MANILA (Reuters) – Negotiations on the future status of Serbia’s Kosovo province will start around the middle of this month, European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana said yesterday. “The beginning of the talks will start probably around the middle of the month of August,” Solana told reporters on the sidelines of an Asian security meeting in Manila.

TIRANA (Reuters) – Albania assured Azerbaijan yesterday it will do all it can to stop the sale of weapons to countries in a state of conflict, after Turkey sent back a shipment of Albanian weapons bound for Armenia. “The Albanian government will... take all necessary measures to prevent the sales of weaponry to countries in a state of conflict,” Foreign Minister Lulezim Basha said.

A 62-year-old woman has given birth to a healthy baby boy in Montenegro, doctors said. Mileva Radulovic, from the village of Pazici, in central Montenegro, gave birth yesterday. She conceived by in vitro fertilization at a clinic in the Serbian capital, Belgrade. (AP)

An explosion believed to have been caused by a grenade ripped through a home in northern Albania yesterday, killing at least two people and injuring three, local media reported. The blast in the town of Kukes killed a 26-year-old man and one of his daughters. (AP)

Turkey has lodged a complaint against Austria with the OSCE and is preparing to do the same at the UN after Vienna allowed a wanted Turkish Kurd rebel leader to travel to Iraq instead of extraditing him to Ankara, Turkish officials said yesterday. The man at the center of the row is Riza Altun, a founding member and chief financial operator of the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). (AP)

Two Bosnian refugees are suing Serbia for alleged torture while they were detained after fleeing the massacres of Muslim men during the 1992-95 war, a human rights group said yesterday. Sakib Rizvic and Nusret Kulovac, refugees from the eastern Bosnian enclaves of Srebrenica and Zepa, have accused the police of beatings and harassment, said the Humanitarian Law Fund, which has filed suit on behalf of the men. (AP)