ANKARA (AFP) - Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sued a satirical magazine and one of its cartoonists for depicting him as a tick, his lawyer said yesterday. Lawyer Fatih Sahin told AFP that he had filed a complaint with an Ankara court Tuesday against the weekly Leman magazine and cartoonist Mehmet Cagcag for offending the prime minister with a cartoon published on the front page of the magazine’s July 6 issue. In reference to a tick-borne disease that has claimed some 20 lives in Turkey this year, Cagcag caricatured Erdogan as a tick sitting on the back of a man with its teeth sunk into his head, with a title that said he was “making Turkey suffer.” Sahin said Erdogan was seeking 25,000 Turkish liras (13,000 euros) in compensation.

ANKARA (AFP) - A Turkish technician kidnapped in Iraq in June was released and turned over to the Turkish Embassy in Baghdad yesterday, the Foreign Ministry in Ankara said. Hasan Eskimutlu, abducted on June 14, was in good health and expected to return home today, the ministry said in a statement. Ministry officials contacted by AFP declined to say how Eskimutlu’s release was secured. Turkish media said the 51-year-old from the southern town of Osmaniye was kidnapped by a Shiite group on his way to a lime-processing plant in Fallujah.

Bulgaria and Montenegro, which on June 3 declared its independence from Serbia, signed an agreement yesterday in Sofia establishing diplomatic ties between the two countries. Bulgaria “will make every effort to aid Montenegro in entering the process of European integration by signing soon a Stability and Association Agreement” with the European Union, Foreign Minister Ivaylo Kafin said after the signing. He also expressed hopes that the NATO summit in Riga in November “will give a strong signal” to include Montenegro in the Partnership for Peace Process, as a step toward NATO membership. (AFP)

A team of surgeons in western Serbia earlier this week took out eight nails, a knife, a pen, a screw, a spoon, a clothes-peg and other, smaller objects, from a young man’s stomach, one of the doctors said yesterday. “We were astonished,” said Dr Maja Gulan, who helped perform the operation Monday in Uzice, 120 kilometers (70 miles) southwest of Belgrade. “We have seen people swallow various things, but never this many,” she added. (AP)