Main News of September 16

A roundup of what has happened in the past 24 hours

RUSSIA

* Russian President Vladimir Putin, supreme commander-in-chief of the nation’s armed forces, ordered a new series of snap checks of the military as well as civil services, including transportation, to begin the next day at 10 a.m.

* Russian President Vladimir Putin admitted that there were still some "ongoing glitches" in preparations for next year's Winter Olympics in Sochi, but he insisted that overall the job is on track

* There is no danger of a radioactive leak from a nuclear submarine in Russia’s Far East after a fire broke out during repairs, the Defense Ministry said

* People in Russia’s flood-hit far east will get 17 million rubles (about $527,187) from the federal reserve fund to help repair flood damage, with a further 16.4 million rubles coming from a regional reserve fund, local authorities said

* Almost half of all Russians, 44 percent, agree with opposition leader Alexei Navalny that the ruling United Russia party is made up of “crooks and thieves,” a recent opinion poll showed, a significant increase from two years ago

* A Moscow court removed a female juror from a trial into the murder of prominent journalist Anna Politkovskaya after concluding that the juror had told her colleagues that the defendants would be “imprisoned under any circumstance,” the RAPSI legal news agency reported from the courtroom

* All Bulava missiles from the same batch as the one that failed on September 6 will undergo additional tests by their manufacturer, a senior defense industry official told RIA Novosti

* Russia will reopen a military base in the New Siberian Islands, an Arctic archipelago north of Yakutia, to secure control of the strategic region, Russian President Vladimir Putin said

 

WORLD

* Officials said multiple people were killed and several others wounded in a shooting rampage at a US Navy administrative center in Washington carried out by as many as three gunmen, an attack that sparked panic in the American capital

* A rebel coup against Syrian President Bashar Assad could boost al-Qaida’s influence in the violence-plagued nation and transform it into a safe haven for terrorists, a former senior US intelligence official said

* South and North Korea resumed the operation of their troubled joint industrial area with a trial-run production, the Yonhap news agency reported