WORLD
* French President Nicolas Sarkozy has become a father for the fourth time after his wife Carla Bruni gave birth to a baby girl, BFM TV reported
* A Proton-M carrier rocket carrying the U.S. ViaSat-1 communications satellite was launched from the Baikonur Space Center in Kazakhstan, Russia’s Roscosmos space agency said
* The Nord and South Streams gas pipelines appeared when Ukraine became an unreliable gas transit country after several gas rows with Russia, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych said
*Missile defense talks between Russia and the United States are deadlocked, but Moscow will not make concessions at the expense of its own security, Russia’s envoy to NATO Dmitry Rogozin said
*A former British parliamentary assistant facing charges of spying for Russia has admitted to a four-year affair with the member of parliament who employed her but denied spying
*Apple’s new iPhone 4S, which came on sale on Friday, is the first globally sold smart phone that supports the Russian GLONASS navigation system along with GPS, the company’s phone manual said
*Russia will live on even if the World Trade Organization (WTO) rejects its membership bid, President Dmitry Medvedev said on Wednesday
*The Georgian Republican Party has accused authorities of attempting “to kill” the political process in Georgia by barring Georgian-born billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili from politics, the party said in a statement
*U.S. charges that Iran’s secret services planned to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington will be examined by the UN Security Council at a date yet to be named. Meanwhile, the United States, Saudi Arabia and Iran have all sent protest letters to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
RUSSIA
*Talks between Belarus and Russia’s gas giant Gazprom on reducing the gas price for the ex-soviet state are coming to a close, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said
*The Russian Defense Ministry has dismissed media reports, claiming the Defense Minister had instructed it to deprive contract servicemen of their pay, as “misquoted” and “taken out of context.”
*The free trade zone agreement between members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) may come into force in January 2012, Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov said.