Main news of September 3

A roundup of what has happened in the past 24 hours

WORLD

* Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro made his first public speech since 2006, calling on all countries to give up nuclear weapons

* Moscow called on Israel and the Palestinian Authority to come to complicated compromises to reach a settlement of Israeli-Palestinian conflict

* A cargo plane crashed on a busy highway near a residential district in Dubai, setting several cars on fire, Al Arabiya TV channel said

* The number of people injured in Friday morning's explosion at a police station in northern Tajikistan has risen to 30, with one police officer killed and one unaccounted for, police said

* Russian President Dmitry Medvedev will pay a visit to Kazakhstan on September 6-7, a presidential aide said

RUSSIA

* Azerbaijan has agreed to increase substantially its gas exports to Russia, the CEO of Russian energy giant Gazprom said

* Russian President Dmitry Medvedev called for Azerbaijan and Armenia to intensify efforts to reach a settlement in their conflict over Nagorny Karabakh

* Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin allocated 1 billion rubles ($33 million) to the wildfire-stricken Volgograd and Saratov regions, a cabinet statement said

* President Alexander Lukashenko's remarks suggesting Russia could have been behind an attack on its own embassy in Minsk are "obscene", Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said

* A Moscow justice of the peace fined opposition leader Boris Nemtsov 500 rubles for disobeying a police officer

* The Russian Central Bank believes that the country's banks do not need any further financial state support, a business daily said, citing a Bank of Russia official

* Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov said he was ready to pay ten million rubles ($326,000) for true information about the location of militants who attacked his home village in late August