Main News of October 17

A roundup of what has happened in the past 24 hours

WORLD

* Rescuers are battling to try to reach 11 coalminers trapped underground following a coal mine explosion in central China that killed 26 workers, local media reported

 

* Ukraine’s former premier, Yulia Tymoshenko, said that her opposition fraction would do everything it could do to stop the Russian language gaining official status in the former Soviet state

 

* Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Tehran was ready to restart talks with world powers on its nuclear program in November in exchange for a statement on Israel’s atomic capability

 

* Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovych urged Ukrainians to make joint efforts to defeat poverty in the ex-Soviet republic, where every fourth person is living under the poverty line according to Labor Ministry data

 

* Over 25 people have been killed and more than 70 injured in Pakistan's biggest city of Karachi on the eve of by-elections for a seat in the provincial assembly, local media reported

 

RUSSIA

 

* A senior Kremlin official has said that opposition protests in central Moscow are likely to get the go-ahead when the city's new mayor takes office.

 

* CSKA Moscow beat Terek Grozny 3-0 to record their first ever win in the Chechen capital

 

* No date has yet been set for a vote in Moscow city parliament on the nomination by President Dmitry Medvedev of Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Sobyanin for Moscow mayor, the City Duma speaker said

 

* Russian troops started the active phase of anti-terrorist drills on Indian territory as part of joint Russian-Indian exercises, the Russian Defense ministry said

 

* Flooding in the southern Russian region of Krasnodar has killed at least 13 people and twelve are missing, the regional prosecutor's office said