SOFIA (Reuters) – Bulgaria plans to free hundreds of prisoners from its overcrowded jails to celebrate joining the European Union last month, the government said yesterday. Under a draft law adopted by the Socialist-led government, inmates with light sentences or nearing the end of their terms will be released. Criminals serving time for murder, robbery, human trafficking or sex crimes will be excluded. “Bulgaria’s entry into the European Union is a good enough reason for amnesty. The convicted deserve an act of clemency,” Justice Minister Georgi Petkanov told reporters. Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU on January 1. Civil groups slammed the plan, saying it smacked of a kind of populism seen in the communist era before 1989.

BELGRADE (Reuters) – A commercial promoting Serbia as a tourist destination appears to be jinxed after CNN used the soundtrack for a Kazakh tourism ad as backing music by mistake. The “Serbia – Moments to Remember” commercial was widely pilloried at home as being boring and misleading for showing Serbia as a land of rolling hills, churches and nature reserves full of wildlife, but apparently devoid of people. Serb viewers also spotted that one medieval church featured prominently in the ad was not in fact Serbian but Romanian, on the other side of the Danube River on Serbia’s eastern border. They said CNN had agreed to extend the life of the ad to make up for their mistake with the Kazakh folk music.

An explosion ripped through a storage tank at Turkey’s largest oil refinery in northwestern Turkey yesterday, killing one person and injuring three others, private NTV television reported. The explosion occurred at the Tupras oil refinery, near Izmit, some 100 kilometers (60 miles) east of Istanbul, while workers were dismantling an empty tank, said Cavit Aykanat, an official of the oil union in Izmit. Aykanat said authorities were trying to evacuate people due to the possibility of a leakage of poisonous gas. NTV said one person was killed and three others were injured in the explosion. (AP)

Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk boarded a plane for New York yesterday to give a series of talks in the United States, a day after he called off a visit to Germany. “I will give talks at Columbia University and other universities,” Pamuk told reporters at Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport, but he refused to answer questions on news reports that he had canceled his trip to Germany over security concerns. (AP)