ANKARA (AFP) – Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan yesterday announced a major cabinet reshuffle, following local elections in March that saw his Islamist-rooted party lose support despite its victory. Erdogan said President Abdullah Gul had approved the new cabinet before he read out the list to reporters. A major change was the appointment of Ahmet Davutoglu, Erdogan’s chief foreign policy adviser, as foreign minister, replacing Ali Babacan, who became deputy prime minister responsible for the economy. Davutoglu’s appointment marks a rare phenomenon in Turkish politics: an official joining the cabinet without being a parliament member. Though he has avoided the limelight, Davutoglu, 50, has been highly influential in shaping the Justice and Development Party’s foreign policy. Erdogan also explained that Babacan would now be responsible for all economic and financial institutions as well as state banks, stressing the need “for management by a single hand” in times of economic difficulty. In another significant change, former Parliament Speaker Bulent Arinc, who has often angered secularists with comments deemed as targeting Turkey’s secular system, became the second of the three deputy prime ministers.

ISTANBUL (AP) – Turkish police let union workers rally yesterday at the site of a deadly May Day demonstration three decades ago, but fired tear gas and water cannon at leftists hurling rocks and gasoline bombs in side streets. Dozens of people, many of them police, were injured. The commemoration in Istanbul’s Taksim Square was a symbolic victory for the unions which had been mostly denied access to the transit hub since 1977 when several dozen people died after shooting triggered a stampede. The culprits were never found, contributing to a mood of instability and conspiracy theories before a military coup in 1980. Turkey is now a democracy with an increasingly confident, Islam-inspired government, and the fighting between officers in body armor and protesters in masks and hoods seemed a throwback to a more chaotic era. Police in gas masks fired dozens of tear gas canisters at small bands of activists who lobbed chunks of sidewalk and gasoline bombs. Some protesters sprinted in an effort to join the main union march, and police flailed at them with truncheons. Istanbul Governor Muammer Guler said more than 100 people were detained, according to the Anatolia news agency. He said 21 police officers were injured and 20 other people sought help at hospitals, although none were in serious condition.

THE HAGUE (AFP) – Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic sought yesterday the disqualification of a judge likely to sit on his trial for war crimes and genocide, claiming bias. French national Michele Picard, one of three pretrial judges on his case, should be removed because of her past presidency of the Human Rights Chamber of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Karadzic argued in a written motion. The body has probed human rights violations. Her participation in the chamber, as well as “her advocacy on the part of the Muslim victims and against the Serb entity founded and led by Dr Karadzic, creates an unacceptable appearance of bias,” he wrote. “Judge Picard has already determined some of the same facts that are in issue in the Karadzic case,” including on the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys, for which Karadzic stands accused, the filing read. “It is beyond any doubt that Judge Picard has taken a side on these analogous matters.”

US Vice President Joe Biden will visit Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo during the week of May 18, focusing on a region that so far has not been high on the Obama administration’s foreign policy agenda. “The vice president will meet with the political leadership in all three countries, as well as US officials and military personnel stationed in the region,” Biden’s office said yesterday. (Reuters)

A female patient was released from the hospital on Thursday afternoon after testing negative for H1N1 flu, Serbia’s top health official said. “The results of tests conducted at the National Laboratory of the Torlak Institute have found no trace of the Mexican-type influenza,” Health Minister Tomica Milosavljevic told Pink TV. The 71-year old women, who returned from the United States a few days ago, was released from the clinic in Vojvodina after having been hospitalized earlier in the day. (Reuters)