* President Vladimir Putin instructed the government to revise and submit to parliament a bill on cutting army conscription term from 24 to 12 months starting January 1, 2008

YEREVAN

MOSCOW, December 2 (RIA Novosti)-The Supreme Court of Russia will hear an appeal Friday lodged by a controversial political party against a ruling from a lower court barring it from participating in the December 4 elections to the Moscow city legislature, the party leader said.

VLADIVOSTOK, December 2 (RIA Novosti, Veronika Perminova) – The Russian Emergency Situations Ministry said Friday that a stretch of polluted water from China was expanding by five to ten kilometers a day, according to Chinese experts, and could be about 125 miles long when it reaches the Russian city of Khabarovsk.

ASTANA, December 2 (RIA Novosti) – Friday is the last day of campaigning in Kazakhstan's presidential elections, the country's top election official said. "Campaigning ends at midnight today, and from December 3 campaigning is forbidden," Onalsyn Zhumabekov said at a meeting with election observers from the United Kingdom.

VLADIVOSTOK, December 2 (RIA Novosti, Veronika Perminova) – China is set to supply Russia with rapid-analysis equipment to test samples from the Amur River as a 70-mile slick of polluted water from its Chinese tributary, the Songhua, approaches the Russian city of Khabarovsk, a spokesman for the Russian president's envoy to the Far Eastern District said Friday.

MOSCOW, December 02 (RIA Novosti) – Russia's Central Bank announced Friday that the country's narrowly defined money supply (M1) was 2,023 billion rubles ($70.2 billion) as of November 28, down 14.7 billion rubles ($510 million) in the week since November 21.

NEW DELHI, December 2 (RIA Novosti, Larisa Sayenko) – The Indian navy will deploy the Admiral Gorshkov, an aircraft carrier bought from Russia, in the first half of 2008, Indian newspaper The Hindu reported Friday citing a senior naval commander.

Moscow. (RIA Novosti political commentator Yury Filippov). The campaign for the December 4th elections to the Moscow City Duma has been besieged by one intrigue after another.

MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Andrei Kislyakov.) Despite Russia's 30-fold disadvantage in financing its space effort as compared with America's, it has greater chances of being the first in reaching the Moon this time, or perhaps the Mars.