U.S. government secrecy will not be an issue, I told myself optimistically, as I began to research a history of the Cuban missile crisis.

Last Friday, I turned 50. Growing up, I always knew that the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party -- the one that denounced Stalin's personality cult -- took place in 1956. But only this year, after a spate of articles in the English-language press commemorating its 50th anniversary, did I realize that I was born just two weeks after Khrushchev's famous secret speech.

A dramatic nighttime police raid to evict protesting students from Paris' best-known university has increased the furor over the conservative government's effort to reduce unemployment -- and exposed how resistance to change remains widespread in France.

Socialist Michelle Bachelet was sworn in as Chile's first female president and appealed for national unity to heal the divisions left by a military dictatorship that had imprisoned and tortured her and her parents.

Inside the local bar in this frozen village in Romania's bleak northeast, Oana Gatu poured mugs of hot wine for a couple of farmers and talked about how the European Union is going to change Christmas.

Oil Fund Hits $55.6 Bln The stabilization fund, which holds the country's windfall oil revenue, rose 7 percent in February from the previous month to 1.56 trillion rubles ($55.6 billion), Finance Ministry spokeswoman Irina Ershova said. The fund is expected to reach $75.2 billion by the end of 2006 and $146.7 billion by the end of 2008, the Finance Ministry said March 1. It was at $53.7 billion on Jan. 31. (Bloomberg) M&A Deals Double in '05 The value of mergers and acquisitions involving Russian companies more than doubled last year to a record $59 billion, Vedomosti said, citing data compiled by the Mergers.ru web site. Gazprom's purchase of Roman Abramovich's oil company Sibneft for $13.7 billion was the biggest deal of the year, Vedomosti said. Nine of the top 20 transactions involved a foreign company, led by U.S. oil producer ConocoPhillips's purchase of shares in LUKoil for $2.62 billion, the paper said.