BOBIGNY (Reuters) – A French court yesterday sentenced 10 Bulgarians to up to six years in prison for having sold babies to French Gypsy families. The Roma families admitted to buying 23 babies for between –2,500 and –8,000 ($3,255-$10,420), saying they had acted because they could not have children of their own or because they thought the children would have a better life in France. “We had to take into account the wish for a child that was hard to achieve and at the same time, the fact that there cannot be trade in human beings,” the president of the court said. The court north of Paris sentenced most of the 41 French recipients of the babies to symbolic suspended prison sentences of six months. Frenchman Henri Salva, 72, who brought the buyers into contact with the sellers, received a five-year jail term. The court sentenced the 10 Bulgarians, most of them from the same Roma family, to prison sentences ranging from two to six years.

SOFIA (Reuters) – Bulgaria amended its constitution yesterday in line with European Union recommendations aimed at shoring up the new EU member’s slow and graft-prone courts and avoiding sanctions from Brussels. In a third and final vote, 192 of 240 deputies backed amendments to end full immunity held by judges, prosecutors and investigators and establish an inspectorate elected by parliament to monitor the judiciary. The EU Commission has warned Sofia to strengthen its courts and put criminals and corrupt officials behind bars or see its judicial system quarantined from the rest of the bloc.

Sarajevo’s Kosevo hospital was rocked by a sex scandal when a nurse handed over to the director a list of 20 prominent doctors as potential fathers to her baby son, a Sarajevo magazine reported yesterday. The nurse, identified only as Merima F., who gave birth to a boy last month, asked the hospital management to investigate and determine who fathered the child, Slobodna Bosna magazine reported. “These rumors exist, but here at the hospital the word is that 15 (not 20) doctors are on the list,” Biljana Andric, hospital spokeswoman said. (AP)

Romania’s Foreign Minister Mihai-Razvan Ungureanu quit yesterday after the government accused him of not informing it about a three-month-long detainment of two Romanian workers at a military base in Iraq. “Prime Minister Calin Tariceanu asked the minister to quit... the prime minister found out only from the media about the arrest of the two,” the cabinet said in a statement. (Reuters)