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.

Moscow/Kiev - Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin met Thursday with Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko for talks on natural gas and other energy issues.

Putin and Tymoshenko held the discussions in a Russian government country mansion in the village of Novo-Ogarevo, outside Moscow.

The top issue for the two prime ministers was gas shipments between the two countries, particularly Russian pricing for gas sold to Ukraine, and Ukrainian pricing for gas shipped by Russia via Ukrainian pipelines to European consumers.

Moscow/Kiev  - Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday were at odds over the Caucasus in opening statements delivered at an international forum devoted to soothing rising tensions between Moscow and Western nations.

Merkel, in her opening remarks at the conference, called "The Petersburg Dialogue" called for increased understanding between Europe and the Kremlin, but at the same time criticized Medvedev and his government for Russia's hardline policies in Georgia.