Washington  - US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice backed off plans to offer Georgia and Ukraine a formal roadmap for joining NATO, but said the United States is still committed to bringing the two countries into the alliance.

Rice is due to arrive in Brussels next week for a conference of NATO foreign minister December 2-3. She does not plan to push for quickly offering the former Soviet states a so-called membership action plan, which would place them on course to join NATO.

"Georgia and Ukraine are not ready for membership. That is very clear," Rice said, referring to the benchmarks countries must meet to enter NATO. "There does not need at this point in time to be any discussion of a" membership action plan.

Atlanta (Georgia, US), Nov. 25: A Keralite based in Sacramento, California, who was accused of fatally shooting two people, including his estranged wife, in a New Jersey church, was captured late Monday in Georgia.

New Jersey District U. S. Marshal James Plousis said Joseph "Sanish" Pallipurath was captured around midnight Monday in Monroe, east of Atlanta.

According to the Sacramento Bee, the manhunt for Pallipurath was centered on Georgia because the suspect has relatives in the area, authorities said.

Police said Pallipurath, 27, gunned down three people, including his estranged wife, Reshma James, at the St. Thomas Syrian Orthodox Knanaya Church in Clifton, New Jersey, a suburb about 15 miles west of Manhattan.

Moscow - Shots fired at the Polish and Georgian presidential motorcade near the South Ossetian border were staged and "yet another provocation" by Georgia, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Monday.

Georgia said Russian forces had opened fire on the motorcade carrying Polish and Georgian Presidents Lech Kaczynski and Mikheil Saakashvili on Sunday from the airport in Tbilisi to a settlement near the Ossetian border.

Geneva  - All the delegations attended "constructive" talks on the Russia-Georgia conflict Wednesday and agreed to meet again for another round of negotiations next month, the European Union representative to the discussions said.

"We had constructive meetings of the two working groups," said Pierre Morel. As planned, the two groups, with eight delegations in total, met on security and refugee issues for about three hours each.

The first round of talks last month ended with Moscow and Tbilisi accusing each other of walking out without the two sides having sat in the same room.

"Today, we have taken a big step forward," said Morel, adding that the talks had entered a "fully operational phase."

Geneva - All the delegations attended "constructive" talks on the Russia-Georgia conflict Wednesday and agreed to meet again for another round of negotiations next month, the European Union representative to the discussions said.

"We had constructive meetings of the two working groups," said Pierre Morel. As planned, the two groups, with eight delegations in total, met on security and refugee issues for about three hours each.

Geneva - The delegations from Russia, Georgia and the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia arrived Wednesday morning at the United Nations in Geneva for a second round of talks since they went to war in the summer.

Also attending the meetings are representatives from the United States, European Union, UN and Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

An official with the self-declared Abkhazian government said he hoped the talks would be "constructive" but stressed that there would be no plenary meeting.

"It will be eight individuals in groups working together," said Maxim Grinjia, a deputy to the foreign minister.