Main news of November 14

A roundup of what has happened in the past 24 hours

WORLD

*Greece must by the end of the year approve the bailout package presented by the European Union at the end of October, Greece's new Prime Minister Lucas Papadimos said on Monday

*The resignation of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who said he would step down last week, became effective late Saturday night

*The Arab League will send 500 monitors to Syria to help resolve the ongoing crisis in the country, the Arab Medical Union's head, Ibrahim al-Zafarani, said

*The Russian Foreign Ministry summoned the Tajik ambassador to Moscow on Monday over the case of Russian pilot Vladimir Sadovnichy who was sent to prison for eight and a half years by Tajik court last week for smuggling and border violations , the ministry said

*Ukraine's economy is stable enough without International Monetary Fund loans and Kiev will do without them in the future, Ukraine Prime Minister Mykola Azarov said

*EU foreign ministers approved a package of additional sanctions against Syria on Monday over the bloody crackdown on protests by President Bashar Assad's regime

*The leader of Greece's center-right opposition Antonis Samaras said on Monday his New Democracy party would not vote for any new austerity plan demanded by international lenders before they provide more financial aid to Athens

*Anders Breivik, the man accused of killing 77 people in Norway last summer, made his first public appearance in court on Monday, where he was remanded for another 12 weeks

*The West is encouraging the Syrian opposition to continue its confrontation with the ruling regime and Washington is “persistently and publicly” advising them to reject all peace proposals, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said

*The option of sanctions against Iran over its disputed nuclear program is exhausted and the issue should be solved by talks, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said

RUSSIA

*A fire on a passenger vessel moored at a Moscow river port was finally extinguished after a thirteen hour struggle by firefighters on Monday evening, a police source said

*The Russian Defense Ministry denied on Monday media reports that it had bought thousands of badminton rackets and tens of thousands of shuttlecocks for military units

*Russia’s chief sanitary official, Gennady Onishchenko, has called for labor migrants from Tajikistan to be temporarily barred from Russia for public health reasons

*Russia is ready to continue talks with Saudi Arabia on the export of helicopters and air defense missiles systems, state-run arms exporter Rosoboronexport said

*The Russian Defense Ministry will buy about 10,000 badminton rackets and tens of thousands of shuttlecocks in 2012 and plans to provide all military units with equipment from that particular sport, Izvestia newspaper said

*Russia has time until the beginning of December to establish contact with its Phobos-Grunt unmanned spacecraft that is stranded at a low-Earth orbit after launch, the Russian space agency Roscosmos said

*A Soyuz TMA-22 spaceship departed on Monday for the international space station (ISS) from a launch pad in Kazakhstan

*Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced that he would deliver a complete assessment on the U.S.-backed European missile defense system in the near future