Main News of March 26

A roundup of what has happened in the past 24 hours

RUSSIA

* Physicists from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna intend to begin experiments on the synthesis of element 119 of the periodic system, Sergei Dmitriyev, the head of the institute's laboratory of nuclear reactions, said

WORLD

* More than 4,000 cities from 131 countries and about 750 major landmarks turned off their lights during the global Earth Hour event

* U.S. President Barack Obama said that the United States will not deploy any ground forces in Libya

* Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas met with a delegation of the rival Palestinian movement Hamas in Ramallah to discuss reconciliation attempts

* Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh said that he is ready to leave power "with respect and dignity"

* The international coalition enforcing a no-fly zone in Libya is bombing both military and civilians targets to pave the rebels' way to oil facilities, a Libyan military source said

* Sudan denied reports that it had allegedly granted a secret permission to use its airspace to western nations enforcing the no-fly zone in Libya, the Sudanese Foreign Ministry's official spokesman said

* Japanese engineers restored on Saturday the electricity supply at the control room of the second reactor of Japan's quake-hit Fukushima 1 nuclear power plant, Kyodo news agency reported

* Japan's marine life is in no danger regardless of the radiation levels in the waters near the crippled Fukushima 1 Nuclear Power Plant, government spokesman Yukio Edano said