Main news of June 3

A roundup of what has happened in the past 24 hours

Russia:

* Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said he hoped the Russian-U.S. strategic arms reduction treaty would be ratified soon by both sides

* Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has signed a federal law ratifying the Customs Code, which paves the way for the creation of a Customs Union with Belarus and Kazakhstan, the Kremlin said on its website

* Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said he hopes to see a peaceful settlement of the situation on the Korean peninsula, worsened recently by the sinking of a South Korean warship in an alleged attack by the North

* Russian defense spending will rise to 2.9% of GDP in 2011, up three tenths of a percent on the current year, a deputy finance minister said

* Finnish President Tarja Halonen has refused to prevent the deportation of an 82-year-old, disabled Russian woman, despite the fact that the journey poses a serious health risk, a Finnish human rights activist said

* Russia will provide Nicaragua with $10 million to help the Central American country tackle its budget deficit, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said

* The third and possibly final round of talks between Russia and the U.S. on a bilateral agreement on children adoption will be held in Washington on June 14-16, Russia's child ombudsman said

* Russia will test launch a new spacecraft from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in 2015, the head of the manned space program at Russia's Federal Space Agency Roscosmos said

* The participants in a simulated Mars expedition waved good-bye to journalists, sealed the hatches and "took off" for a 520-day "space trip" , a spokesman for the Moscow Institute of Medical and Biological Problems said

* The Russian scientific institute that started the Mars-500 simulation of a manned mission to the Red Planet has launched an interactive website on the experiment in cooperation with Google

World:

*The United States expects the United Nations Security Council to vote on new sanctions on Iran next week, the White House spokesman said

*South Korea officially informed Russia that it will submit to the United Nations Security Council a request for a resolution against North Korea over its alleged attack on the Cheonan warship, Yonhap South Korean news agency said

* Turkey will never forgive Israel for the killing of Turkish citizens on a Gaza-bound humanitarian convoy by Israeli special forces, Turkish President Abdullah Gul said

* Turkey may exclude Israel from the Blue Stream-2 gas pipeline project if relations between the countries continue to deteriorate following the Israeli attack on a Gaza-bound humanitarian aid convoy, Turkish media said

* Tehran has not stopped its uranium enrichment activities, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman said

* Ukraine's parliament, the Supreme Rada, passed in the first reading a bill that stipulates Ukraine's status of non-alignment with international blocs

* Russian military experts have inspected the wreckage of a South Korean warship that sank in the Yellow Sea in March following an alleged attack by North Korea, a South Korean military official said

* Poland is satisfied with the cooperation between Moscow and Warsaw in investigating the crash of its president's plane, its ambassador to Moscow said

* Belarus actively backs the creation of the Customs Union between Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, a spokesman for the Belarusian Foreign Ministry said

* Russia will provide Nicaragua with $10 million to help the Central American country tackle its budget deficit, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said

Business:

* Morgan Stanley expects Russia's economy to be among the fastest-growing in the world this year despite trailing rivals in foreign investment, the firm's chairman said ahead of the International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg

* British Petroleum, dubbed Bad Petroleum after the April 20 accident at its Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, is only now coming to see the dramatic consequences of the accident, its early failure to assess the scale of it and act to stop the oil spill, and its clumsy attempts to shift the blame onto contractors and equipment suppliers

* Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has welcomed plans from Finnish mobile giant Nokia to become a founding member of the Russian Skolkovo high-tech research hub