Main news of December 3

A roundup of what has happened in the past 24 hours

RUSSIA

* A national “day of silence” kicked off at midnight on Saturday in Russia prior to parliamentary elections on December 4

* Russia will start building modernized Borey-A class strategic nuclear-powered submarines in 2012, the Sevmash shipyard said

* President Dmitry Medvedev urged government agencies to work out a way to punish foreigners for violent treatment of adopted Russian children in the wake of recent acquittal rulings in the United States

* Moscow airport customs confiscated a laptop from the leader of the Golos independent election monitoring group accused of violations ahead of the Sunday parliamentary polls

WORLD

* The White House expressed concern over the political pressure on Russia’s independent election monitoring group Golos ahead of Sunday general election

* The UN Security Council has extended the mandate of the UN support mission in Libya where the new government is facing a post-war proliferation of weapons

* South Ossetia:

- Supporters of former presidential candidate Alla Dzhioyeva demanded incumbent leader Eduard Kokoity's immediate resignation

- Supporters of Dzhioyeva want to inaugurate the politician as president on December 10, spokesman for Dzhioyeva's staff said

- Thousands of opposition protesters in the partly recognized South Ossetian republic refused to leave the square to cast their votes in the Russian parliamentary elections due on Sunday

* Syrian diplomats dismissed a new resolution of the UN human rights watchdog as unfair and blatantly politicized, the Foreign Ministry said

*A Pennsylvania court sentenced U.S. businessman and patron of arts Kenneth Schneider to 15 years in jail for having intimate relations with a Russian teenaged ballet dancer, NBC said