Clearer skies in Moscow have prompted the city’s embassies to resume full operations, says the EU’s Russia delegation, but it is thought that peat bog fires will continue to burn and emit greenhouse gases until the winter.  The Moscow Times reports on one blogger’s response to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s well-documented piloting of a firefighting aircraft in a bid to boost public support earlier this week: ‘he should be fined for operating a plane without a license‘.  China has pledged $1 million in cash and just under $3 million in relief supplies to help Russia fight the wildfires.  On the current reduced status of the Aerial Forest Protection Center, 9,000-strong at its Soviet inception, but whose staff over the years has been cut down gradually (‘reformed‘) over the years to just 1,800.  ‘Whatever you might think of the terror, food shortages and economic stagnation under Soviet leaders […], at least factory directors were expected to be on the job when something went wrong,‘ says the Moscow Times.  And this from The Guardian: ‘By controlling the mass media – television first and foremost – the leaders in [authoritarian regimes] lack the ability to envisage and calculate possible risks.‘  Satellite images are registering fewer hotspots today, by RIA Novosti’s calculation.