Balkans

TRIPOLI (AFP) — Six foreign medics on death row for infecting Libyan children with the AIDS virus launched a final appeal on Wednesday after more than eight years behind bars for a crime they say they did not commit.

A crucial war crimes trial against two former high-ranking Croat officers, accused of atrocities against ethnic Serbs during a 1993 military operation, opened in Zagreb on Monday (June 18th) amid tight security.

A former Serbian police general was transferred to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on Sunday (June 17th), hours after being arrested in Montenegro.

US special envoy Frank Wisner was in Pristina on Friday (June 15th) to urge patience as the status process winds towards resolution. He reiterated Washington’s support for Kosovo’s independence, and said sovereignty for the province must be the end goal of any new round of talks between Belgrade and Pristina.

The conduct of secret nuclear wars since 1991, through the use of depleted uranium weaponry by the United States and Great Britain with their allies, has taken place in the Middle East, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan2 and Lebanon.3 It has been carried out for the express purpose of destroying the …

WASHINGTON, United States — Romanian Foreign Minister Adrian Cioroianu met with US counterpart Condoleezza Rice and Pentagon officials on Wednesday (June 13th), telling them that his country is ready to boost the number of its troops deployed with the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan.

BUCHAREST, Romania — Hungarian Foreign Minister Kinga Goncz issued a statement Thursday (June 14th) expressing concern over the criminal investigations opened against some members of the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania, including one against Telecommunications Minister Zsolt Nagy.

PRISTINA, Kosovo, Serbia — Britain is working to get the new resolution on Kosovo, based on UN envoy Martti Ahtisaari’s plan, approved at the UN Security Council, said Anthony Smith, a political director at the British Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

SOFIA, Bulgaria — A EU report on Bulgaria’s compliance with recommendations to tackle organised crime and corruption and to overhaul its judiciary will make no mention of any penalties for the country, European Commission spokesman Mark Gray said on Thursday (June 14th).

Bulgaria and Romania should try to avoid the decline in democratic progress seen last year in many of the other post-communist countries that are now members of the EU, Freedom House said on Thursday (June 14th) upon the release of a new report.