Main News of August 4

Roundup of what has happened over the last 24 hours

WORLD

*Poland needs its own missile defense shield while the agreement with the United States on the deployment of an anti-ballistic-missile defense system on its territory was “a mistake,” Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski said in an interview with the Wprost magazine, published on Saturday

*Roughly two tons of cocaine have been seized by the Colombian and the U.S. Coast Guard from the United States-bound ship in the Pacific Ocean, Chilean LA Segunda daily reported on Friday

*A total of 48 Iranian Shia pilgrims were kidnapped in Syrian capital, Damascus on Saturday as they were heading to the country’s shrines, a spokesman for the Iranian Al-Alam TV channel said

*Mykola Melnychenko, a former security officer who claims to have secretly recorded conversations that implicate Ukrainian ex-president Leonid Kuchma in the murder of an opposition journalist, has been detained in the airport of Naples, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said on Saturday

*Sudan and South Sudan have struck a deal on how to share their oil wealth, one of a series of disputes that brought the rivals to the brink of war earlier this year

RUSSIA

*Russian diesel-electric icebreaker Kapitan Darnitsyn on Friday night left Murmansk port and headed for an expedition to find evidence supporting the country’s claims for a ridge in the Arctic Ocean, the Federal Agency for Marine and River Transport said

*The total area gripped by Fires in Russia has shrunk by 1,900 hectares overnight, the Emergencies Ministry said on Saturday morning

*Law enforcement officers have killed a suspected militant near the capital of the Russian North Caucasus republic of Dagestan, a police spokesman said early on Saturday

SPORTS

*The Russian government will launch “very tough” changes to the country’s sport federations after the country’s athletes disappointed at the start of the Olympics, Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko said Saturday

*Chen Ding walked to the gold medal in the men’s 20 kilometer walk at the Olympics on Saturday as a pair of highly-rated Russians fell by the wayside

*For those unfamiliar with judo, Russia’s position as the top team at the Olympics with three judo gold may seem odd, especially since the country is far ahead of Japan, which invented the sport but went home with just one gold

*Serena Williams of the Unites States demolished Russia’s Maria Sharapova to grab her first Olympic gold in the women’s singles tennis on Saturday

*Russian pair Valeria Sorokina and Nina Vislova crushed Canada's Alex Bruce and Li Michele to take badminton bronze in the women's doubles on Saturday