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Pipeline fixed, but Georgia, Russia aren't done fighting

MOSCOW - Russia completed repairs on Sunday to a natural gas pipeline carrying fuel over its border in the Caucasus, beginning to restore fuel to Georgia after a week of blackouts and heating fuel shortages strained relations between the countries.

Bombs severed the pipeline, as well as a reserve pipeline and an electricity line, on Jan. 22. No one has claimed responsibility for the bombing. Russia has blamed insurgents in the region, though Georgian officials have rejected that explanation.

The energy shortage began during the coldest weather in Georgia in years and worsened several days later when wind toppled transmission lines carrying electricity generated by hydropower dams.

In another sign of deteriorating relations between Georgia and Russia, the mayor of Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, announced that Georgia had cut off gas to the Russian Embassy there and to a local office of Gazprom, Russia's gas monopoly.

Russia's Foreign Ministry promptly threatened to cut off energy to the Georgian Embassy in Moscow, but later said that gas had been restored to its buildings in Tbilisi.

By 10 p.m. on Sunday, however, the Interfax news agency reported that the Georgian Embassy in Moscow and several buildings nearby had lost heat and electricity because of unspecified damage to the local electric grid and heating plant. The temperature in Moscow was 13 degrees and dropping.

HELSINKI, Finland - Finland's leftist president won another six-year term Sunday after her conservative challenger conceded defeat in a runoff election.

President Tarja Halonen and her opponent, Sauli Niinisto, had presented similar visions for neutral Finland's foreign policy - the president's primary domain.

Halonen had nearly 52 percent to Niinisto's 48 percent, with all the votes counted.

Halonen got an unusual endorsement from fellow redhead Conan O'Brien, the NBC late-night talk show host who backed her as part of a running joke about their supposed physical similarities.

ESTERHAZY, Saskatchewan - Fire broke out Sunday in a mine in central Canada, forcing some 70 miners trapped underground to retreat to emergency rooms with oxygen and supplies, a mine official said.

Marshall Hamilton, a spokesman for Mosaic Company, the Minneapolis-based firm that operates the potash mine, said the fire broke out nearly a mile underground in Saskatchewan province.

Hamilton said company officials had not been able to establish a radio link with 30 of the miners, but that there was "no reason to doubt they are anything but safe."

[Last modified January 30, 2006, 00:33:11]