Main News of September 3

A roundup of what has happened in the past 24 hours

WORLD

* US President Barack Obama will discuss Syria with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the upcoming G20 summit in St. Petersburg in talks that could produce a Kremlin “change of heart” on how to deal with the crisis there, Secretary of State John Kerry said

* Military action against Syria not approved by the UN Security Council would be in violation of international law, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Tuesday, comments that came as US President Barack Obama pressed his case to Congressional leaders for a retaliatory strike on Syria over its alleged used of chemical weapons

* Senior US lawmakers from both political parties said Tuesday that they will support President Barack Obama’s push for military action against Syria as retaliation for a chemical weapons attack allegedly carried out by the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad

* Syrian rebel forces and not the government are responsible for recent chemical weapon attacks in the civil war there, a Russian Islamic council head said

* Two “ballistic targets” detected Tuesday in the Mediterranean by the Russian military were launched by the Israeli military as part of a joint US-Israeli test of its missile defense system, an official in Tel Aviv said

RUSSIA

* Russian lawmakers are ready to meet with their US counterparts to discuss ways of resolving the Syria situation without the use of force, the speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament said Tuesday in a letter to the US Senate majority leader

* In a solemn memorial ceremony on Tuesday, Moscow marked nine years since more than 300 hostages, most of them children, were killed in a school seized by Chechen separatists in the southern city of Beslan

* Europe should follow Russia’s example in adopting laws designed to preserve family life, such as its ban on propagating "homosexual propaganda" to children, a church official said

POLITICS

* Russian fertilizer giant Uralkali has asked the Russian government to make Belarus stop what the company on Tuesday called “politically motivated persecution” of Uralkali executives

* Armenia is ready to join the Moscow-led Customs Union of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan and later take part in establishing the Eurasian Economic Union, Armenia’s president said in a statement

DEFENSE

* Hours after Israel admitted to firing “ballistic targets” that resembled missiles in the Mediterranean, a launch that the country did not priorly announce, Russia’s Defense Ministry spoke out against “playing with arms and missiles” in such a “volatile” region

* A joint US-Israeli missile test over the Mediterranean Sea was “long planned” and had “nothing to do” with a possible US military response to the chemical weapons attack on a Damascus suburb that Washington has blamed on the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, the Pentagon said