Main news of July 20

A roundup of what has happened in the past 24 hours

WORLD

*Libya will support any Russian assistance in the peaceful mediation of the crisis in the country, Libyan Foreign Minister Abdul Ati al-Obeidi said

*Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblatt said on Wednesday Lebanon accepts the indictments by the UN Special Tribunal on the assassination of then-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri but will not tolerate any interference in its domestic affairs

*The U.S. Congress is likely to approve an increase in the country's debt ceiling, as it has many times done before, analysts said

*Goran Hadzic, a Croatian Serb general wanted for war crimes in Croatia in 1990s, has been detained by Serb authorities

*Belarusian Prosecutor General Grigory Vasilevich on Wednesday called on the country's police to respect the rights of journalists amid ongoing protests against the rule of President Alexander Lukashenko

*Turkey may freeze relations with the European Union for the duration of Cyprus’s presidency of the organization, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said

*The FBI has arrested 14 people suspected of cyber attacks on the PayPal website, the U.S. Department of Justice said

*Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is ready to announce new changes in election legislation that would allow multiple candidates to run for president for the first time since 1963, a Lebanese paper said

*Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will visit the Gaza Strip if Israel does not apologize for its 2010 attack on the Freedom Flotilla, Turkish media reported

* Weather forecasts are favorable for the last landing under the Space Shuttle program

*The EU Council of Ministers has approved new regulations for nuclear waste management, which allow nuclear waste storage in non-EU countries, including Russia

*A Russian national was gunned down in the Colombian capital of Bogota, where he had arrived on a business trip

RUSSIA

*Former security officer Sergei Klimuk, who is serving a life sentence for participating in a 2006 bombing of a Moscow market that killed 14 people, has appealed to the Russian Constitutional Court over alleged violation of his rights for sentence revision

*A Russian cruise ship, the Bulgaria, which sunk on the Volga River, may be lifted on Thursday, Tatarstan President Rustam Minnikhanov said

*The Russian military intends to move towards "virtual battlefield" military training by 2013, Chief of the General Staff Gen. Nikolai Makarov said

*Two people suspected of involvement in a 2010 terrorist attack on a power plant in southern Russia will go on trial, a spokesman for the Russian Investigative Committee said

*A Moscow traffic police officer at the center of a dispute involving a pregnant driver and a VIP vehicle is to face disciplinary action, a police spokesman said

*Wildfires raging in Russia's Siberian republic of Yakutia prompted evacuation of children from a summer camp and approached the regional capital of Yakutsk