Main News of March 15

A roundup of what has happened in the past 24 hours

WORLD

* The once-booming city of Detroit became the largest city in United States history to be taken over by its home state, when Michigan Governor Rick Snyder on Thursday appointed an emergency manager to oversee Detroit’s finances to try and avoid bankruptcy

* Unfavorable weather conditions have forced the Russian space agency Roscosmos to postpone the return of three Expedition 34 crewmembers - Russian cosmonauts Oleg Novitsky, Yevgeny Tarelkin, and NASA astronaut Kevin Ford - from the International Space Station (ISS) by one day, space officials said

* Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia has congratulated Pope Francis on his election as the new head of the Roman Catholic Church and expressed hope for cooperation, the Russian Orthodox Church said Thursday

* The global annual road traffic fatality rate could grow to a projected figure of 1.9 million people by 2020 from the current 1.2 million if countries do not toughen road safety laws, the World Health Organization (WHO) said

* The inquest into the death of Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 has been postponed until October

* Ukraine’s boxing-champion-cum-lawmaker Vitali Klitschko says he is not aiming at the post of president in his political career, Correspondent daily reported

* The Chinese authorities have failed to stop a massive flood of hog carcasses into a tributary of the Yangtze River, which has now risen to 7,545 bodies over the past week, the Shanghai Daily newspaper reported

* The Syrian Foreign Ministry has threatened to strike militants' bases on Lebanese territory if Beirut fails to beef up security on their common border and prevent infiltration, local media reported

* United States drone attacks are “a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty,” and are being conducted without the consent of Islamabad, the head of the United Nations team investigating casualties from American drone strikes in Pakistan, said in a statement

* A former naval shipyard worker who confessed to setting a fire aboard a US nuclear submarine causing $450 million in damage was sentenced to 17 years in federal prison Friday in US District Court in Maine

* Three white tiger cubs were born at the zoo in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, a spokesman for the zoo said

* South Korean electronics maker Samsung unveiled its latest smartphone the Galaxy S4, which boasts innovative features like allowing users to control the screen with their eyes. But initial reviews have been mixed, and industry experts are divided over whether this Samsung phone is ready to outsell and out-innovate its chief rival, Apple

* Thousands of Venezuelans lined the streets of Caracas on Friday to escort the body of late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez to the Military Museum, local media have reported.

RUSSIA

* The Bolshoi Theater’s artistic director Sergei Filin said on Friday that he had suspected the guilt of the soloist who was arrested for allegedly planning the acid attack which almost blinded him

* Russian President Vladimir Putin has supported a public organization’s idea to create a textbook on Russia’s military history for high school

* Russia may soon have a consumer rights ombudsman, the country’s chief public health official Gennady Onishchenko said

* Deputies from the Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, accused their opposition-supporting colleague Dmitry Gudkov on Friday of supporting the United States against Russia, and have appealed to the ethics commission to investigate his conduct

* About 1,500 violations and infractions have been uncovered in Russia's state defense spending in 2012 involving over 16 billion rubles ($533 million), the Russian Federal Defense Contracts Service (Rosoboronzakaz) said

* The Russian Armed Forces should be capable of conducting standoff engagement-based operations to minimize service casualties by 2020, thanks to the major reequipment drive currently underway, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said

* Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who oversees the country’s military-industrial complex, called on Friday for harsher punishments for corrupt officials who “betray the motherland” by siphoning funds from defense projects

* President Vladimir Putin has signed a government-sponsored law banning foreign banks from opening branches in Russia, the government’s website said

* Russia’s entry in this year’s Eurovision contest unveiled the final version of her ballad "What If" on Friday, with just two months to go until the annual gathering of European pop fans

* A new Russian carrier-deck pilot training site will be ready for operation by fall, the Federal Agency for Special Construction Work confirmed on Friday, replacing a Soviet-era base in Ukraine which Kiev has said it may lease to other countries

* Russian soccer player Alexander Kerzhakov has been defrauded of $1 million in an elaborate scheme involving the construction of a ghost oil refinery, his lawyer said

* The last in a series of three frigates that Russia is building for India at the Yantar Shipyard in the Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad has completed contractor sea trials, a spokesman for the shipyard said

* A former army commando who took several hostages in a city in southern Russia on Thursday, demanding money, a getaway car and a pizza, wanted to impress his ex-girlfriend, a spokesman for the investigation said

* A butcher at a meat processing plant in the Moscow Region is suspected of having killed and dismembered his coworker after discovering that the latter began stealing meat on his own, regional investigators said

* The Russian government is preventing Sochi hotels from profiteering at next year's Winter Games by banning minimum periods of stay during the Olympics

* Russia’s Ufa-based engine maker will deliver the first 10 of 920 AL-31FP engines for the Su-30MKI Flanker-H to India before the end of March, the manufacturer said

* The administration of the Twitter micro-blogging service has begun cooperating with Russia’s media and communications watchdog Roskomnadzor by limiting access to accounts connected with blacklisted websites, the watchdog said in a statement

* The population of the Amur leopard has grown by half since 2007 and the cats have expanded their habitat as far as North Korea, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said

* A man who attempted to commit suicide by setting himself on fire at a Moscow supermarket said he was a migrant worker from Tajikistan, working at a construction site without being paid, a witness said

* The lower house of the Russian parliament, the State Duma, voted on Friday to terminate lawmaker Vladimir Pekhtin’s mandate over allegations of unethical behavior

* The Russian parliament’s lower house, the State Duma, passed in the second reading on Friday a bill stipulating fines for the use of foul language in media

* Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has given a minister’s job to Arbi Tamayev, who subscribed to his newly registered account on a popular photo sharing service Instagram, a spokesman for the republic’s administration said

SPACE

* A Soyuz TMA-06M spacecraft with three crewmembers from the International Space Station (ISS) is due to land on Saturday at 7:06 a.m. Moscow time (3:06 a.m. GMT) 50 kilometers (30 miles) north of the town of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan, Federal Air Transport Agency Rosaviatsia said