Main news of March 22

A roundup of what has happened in the past 24 hours

WORLD

* Amnesty International has called on Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to pass an immediate moratorium on the death penalty after it became known that two men were executed in Minsk last week

* The Inter-American Development Bank wrote off Haiti's $479 million debt, and opened a new credit line of $200 million for the poorest Latin American country that was devastated by an earthquake in January

* EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said that Palestine may become an independent and viable sovereign nation within the next two years

* A growing number of countries join the United States in applying pressure on Tehran to revert its course on developing a nuclear weapon, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said

* Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez will open a blog to keep his readers posted and use as a battleground, national media reported

* European Union foreign ministers urged Iran to stop jamming foreign information and censoring European news sites

RUSSIA

*The pro-Kremlin United Russia party has proposed granting amnesty to over 300,000 convicts to mark the 65th anniversary of Russia's World War II victory, a Russian business daily said

* A counter-terrorism operation regime was imposed early on Monday in a street in Makhachkala, the capital of Russia's North Caucasus Republic of Dagestan, a spokesman for the republic's security service said

* Two people were seriously injured and five more sought medical assistance after a Tu-204 plane crash-landed near a Moscow airport, a source in the regional emergencies service

BUSINESS

* Ukraine's new President Viktor Yanukovych expressed hope that his country could sign a new gas deal with Moscow during the upcoming visit of the Russian president to Ukraine

* Russia's United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) said it does not plan to enter a lucrative contract to replace the U.S. Air Force's fleet of aerial tankers

* The first pipelay vessel started its journey to the Baltic Sea to begin construction on the Nord Stream pipeline, which will pump Russian natural gas to Europe, the project operator said

* Alfa Bank is to invest around $240 million in Mirax Group to continue construction of a Moscow skyscraper, planned as one of the world's tallest buildings, a Russian business daily said

* China's state-run news agency Xinhua in an editorial accused Google of being a political tool to "export culture, values and ideas," a day before the world's largest search engine is expected to announce that it would leave the country