Moscow  - A Russian military chief was one of those killed in Friday's car-bomb blast in the Georgian breakaway region of South Ossetia, Interfax news agency reported Saturday, citing a military spokesman in Moscow.

Colonel Ivan Petrik, who was the commander of the Russian troops in South Ossetia, was fatally wounded in his office when the 20- kilogram bomb went off next to a Russian army base.

The spokesman was confirming a report in Saturday's Kommersant newspaper.

Seven Russian soldiers were killed in the attack and seven injured.

Moscow  - Six people were killed in an explosion in Georgia's breakaway republic of South Ossetia on Friday, Russian news reports said.

Vienna - Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska has given up his shares in the Canadian car assembly firm Magna International Inc. after a creditor took over his 18-per-cent stake, the company announced Friday.

In September 2007, Deripaska's firm OJSC Russian Machines acquired 20 million shares for 1.54 million dollars (1.11 million euros) from Magna, which has its European headquarters near Vienna.

Washington, Oct 3: CIA Director Michael Hayden has said that The fragile state of North Korea and the booming, oil-rich trio of Iran, Venezuela and Russia have grown increasingly aggressive and pose some of the greatest security challenges for the next US President.

Hayden told FOX News that weakness and poverty have made North Korea more aggressive as it threatens to restart work on its nuclear weapons programme.

“This is a country in very, very desperate straits. But out of this weakness, out of this very fragility, there’s this danger of great chaos; they seem to have a knack for using that very fragility to the best of their ability to affect the nations around them - ourselves included,” he said.

Dusseldorf - E. ON, one of Germany's biggest energy companies, said Thursday it had bought one quarter of the one of the world's greatest natural gas fields, at Yuzhno Russkoye in Russia.

The deal, which follows years of tortuous negotiations, was signed with gas monopoly Gazprom at a meeting of Russian and German government leaders on Thursday in the Russian city of St Petersburg.

Another big German company, BASF, has already bought a quarter of the same field.

E. ON controls a large part of Germany's gas and electricity supplies.

Brussels - Russia is considering tasking a warship to work with a European Union fleet intended to combat piracy off the coast of Somalia, Russia's ambassador to the EU said Thursday.

"We are considering the possibility of coordinated efforts between Russia and the EU in combating the ever-increasing acts of naval piracy along the coast of Somalia," Ambassador Vladimir Chizhov told journalists in Brussels.