Venezuelan Pres charges US with attempts to provoke war with Colombia

.

CARACAS, August 9 (Itar-Tass) - U.S. is trying to provoke a war
between Colombia and Venezuela so as to seize control of the world's
largest deposit of low-gravity oil in the Orinoco River basin, Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez said Saturday.
For this purpose, the U.S. reportedly plans using seven Colombian
military bases, which the Colombian government is ready to offer to the
Americans under the pretext of stepping up the struggle with drugs
cartels, he said.
Chavez also described a possible scenario of combat operations, under
which Colombia may attack Venezuela and the U.S. intervenes afterwards "to
establish peace."
In the course of doing this, American troops will ostensibly grab
control of the Orinoco oil belt, the subsurface reserves of which contain
an estimated 235 billion tons of low-gravity and super-low-gravity oils.
Chavez froze relations withy Colombia at the end of July in the wake
of growing bilateral tensions and revoked the Venezuelan ambassador from
Bogota.
However, he made an announcement Saturday that the ambassador is about
to return to Colombia to lay what he called 'bases of peace' as a
counterbalance to the 'Yankees' military bases."

.Russian dry cargo ship disappears in Atlantic Ocean.

MOSCOW, August 9 (Itar-Tass) - A dry cargo ship with a Russian crew
has disappeared off the shores of Portugal in the Atlantic Ocean, says a
report published by the Sovracht Maritime Bulletin web portal.
The ship disappeared when it was en route to Gibraltar and farther on
to the Algerian port of Bejaia, the portal's editor-in-chief Mikhail
Voitenko said.
The Arctic Sea dry cargo carrier was expected to arrive ther August 4
but communications with the crew were lost July 28.
A search for the missing ship is being conducted by all the agencies
concerned, including the Russian federal security service FSB and the Navy.
The Arctic Sea underwent a mysterious attack by unknown people in the
Baltic Sea July 24, the portal said. The attackers kept the crewmembers
tied for twelve hours, in the source of which they ransacked the ship in
an attempt to find some unestablished cargo.
They left the ship after that wihtout taking away either money or
cargo.
Information for the end of March says the Arctic Sea had a
thirteen-strong crew. At the time of disappearance, it was carrying a
consignment of timber to North Africa.

.Russian give highest assessment to Putin's 10 years in power.

MOSCOW, August 9 (Itar-Tass) - Russians have given the highest
possible assessment to Vladimir Putin's performance during the ten years
of his activity at the helm of state power, Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of
the lower house of Russian parliament told reporters on the eve of the
tenth anniversary since Putin's appointment to the post of Prime Minister.
"The past decade will go down in history as the time of Russia's
re-emergence and rise and great credit for this certainly goes to Vladimir
Vladimirovich Putin," Gryzlov said.
"For all the Russians, Putin has become a kind of national leader whom
this country wanted badly for so many years," he said. "Vladimir Putin
shaped up our course, the one that the Russians looked so much for after
the mess of the 1980's and 1990's."
"Putin's course is that of strategic development and it rests on the
foundation of our national interests," Gryzlov said.
He pointed out the fact that Putin, who is again performing the
duties of Prime Minister after eight years in the Office of the President,
"has done much to restore the strength, responsibility and professionalism
of state power and this in turn has consolidated the country."
"We managed to overcome a multitude of knotty problems and to render
neutral the dangers that loomed over the very existence of the Russian
state some ten years ago," Gryzlov said.
"As a result, people regained trust in their homeland and a sense of
pride in their nation, and the whole world, too, started respecting Russia
again," he said.
"The Russians gave Putin the highest mark by giving a majority vote to
his candidacy for the Office of the President twice," Gryzlov said.
"In many ways, the United Russia Party, too, acquired its current
status thanks to Putin's personal authoritativeness," he said. "Our party
has the majority in the second successive convocation of the lower house
and it forms a reliable support for the both the President and the Prime
Minister."
"Close coordination and mutual understanding between the legislative
and executive branches of power - that is, when the chairman of a party
having the majority in parliament stands at the head of the government -
is extremely important in the times of the economic crisis," Gryzlov said.

.Large pocket of H1N1 flu identified in language camp in southern
France.

PARIS, August 9 (Itar-Tass) - Medical tests have identified a large
pocket of the H1N1 flu virus on a camp for the studies of language in the
south of France.
A total of 64 persons have fallen ill on the territory of the camp
located near Monaco. As many as 59 of that number are teenagers in the
group age of thirteen to seventeen years old who have come there from the
countries of Central and Eastern Europe, Italy, Luxembourg, and Britain.
Another five sick are the grownup teachers and counselors from the
camp's staff.
LCI television channel said kids from Russia and the U.S. are found on
the list of the sick.
All the newly identified patients displayed clear symptoms of the H1N1
flu in the past few days.
Physicians described the condition of the patients as normal, saying
there are no heavy cases among them. They also said there is no need to
treat the sick with the antiviral drug Tamiflu.
All in all, some 148 people have stayed on the camp's territory in the
last several days. Some of them left the camp Saturday night as their
course of training had drawn to an end.
The local prefect has issued an order that no new students appear on
the camp, as massive disinfecting will be done there.
The sick children will return to their families, since France does not
have any laws prohibiting their return home in the conditions of a
spreading flu virus.
Nor are there any provisions banning the transportation of sick
patients by public transport except for airlines where jet captains have
the right to take sick passengers off the flights.
A deputy prefect of France's Maritime Alps department the masks put
over sick children's faces will provide enough guarantees that the
infection will not spread around them.
-0-kle