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Acclaimed Italian director Nanni Moretti will head the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in May, organisers said. The Cannes regular, who won the Palme d'Or with The Son's Room in 2001, will preside over the 65th edition of the festival on May 16-27. Festival director Thierry Fremaux said: "The festival wanted to celebrate its 65th season with a European jury president. High-spirited and marked by his modernity and intelligence, Nanni Moretti's films are the incarnation of all the best in cinema over the past 30 years".

Moretti, 59, said it was a "real joy, honour and tremendous responsibility" to accept the position. "As a director, I was always moved when my films were presented at the Cannes Film Festival," said Moretti, who has screened six films at Cannes starting with Ecce Bombo in 1978. "I also have very happy memories of my experience as a jury member during the 50th anniversary season", he went on. "As a spectator, fortunately I still have the same curiosity that I had in my youth and so it is a great privilege for me to embark on this voyage into the world of contemporary international film."

In 1994 Moretti won best director at the festival for Caro Diario (Dear Diary) before picking up the Palme d'Or seven years ater with La Stanza del Figlio (The Son's Room). Il Caimano (The Cayman), Moretti's satirical swipe at Italian politics in the Berlusconi era, screened at Cannes in 2006. His latest movie Habemus Papam was unveiled at the festival last year.

A Russian orthodox church in the city of Bari will be formally handed over to Russia, completing a two-year process. The city council will consign the building to the Patriarchate of Moscow at a long-awaited ceremony, Bari town hall said. Among those attending the ceremony will be Russian Ambassador Aleksej Meshkov.

The church, dedicated to St Nicholas, was built in the early 20th century to welcome Russian pilgrims coming to the city to visit the 11th-century Basilica of St Nicholas, where the saint's relics lie. It was later acquired by Bari city council. The church, which has been housing municipal offices, is expected to return to its original function following the handover.

The return of the church has been the subject of talks since March 2007, when former Russian president and current premier, Vladimir Putin, made an official request for its return during an Italo-Russian summit in the city. Two years later, on March 1, 2009, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and his Italian counterpart Giorgio Napolitano attended a ceremony to start returning the church. The ceremony was originally scheduled to coincide with the saint's feast day, December 6, marking the anniversary of his death in 333 AD.

Bari is the most popular destination in the world for Russian orthodox pilgrims, for whom St Nicholas holds great importance. A fourth-century bishop in what is now Turkey, St Nicholas was famous for his generosity and later developed in some regions of the world into the figure of Santa Claus. Sailors from Bari stole his remains from the ancient city of Myra in 1087.

Former leftist militant Adriano Sofri has been freed after serving a jail term for ordering the murder of a police commissioner in the 1970s. Sofri, 69, an intellectual and writer, had been under house arrest for health reasons since 2007 and had been permitted furloughs. In 1990 he was given a 22-year sentence for the 1972 murder of Milan police ommissioner Luigi Calabresi. In November 2005 he almost died after suffering a ruptured oesophagus. His sentence was subsequently suspended and he has been convalescing ever since. Parole judges ruled he could serve out the rest of his sentence at his home in the small town of Impruneta near Florence.

The ex-leader of Lotta Continua, a hard-left political movement active during the 1970s, was found guilty of the Calabresi murder along with two former fellow militants, Ovidio Bompressi and Giorgio Pietrostefani. The trials, appeals and various retrials of the three, who were first arrested in 1988, marked one of the most complicated and drawn-out cases in Italian legal history. The convictions were definitively upheld in 2000. Bompressi was granted a presidential pardon for health reasons in May 2006 while Pietrostefani fled to France to avoid jail.

Commissioner Calabresi was gunned down in front of his Milan home on May 7, 1972. He had become a figure of loathing in hard-left circles after anarchist Pino Pinelli fell to his death in suspicious circumstances from a window at Milan's police headquarters in 1969. The case was the subject of Nobel prize winner Dario Fo's best-known work Accidental Death of an Anarchist. In 1971, Calabresi was put under investigation for Pinelli's murder but charges were dropped because of lack of evidence.

Sofri's supporters have been long been lobbying for a presidential pardon for the former militant. But Sofri's case is more complicated than that of Bompressi because he has always made a point of never asking for a pardon himself, saying that this would be an admission of guilt. Sofri, who has always maintained his innocence, has become a columnist, mostly for the left-leaning daily La Repubblica, and a pacifist intellectual who regularly contributes to the country's political debate.