More than 200 experts on GM and non-GM coexistence will converge on Melbourne next week as part of the GMCC-09 conference.

Russia's space agency chief, Anatoly Perminov, said on Wednesday that Moscow is ready to help Cuba develop its own space center after talks in Caracas with Venezuelan and Cuban officials, Itar-Tass news agency reported.

By DOUGLAS BIRCH By Douglas Birch The Associated Press MOSCOW Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author whose books chronicled the horrors of dictator Josef Stalin's slave labor camps, has died of heart failure, his son said Monday. He was 89.

By Varga-Harris, Christine In February 1956, at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev denounced the Stalin "cult of personality" in his famous " secret Speech," thereby providing official sanction for the de-Stalinization of Soviet society.1 This process included the rehabilitation of individuals who had been unjustly accused of being "enemies of the people," greater liberty in the sphere of literary production, economic restructuring, and the revitalization of Soviet agriculture.2 Because of these liberalizing reforms, the Khrushchev era assumed the moniker "the Thaw." In general terms, this reform spirit fostered a belated postwar "return to normalcy," something that had been delayed in the Soviet Union until the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, due to the continuation of the repression that distinguished his leadership.3 In addition, it signaled a return to the task of building Communism, which had been interrupted by war.

Just a month after the Soviet Union stunned the world by putting the first artificial satellite into orbit, it boasted a new victory - a bigger satellite carrying a dog called Laika. The mission, 50 years ago today, ended sadly for Laika but helped pave the way for human flight.