Main News of April 3

A roundup of what has happened in the past 24 hours.

WORLD

* A shooting spree at a small religious college in northern California left seven people dead and three wounded, CNN reported on Monday citing local police.

* Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed Amr has called on all Syrian opposition groups to gather for a conference in Cairo under the auspices of the Arab League to unite their efforts in resolving the current political crisis in Syria.

* At least four people have died and 65 were injured, including several policemen, in riots in the town of Gilgit in the Northern Areas of North Pakistan, The News reported.

* The Taliban have ambushed a NATO supply column in Delaram, southwest Afghanistan, destroying a number of fuel trucks, the Pajhwok news agency reported on Tuesday.

* Belarus may build a second nuclear plant in the country in addition to one already planned for the western Grodno Region, President Alexander Lukashenko said on Tuesday.

* At least nine Afghan police officers were killed and 14 others were taken hostage in two separate attacks by Taliban militants on police outposts in northern and southern Afghanistan in the early hours of Tuesday, local media reported.

 

RUSSIA

* A blaze on two upper floors of a skyscraper under construction in Moscow has been put out, a law enforcement source told RIA Novosti on Tuesday.

* Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has disagreed with the presidential human rights council’s view on pardon of convicts in questionable cases, the head of the council Mikhail Fedotov said.

* At least 15 people died early on Tuesday in a fire at a market in southern Moscow, a police source told RIA Novosti.

* A senior police accountant in Russia's Krasnoyarsk Territory has been charged with large-scale fraud as investigators suspect her of stealing payroll money totaling some 6 million rubles (over $200,000), a regional police spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

* Another case of police brutality came to light in Russia on Tuesday with the announcement that two policemen from Kostroma violently beat and tortured two detainees during an interrogation in 2010.

* A woman in northern Russia was given a suspended sentence for killing her newborn and keeping its body for almost five years in a freezer.

* Three individuals working in Russia's nuclear arms complex face fraud charges over a scheme to embezzle 190 million rubles ($6.3 mln) of public funds, the Russian Interior Ministry's anti-corruption committee said on Tuesday.

* A mere twenty five percent of Russians believe that President-elect Vladimir Putin will be able to significantly reduce corruption in the country before the end of his presidential term of office in 2018, an opinion poll revealed on Tuesday.

* Russian airline UTair has suspended flights of ATR 72-200 aircraft until the end of an investigation into Monday’s deadly plane crash near the city of Tyumen, UTair reported.

* Outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev signed into law on Tuesday a bill to simplify Russia's current stringent requirements for the registration of political parties.

* The head of Central Russia’s Ryazan Region traffic police department is suspected of receiving a bribe of 500,000 rubles ($17,000), the Russian Investigative Committee spokesman Vladimir Markin said on Tuesday.

* A Moscow court turned down an appeal by the mother of Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian lawyer who died in remand prison in 2009, against the posthumous reopening of a criminal case against her son, a RAPSI correspondent reported from the court room.

* The Russian Orthodox Church should be ready for public debates with its opponents but not reply in kind to a smear campaign against it, the church’s leader, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia, said on Tuesday.

* Five suspected militants, two of them in suicide belts with the total power equivalent of five kg of TNT, have been killed in a special operation in Nazran, the largest town in the Russian North Caucasus republic of Ingushetia, the National Antiterrorism Committee (NAC) reported on Tuesday.