MIKHAIL GORBACHEV is by his wife's bed night and day, praying for a miracle. Raisa Gorbachev is hovering at death's jaws at the Munster clinic where she has been receiving treatment for leukaemia for nearly two months.

I shall miss Mir hugely. It made space human, unpredictable and therefore interesting.

RAISA GORBACHEV, the glittering first lady during the last days of the Soviet Union, is seriously ill in hospital in Germany, her husband's spokesman said yesterday. Mikhail Gorbachev was at his wife's bedside in Munster, Germany, where she arrived on Monday for medical tests after deciding to be treated abroad.

Andy Farrell meets a player at his peak as Carnoustie calls: Countdown to The Open: Mind games at work as major talent strives to be first Swede to triumph

VIKTOR CHEBRIKOV'S rise in the Soviet state and party apparatus was a model of the patronage system, especially with Leonid Brezhnev in power.

WARS END, as they begin, in a myriad settings. They may start with a proclamation in parliament or a sneak invasion, with the drumroll despatch of a great army or the tiniest guerrilla skirmish. They can end in great hotels, in courthouses and schoolhouses, in railway carriages, and aboard ships. But most often perhaps, as the one over Kosovo is about to do, in a tent.

BORIS YELTSIN may have hoped to go down in history as a great reformer but future generations are likely to remember him as a hero with tragic flaws.

The spaceman who went up a Soviet and came back a Russian ... and lived to star in the film. By Robin Buss

The Queen has been invited to visit the Soviet Union. Anthony Bevins and Rupert Cornwell report

VYACHESLAV CHORNOVIL, who was killed in a late-night car crash as he was returning to Kiev from an election meeting, managed the difficult transition from Soviet-era dissident to politician, but never quite achieved the success he had hoped for in realising his ideal of an independent Ukrainian state.

Thinking Aloud Cambridge Kettle's Yard

Aid poured in when the region was laid waste by earthquake. But Sophia Coudenhove finds devastation a decade later

THESE WERE the "world leaders" back in October 1978, when a little- known Polish cardinal stepped out on to St Peter's Square as the new pope and proclaimed his electrifying message: "Be not afraid!" Twenty years on, those worldly leaders are long since retired or dead, but the "servant of the servants of God" is still with us, still travelling the world, still tirelessly proclaiming the same urgent, universal message to all humankind.

After 20 years in the Vatican John Paul II aims to put his stamp on the next century, writes Anne Hanley in Rome