Indian security forces are planning to use the world's hottest chilli powder in non-lethal hand grenades to control riots and in counter-insurgency operations, a news report said Friday.

The time is not right for the European Union to upgrade its relationship with Israel following the latter's military offensive on Gaza, the EU's foreign affairs commissioner said Thursday, 10 months after the bloc agreed to such an upgrade . "We do not believe that the time is right to go beyond the current level of relations: too much remains unclear at this current point in time," Benita Ferrero-Waldner told journalists in Brussels.

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates will on Monday announce what Pentagon officials are describing as a major shift in the US military's spending priorities.

Gates will be detailing the Defence Department's much-anticipated 2010 budget, the first outline since President Barack Obama took office in January, the Pentagon announced Friday.

Quito - At least five people were killed when a military aircraft crashed into an apartment building in thick fog and exploded in the capital of Ecuador.

Four other people were injured, one seriously, in Thursday night's crash in Quito, authorities said.

The eight-seat propeller Beechcraft plane was flying low as it prepared to land in Quito and grazed a tree before it flew into the building, witnesses said.

All three people on the plane were killed, the Defence Ministry said. Two other people on the ground also died, authorities said.

Caracas - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Sunday denied having offered a Venezuelan island in the Caribbean as a base for the Russian Air Force.

A senior officer of the Russian Air Force said Saturday that the force was considering temporarily basing long-range bombers on Cuba or in Venezuela.

Cuba alone had four or five suitable bases, and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez had offered a base on La Orchila island, Major- General Anatoly Shikharev was quoted as saying.

Washington - The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has destroyed 92 video files of the harsh confinement and interrogation of suspected al-Qaeda operatives in custody, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday.

Citing government lawyers close to a long-running probe into CIA operations, the paper said that the video files had been destroyed in 2005, on the orders of then-CIA operations chief Jose A. Rodriguez Jr.

A Bulgarian and a Romanian soldier were detained in Romania for 24 hours. They were accused of high treason and espionage, according to information presented on Realitaia TV, Romania. The data were provided by the prosecutor's office with the Supreme Court of Appeal press office.
Florichel Akim, a non-commissioned officer from Romanian Ministry of Defense, and Bulgarian Zikulov, were arrested by Prosecutors in the Directorate for Investigation of Organized Crime and Terrorism for providing secret information and espionage.

Israel pulled the last of its soldiers out the Gaza Strip early Wednesday morning, over two and a half weeks since they were sent in as part of an intense Israeli operation against militants in the salient, a military spokesman in Tel Aviv said.