"Russia sends in firefighters as Greek minister says sorry..."

[demoleft]

"...for losing the battle against 3,000 forest fires", reports The Guardian, 31 July 2007.

"Two giant water bombing aircraft from Russia yesterday weighed into the fight against scores of fires raging across Greece as Athens' conservative government, fending off claims of ineptitude, apologised for its handling of the disaster."

"As President Vladimir Putin stepped in at the request of the prime minister, Costas Karamanlis, dispatching two amphibian planes and several helicopters to Greece, the scale of the crisis became ever more apparent with fires ravaging villages, farmland and forests for a third week."

"I must say sorry to all those who have suffered ," said the interior minister, Prokopis Pavlopoulos, on a tour of Corinth where large areas of land resemble a war zone. "No government could be satisfied with this. It is the responsibility of the state to ensure this doesn't happen."

"An estimated 25,000 acres (10,000 hectares) of land have been destroyed in some 3,000 wildfires across Greece since June. Last week, panic-stricken British tourists told how they had only minutes to pack up and flee as giant flames raced towards hotels in Skala on the southernmost tip of Cephalonia."

The article on The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2138146,00.html