Main News of September 30

A roundup of what has happened in the past 24 hours

WORLD

* It is possible to create a Middle East without weapons of mass destruction only if Israel consents to the relevant international agreements, Syria’s foreign minister said

* Americans trust themselves less than at any time since the 1970s to make judgments about political issues facing the country, but still have significantly more confidence in “the American people’s” decision-making than in politicians’ or the federal government’s, a Gallup poll shows

* The CEO of Russian fertilizer giant Uralkali has no complaints about the conditions of his house arrest in Belarus and will be able to meet with Russian foreign service officials every two months, the Russian consul in Minsk said

* Sunday saw two successful space debuts for the United States: hours after the Cygnus cargo spacecraft eventually reached the International Space Station (ISS), a new version of the Falcon 9 rocket took five satellites into orbit

RUSSIA

* Russian Migration Service officials on Monday detained 20 illegal migrant workers at a construction site in northeast Moscow and 13 more at a market in the city’s south, the service said

* Four people have been detained over a grassroots attempt to hunt for illegal migrants in Moscow and flush them out of a dormitory in a raid that ended in a shootout, city police said

* A senior Russian official suspected of involvement in a corruption scandal has been sacked, the federal land registration agency confirmed Monday, amid media reports that the man had already fled the country

* Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a federal law granting tax and customs benefits for oil and gas production on the country’s continental shelf, the Kremlin site said

* Rosneft said Monday that its board of directors had approved a share buyback from former minority shareholders in TNK-BP, a transaction that is expected to cost the state-owned oil giant about $1.5 billion

* The government’s 2014 budget, which Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has described as “very harsh,” was submitted to Russia’s State Duma

* Russia’s Investigative Committee said Monday that Greenpeace’s attempt to scale a Russian oil rig in the Arctic in protest against drilling in the region earlier this month had posed a threat to the platform’s staff and constituted a crime

* Russia’s first successful launch of a Proton-M carrier rocket since a July disaster has successfully put a European telecom satellite into orbit, a spokesman for the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos) said

* A Proton-M carrier rocket with a European telecoms satellite lifted off from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan on Monday, for the first time since the launch failure in July, the Russian space agency said

DEFENSE

* A state-of-the-art communication ship for the Russian Navy was launched in St. Petersburg