Main News of April 25

A roundup of what has happened in the past 24 hours

RUSSIA

* Russian President Vladimir Putin fielded more sharp questions than usual during his annual live call-in show Thursday, which lasted a record four hours and 47 minutes

* Police found a cache of firearms they believed were used by a gunman in the apparently random killing of six people in the southwestern Russian city of Belgorod on Monday, an Interior Ministry spokesman said

* A Moscow court jailed an anti-Kremlin activist for two and a half years on charges of plotting to overthrow President Vladimir Putin

* Yandex, operator of Russia's leading internet search engine, posted a US GAAP net profit of 2.246 billion rubles ($72.2 million) in January-March 2013, up 79 percent on the same period last year, the company said

* Russia's Golos Association, a non-government organization which monitors elections and campaigns for voters' rights, has refused to register itself as a "foreign agent" as required by a new NGOs law, RAPSI reported from Moscow's Presnensky Court

* Russian internet users have set up a new association to campaign for their rights and freedoms in cyberspace, the Russian Pirate Party announced

* Russian hockey forward Anton Zlobin has signed a three-year contract with the Pittsburgh Penguins, the NHL team announced on its website

WORLD

* US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said that the United States has determined that chemical weapons have been used in the civil war in Syria

* The FBI has promised to allow the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings to see his parents, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s mother said

* At least 231 bodies had been pulled from the rubble of a collapsed building in Bangladesh by Thursday afternoon, the BDNews24 online newspaper reported

* South Korean Prime Minister Chung Hong-won reiterated Seoul’s commitments to a denuclearized Korean Peninsula on Thursday and said he opposed the idea of redeploying the US tactical nuclear weapons in his country

* The Latvian parliament passed in a second reading a bill that would make smoking in the presence of children equal to an act of physical violence, the Delfi news portal reported

* Kazakhstan's military authorities have grounded all the nation's MiG jet fighter aircraft following a crash earlier this week that killed the pilot and injured the navigator of a MiG-31 interceptor, Kazakhstan’s air force chief said