ITAR-TASS Russia, CIS news summary for Saturday, July 23 (1).

24/7 Tass 001

MOSCOW—— An operation to lift the Bulgaria pleasure boat that sank on the Volga River on July 10 will continue on Saturday.

Bulgaria’s upper deck was lifted fully on Friday evening. After that the works had to be suspended because of the coming dusk, Timur Khikmatov from the lift supervisory staff told Itar-Tass.

MINSK– The Minsk city court on Friday upheld a sentence passed on Vladimir Neklyayev, the ex-candidate to the president of Belarus. He had been convicted on a criminal charge of organizing mass riots in the Belarusian capital after the presidential elections on December 19, 2010 and was sentenced to two years in prison with suspension for two years.

MOSCOW– The VTB bank has sued the Inteco Company in court to collect over 870 million roubles worth of credit, which VTB has given to Inteco for state guarantees, the Russia 24 news channel reported.

TYUMEN, the Siberia— The 15th All-Russian competition of dog breeders will open in Khanty-Mansiisk on Saturday.

Three hundred best service dogs and almost 400 people, including judges and team participants, will take part in the competitions.

VLADIMIR— Russian President Dmitry Medvedev intends to announce 2012 to be the Year of Russian History. The Russian president said that Ukraine and Belarus had already supported the idea.

VLADIKAVKAZ— Police in North Ossetia believes that the Swiss citizen Martin Hoisler escaped from a penal colony settlement located several kilometres away from Vladikavkaz on Thursday because he didn’t want to return to his home country.

KHABAROVSK— Efforts to stabilize the wildfire situation in Russia’s Far East are failing so far, although fire fighting operations involve some 2,000 men and 182 units of hardware.

In the past 24 hours, fire fighters have extinguished 10 fires on an area of 1,968 hectares, but seventeen new fires have broken out.

MOSCOW— An active phase of the operation to lift the Bulgaria pleasure boat that sank on the Volga River on July 10 has not yet been resumed. As of Saturday morning, experts are deciding how to pump water from the boat.

RIGA— Latvia holds a referendum on the dissolution of the national parliament initiated by its former president Valdis Zatlers. At 07:00 a.m. local time (08:00 a.m. Moscow time) on Saturday, 950 polling stations opened throughout the country. A total of 78 stations more have been organized abroad. The referendum will be over at 23:00 Moscow time.

BALI ISLAND, Indonesia— Foreign ministers from the two Koreas, KIM Sung-hwan of South Korea and PAK Ui Chun of North Korea, have had a brief meeting, after a three-year break. They met on Saturday on Indonesia’s Bali, a venue for a summit of the Association of East Asian Nations (ASEAN).

MOSCOW— Moscow is astonished to learn that Lithuania has made public details of a conversation between Russian ambassador to Vilnius and Lithuania’s vice minister of foreign affairs Evaldas Ignatavicius related to the situation around the release in Vienna of former KGB officer Mikhail Golovatov, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said on Friday.

MOSCOW— The latest development in relations between North and South Koreas show that the six-party negotiations on North Korea’s nuclear problem, involving Russia, China, the United States, Japan and both Koreas, may be resumed in foreseeable future.

KEMEROVO— Rescuers have found the dead miner who has been reported missing since the June 16 accident at Kiselevskaya coalmine in Russia’s Kemerovo region, the press office of the regional administration of the Russian Investigations Committee reported on Saturday.

He was among the four miners who were killed in the accident. The dead bodies of the three other miners were lifted on June25, July 5, and July 19.

PYONGYANG— North Korea is getting ready for the forthcoming elections to local authorities, which will be held on Sunday.

Members of the Central Election Commission cruised around the streets of the capital city Pyongyang and other settlement in cars equipped with loudspeakers and called on people to necessarily vote for the candidates and to demonstrate the unity of the nation, reminding people about the need to perform their civic duty. Same calls were voiced by TV and radio hosts.

ITAR-TASS

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