Main News of August 24

A roundup of what has happened in the past 24 hours

WORLD

* Two people were killed and nine injured in a shooting outside New York's Empire State building, Mayor Michael Bloomberg told journalists near the scene of the incident

* German Chancellor Angela Merkel appeared to offer Greece no new concessions over debt repayment in talks with Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras in Berlin but maintained her line that she wanted Athens to stay in the Eurozone

* A court in Oslo sentenced Anders Breivik to the maximum 21 years prison for terrorism and the murder of 77 people, after declaring him sane

* Kyrgyzstan's President Almazbek Atambayev signed a decree sacking the government, the state press-service said

* Saif al-Islam, the second son of Libya’s late leader Muammar Gaddafi, will go on trial in September in the Libyan town of Zintan despite repeated calls from the International Criminal Court (ICC) to try him at The Hague

RUSSIA

* Members of the Russian Presidential Human Rights Council said in a statement they question the lawfulness of the sentence handed down to three members of the female punk group Pussy Riot

* Six environmental activists led by the head of Greenpeace International, Kumi Naidoo, stormed a Russian oil platform in the northern Pechora Sea to protest against drilling for oil in the Arctic

BUSINESS

* Warships, warplanes as well as S-400 missile defense systems will be deployed to protect the leaders of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum during a summit in Russia's Far East next month, an official said

* Foreign aircraft companies should be pushed out of Russia’s domestic flights market, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said

* U.S. private company SpaceX will launch its Dragon space freighter on a next resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS) in October this year