Main News of October 15

A roundup of what has happened in the past 24 hours

RUSSIA

* Russian police on Tuesday detained a man suspected of the fatal stabbing that ignited violent anti-migrant protests in a Moscow suburb over the weekend and led to a police round-up of migrant laborers early this week

* Russian authorities said that they have detained two men suspected of planning a terrorist attack at a chemical weapons storage facility that could have caused “hundreds of deaths”

* A Russian military court sentenced North Caucasus militant warlord Ali Taziyev, also known by his alias Magas, to life imprisonment on terrorism charges

* Moscow police detained almost 300 people on Tuesday evening in the south of the Russian capital where anti-migrant protests flared up at the weekend, a Moscow police official said

* If Ukraine signs an EU association agreement it will have no chance of joining the Customs Union of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said

* External parties should refrain from interfering in Russia’s case against Greenpeace activists whom it has charged with piracy over a September protest on an Arctic oil rig, Russia’s foreign minister said Tuesday.

* Russia has completed an annual rotation of its peacekeeping battalion in Moldova's breakaway region of Transdnestr, the Joint Control Commission overseeing peacekeeping operations in the region said

* Hatemongering hackers defaced the website of a Russian Muslim organization Tuesday, the first day of the main Muslim holiday, posting a picture of a severed pig head with a Quran in its jaws

* Russian police have busted a gang responsible for flooding the country’s ATMs with forged cash, forcing some of Russia’s biggest banks to stop accepting certain banknotes

* A Russian expedition carrying a Sochi 2014 Olympic torch set off Tuesday for the North Pole, while Russian cosmonauts prepare to take a modified Olympic torch into space next month

WORLD

* A Yakutia Airlines Boeing 737 that spent weeks parked on the tarmac of an Alaskan airport due to a legal dispute over millions of dollars in allegedly unpaid leasing fees has returned to Russia, the Alaska Dispatch has reported

* A statue in Poland depicting a Soviet soldier raping a pregnant woman while holding a gun to her head has been taken down and its sculptor detained for police questioning, Polish media reported

* A French shipyard floated out Tuesday the first of two Mistral-class amphibious assault ships being built for the Russian Navy

* Syria’s financial losses from the ongoing armed conflict in the country stand at around $100 billion, a senior government official said

* Ukraine’s president has no legal cause for pardoning jailed opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko, the country’s justice minister said