BELGRADE (AFP) – Serbia is willing to give up certain sovereign rights over Kosovo in order to reach a compromise on the province’s future status, Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic said. In a BBC interview on Wednesday, Jeremic said Belgrade was ready to give Kosovo “the widest possible autonomy in the world,” but added that the province’s ethnic Albanian majority should also give up some of their independence demands. In order to reach a “compromise solution” Jeremic said Serbia would be willing to grant Kosovo direct access to international financial institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, as well as “some kind of representation abroad.”

DIYARBAKIR (AFP) – Six Kurdish rebels and three soldiers have been killed in fresh fighting in eastern Turkey, officials said yesterday. The clashes broke out Wednesday afternoon in a mountainous area in the province of Tunceli after the soldiers came under fire from militants of the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the Tunceli governor’s office said. In another incident in Tunceli late Wednesday, PKK militants detonated a remote-controlled land mine on a road as a group of soldiers was passing, leaving five troops injured, one of them seriously, security sources said. Two other land mine explosions yesterday blamed on the PKK left another soldier and a forestry worker injured in the southeastern province of Sirnak, officials said.

A Bulgarian parliamentary committee yesterday accused the city of Sofia of discriminating against Gypsies by banning the use of horse carts around the city. “Carts are listed as ‘vehicles’ under Bulgarian traffic rules so the ban is a form of segregation,” committee chairman Lalo Kamenov told bTV television. Sofia Mayor Boyko Borisov said he would not lift the measure despite the committee’s recommendation to do so. He advised the Gypsies instead to “turn their carts into carriages and attract tourists the way they do in Vienna. (AFP)

The parliament of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia lifted the immunity from prosecution of the country’s former prime minister yesterday, clearing the way for him to be tried for alleged corruption in an arms procurement deal. Prosecutors have asked for Vlado Buckovski, now an opposition lawmaker, to be arrested for his alleged involvement in the 2001 arms deal, which they say cost the country 3 million euros (US$4.1 million). (AP)