News of the Day, 18:00 Moscow time

* Tehran hopes a trial run of the Bushehr nuclear power plant in southern Iran will take place before the end of this year, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said

* Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed Japanese media reports that Moscow had pledged a "non-standard" solution to the dispute with Tokyo over the Kuril Islands

* Russia's Economic Development Ministry has revised downward its GDP and industrial output forecasts for this year, while preserving its oil price projections, said Andrei Klepach, a deputy economics minister

* A governmental re-evaluation of Russia's 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics project allowed costs to be cut by 300 billion rubles ($8.6 billion), a deputy prime minister said

* Prosecutors have not produced any evidence that three men charged in the murder of Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya are guilty, one of the defendants' lawyers said

* Egypt says it welcomes a proposed international peace conference on the Middle East in Moscow and is set to contribute to it, Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said

* Plans to extend the Blue Stream gas pipeline will be discussed at the ministerial level, the Russian government's press secretary said

* Moscow has the potential to broaden cooperation with Washington on supplies of non-lethal cargo to the U.S. troops in Afghanistan via the so-called "northern corridor," a Kremlin official said

* A recent survey revealed that the majority of Ukrainians believe that President Viktor Yushchenko, whose term ends next year, should step down now, the Ukrainian news agency UNIAN reported

* Japan's premier accepted the resignation of the country's finance minister, Shoichi Nakagawa, after his unusual behavior at a G7 press conference in Rome at the weekend led to speculation he was drunk