ANKARA (AP) - The foreign ministers of two of Iran’s neighbors — Turkey and Bahrain — said yesterday they oppose nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. “We agree on the need for the region to be free of nuclear weapons,” Bahrain’s Foreign Minister Sheik Khaled bin Ahmed Al Khalifa told reporters at a joint news conference with his Turkish counterpart Abdullah Gul. Gul said, “We are against weapons of mass destruction in our region.” As a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran “has 100 percent responsibility to show transparency” on the nuclear issue, Gul added.

BUCHAREST (AP) - Romanian President Traian Basescu met with his Austrian counterpart yesterday for talks on Romania’s bid to join the European Union, as well as widespread flooding along the Danube. Austrian President Heinz Fischer, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency, said that both Romania and Bulgaria should join the EU next year. “It is correct, useful and in the EU’s interest,” Fischer said after the meeting at the Cotroceni presidential palace in Bucharest. Fischer also expressed compassion for victims of recent flooding along the River Danube, and pledged Austrian help in rebuilding communities hit worst by the floods.

The Bulgarian Interior Ministry said yesterday that it had started procedures to open the secret files on its activity during the former communist regime. Researchers welcomed the move but complained it was only partial and very late. “We will start declassification with the files that contain information of public and historical interest,” said Ivan Komitski, the head of the Interior Ministry’s archives department. Some 253,000 files have already been declassified, and experts are continuing work on more than 2 million archived secret files, a ministry statement said. Most of them are related to the work of the former communist police force until 1989, when Bulgaria’s communist regime collapsed. Journalist and researcher Hristo Hristov, who has investigated several Cold War cases, said this should have been done three years ago. (AP)

A man drowned after a boat carrying 10 illegal immigrants sank off Turkey’s western coast while trying to reach neighboring Greece, Turkey’s Anatolia news agency reported yesterday. The coast guard rescued eight other immigrants from the sea after receiving an alert from witnesses who saw the boat list and take in water after it set out from the popular Turkish resort of Kusadasi to the nearby Greek island of Samos. (AFP)