Agencies/Caracas

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said a coup being plotted by military aviation officials had been dismantled and those involved detained.
Like his predecessor Hugo Chavez, Maduro frequently announces supposed coup attempts and blames right-wing forces, as well as the US and Colombia.
“We have broken up and foiled a coup attempt against democracy and the stability of our country,” Maduro said at a ceremony in Caracas.
“This was an attempt to use a group of military aviation officers to provoke a violent event,” he added.
One of those detained was “an aviation general called Hernandez, alias el Oso (the bear),” Maduro said, adding that he supposedly had plotted along with four other officers.
Maduro said the coup would have seen an attack by a Tucano aircraft against the presidential palace or another target and the plan was supposedly financed by the US and directed “from Washington.”
The president made the announcement a year after bloody protests in Caracas against his government that between February and June resulted in 43 deaths.
Maduro’s popularity has plummeted to 20% over the past year, as the oil-rich country’s many woes - dire shortages, a shrinking economy, and high crime - have grown worse.
Earlier security forces faced off with stone-wielding protesters as supporters of President Nicolas Maduro also rallied on the anniversary of last year’s fatal unrest.
The flare-ups, in the volatile western city of San Cristobal and the capital Caracas underlined just how tense the nation remains.
In San Cristobal, National Guard soldiers and police fired teargas and buckshot against demonstrators who hurled pipes and Molotov cocktails when a march was blocked.
Five security officials and three demonstrators were hurt in the nearly two-hour standoff, some shops vandalised, and four students arrested in that city, witnesses and authorities said.
In the capital Caracas, masked students blocked an avenue with burning trash and threw rocks at police who also fired buckshot in a confrontation that lasted until dusk.
Witnesses said at least half a dozen youths were arrested in the melee.
Earlier, in the capital, security forces cordoned off several hundred students on an unauthorised march to a church where they planned a service in honour of demonstrators who died. Instead, a priest came out and briefly prayed in the open-air.
In a much larger rival rally, thousands of red-clad supporters of Maduro, the successor to late socialist leader Hugo Chavez who died of cancer in 2013, gathered in a square.
Mindful of last year’s events, when thousands of opposition supporters took to the streets demanding Maduro’s resignation and protesting over the Opec nation’s faltering economy, some Caracas residents stayed at home to avoid trouble.