Main News of July 15

A roundup of what has happened in the past 24 hours

RUSSIA

* Russian President Vladimir Putin said US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden was still in the transit area of a Moscow airport because Washington had “blocked” him there by intimidating countries that had been ready to grant him asylum.

* Russia’s Federal Migration Service (FMS) has not yet received a request for asylum from fugitive former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, the service told RIA Novosti

* Russian President Vladimir Putin went deep into the Baltic Sea to explore a tsarist flagship that sank in 1869

* The Russian government approved a roadmap for the domestic IT industry in an apparent move to boost the country's development in innovative spheres and diversify the economy away from raw material exports

* Moscow is holding talks with Berlin over the possible exchange of a married couple convicted in Germany earlier this month of being Russian intelligence agents, a newspaper report said

* A man whose truck slammed into a bus, killing 18 people on a Moscow highway over the weekend, has been charged with violating traffic rules resulting in multiple deaths, police said. He faces seven years behind bars.

* Four years since human rights activist Natalya Estemirova was abducted and killed in Chechnya, authorities and her colleagues traded conflicting reports about the inquiry into the unsolved murder

WORLD

* A recent operation to remove 410 tons of a toxic rocket fuel component from Kazakhstan cost 600,000 euros, the director of a state-controlled defense company said

* Russian man from West Roxbury, Massachusetts was arraigned in a Boston court, hours after he was detained in an intoxicated state by police outside the home of US Secretary of State John Kerry, where he was taking pictures, the Boston Police Department (BPD) and court officials said