Main News of May 3

A roundup of what has happened in the past 24 hours

RUSSIA

Russia’s Qiwi payment terminal operator announced the pricing of its shares at $17 in the company’s initial public offering on the NASDAQ stock exchange, according to a message on the NASDAQ site.

The Kremlin said it doubted the veracity of a letter published on the internet, said to have been sent to President Vladimir Putin by a group of doctors, asking him to allow adoptions of Russian children which have already started to go ahead, in spite of a new law banning adoptions of Russian children by Americans.

An ecological support group in Russia running a protected site for cranes has been branded as a "foreign agent" by Russian prosecutors - the latest in a series of NGOs to be listed as such by the authorities.

Russia performed miserably in three major ratings by prominent Western media watchdogs released this week to mark World Press Freedom Day.

The Russian government bypassed a state tender to grant Gazprom the right to explore four gas fields in the northern Barents Sea.

A Russian researcher said he discovered fragments of the largest celestial body to hit the Earth in recorded history – though he waited for 23 years before going public with the findings.

 

WORLD

A US military Boeing KC-135 refueling aircraft crashed in a mountainous area in Kyrgyzstan for unspecified reasons, the United States Air Force said.

Moscow is ready to hold talks with all representatives of the Syrian opposition, including Salim Idriss, leader of the Free Syrian Army, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.

The first airplane that can fly both day and night powered exclusively by the sun’s rays took off from California in the first stage of an attempt to fly across the United States without using any fuel.

Chinese authorities busted a large food fraud ring that was selling fox, mink and rat meat as beef and mutton, local media reported.

The Tsarnaev brothers, suspected of carrying out the Boston Marathon bombings, originally planned to detonate their explosive devices on July 4, US media reported citing officials with knowledge of the surviving suspect’s interrogation.

A candidate standing for the May 11 elections to the Pakistan parliament was shot dead in the southern city of Karachi, in the second high-profile assassination in the country in one day.

The prosecutor who investigated the murder of Pakistan’s ex-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was himself slain in a drive-by shooting in Islamabad, Dawn newspaper reported.

 

SPORT

Tomas Zaborsky scored a goal and an assist and Rastislav Stana recorded 24 saves as Slovakia beat France 6-2 in the opening game of the world hockey championship.

Co-host Finland’s world hockey championship campaign got off to a stuttering start with a 4-3 overtime win against Germany on Friday.