ANKARA (AFP) – Turkish authorities said yesterday that bird flu has been detected in poultry in a village in the northwest of the country, the Anatolia news agency reported. The outbreak was discovered in the village of Yenicam, Sakarya province, where dozens of chickens died recently, the governor’s office said in a statement carried by the agency. “The test results have come back positive,” it said.

SARAJEVO (AFP) – European Union-backed reforms of Bosnia’s police forces have stalled again, threatening to delay signing of a deal on further integration with the bloc, an official said yesterday. Further rejection of the police reforms would only leave Bosnia behind other countries in the region,” Oleg Milisic, spokesman for the international community’s top envoy here, told AFP. The latest failure “sends the wrong signal to the EU about Bosnia-Herzegovina’s intention to continue its path” toward the bloc, the spokesman for High Representative Miroslav Lajcak said. The latest round of talks last weekend between the leaders of ruling Croat, Muslim and Serb parties failed.

Bulgaria, seen as one of Europe’s biggest exporters of prostitutes, launched an information campaign yesterday to raise public awareness about human trafficking. “We have to dispel the illusions of some 20 percent of the population that Western Europe is some kind of heaven on earth with no poverty or misery,” said political scientist, Kolyo Kolev, head of a think tank called Mediana and author of a new report on human trafficking. His study, published yesterday, showed that while a lot of Bulgarians wanted to emigrate, many of them were unaware of the dangers of falling victim to human trafficking. (AFP)

The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) argued yesterday that risks linked to the looming independence of neighboring Kosovo mean it should be given NATO membership at a summit of the alliance later this year. In a letter, President Branko Crvenkovski asked NATO’s 26 member countries to “fully support Macedonian membership in NATO” at the April summit in Bucharest, his cabinet said in a statement. “The reasons are known. The process of defining Kosovo’s status is under way and in its final phase, a process that has risks which should not be underestimated,” Crvenkovski was quoted as saying in a statement. (AFP)

A Bosnian war crimes panel has convicted two brothers of killing two civilians at the beginning of the 1992-95 war and sentenced each to 12 years in prison, the court said yesterday. In Monday’s verdict, the war crimes department of the Court of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo found that in 1992, Bosnian Serbs Ranko Vukovic, 39, and Rajko Vukovic, 36, “armed with automatic weapons... arrived at the family house of a Bosniak civilian, whom they found in the house, and shot him dead by use of firearms.” (AP)