Main News of June 23

A roundup of what has happened in the past 24 hours

WORLD

* Ecuador’s foreign minister said on Twitter that Edward Snowden, a former US intelligence contractor wanted by the United States for revealing a highly classified surveillance program, had requested asylum in Ecuador

* Activists have held a mass protest in Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul, shortly after Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s prime minister, gathered his supporters in a seaside resort, media reported

RUSSIA

* Russia’s Emergencies Ministry has sent a plane to Izhevsk in western Urals to take Mikhail Kalashnikov, the 93-year-old inventor of the legendary AK-47 assault rifle, to a Moscow clinic, ministry spokeswoman Irina Rossius said

* The Pakistani Taliban has claimed responsibility for killing a group of tourists, including one Russian, five Ukrainians and three Chinese, as retaliation for a leader’s death in a US drone attack, The Associated Press reported, citing a Taliban spokesman

* Russia can use Soviet-era SS-18 Satan heavy intercontinental ballistic missiles to destroy celestial bodies posing a threat to Earth, a Russian scientist said four months after a powerful meteor struck Russia’s Urals region