The new Russian prosecutor confirmed

The upper house of the Russian Parliament , the Federation Council, has voted overwhelmingly to confirm Vladimir Ustinov, as the country's top prosecutor.

The vote was one-hundred-fourteen to ten. Some MPs expressed their opposition, saying that Mr Ustinov was close to Boris Berezovsky, a powerful business tycoon who has been investigated in a corruption case involving the state airline Aeroflot. Mr Ustinov was proposed for the job by Russia's new president, Vladimir Putin, following the dismissal last month of the former prosecutor general, Yuri Skuratov.

Mr Skuratov was originally dismissed by President Yeltsin, after he began investigations into corruption in the Kremlin; he had implied that Mr Putin might have links with the cases he was investigating.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service