car rolled through this Doctor Zhivago landscape of dachas and birch trees during his second trip to Russia, government publicists back home in North Korea were working overtime to squelch suspicions that Kim, their 60-year-old ""Dear Leader,"" was on another leisurely junket.