BRUSSELS (Reuters) – FYROM’s deputy prime minister warned on Friday that Russian military intervention in Georgia could encourage fringe elements in his country if its bids to join the EU and NATO were not unblocked quickly. Ivica Bocevski said there were two possible spinoffs in the Western Balkans from the Georgian crisis – a spread of pro-European ideas or a spread of uncertainty. He warned that further delay to efforts by the former Yugoslav republic to join the EU and NATO could encourage” marginal forces.” “We need the opening of the negotiations, we need to see this process started and we need to see this process moving,” he told a seminar in Brussels. “If the EU and NATO perspective is prolonged, cynicism can easily kick in.” “We can imagine the whole European periphery as a great chessboard... if this chessboard is not filled by our figures, then the one playing against us can easily fill their place.”

STOCKHOLM (AP) – Cypriot President Dimitris Christofias says he is optimistic about a peace agreement on Cyprus but that talks need to stay cool and quiet. Christofias says he has many ideas for the talks but doesn’t want to disclose them publicly to avoid them becoming “food for the mass media.” He says leaders from both sides have to be “cool and very, very careful” and produce “less statements and more action around the table.” He spoke in Stockholm yesterday after meeting with Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt.

SARAJEVO (Reuters) – Bosnia will prioritize the prosecution of those who planned the worst atrocities in the 1992-1995 war rather than taking “forever” to process thousands of outstanding cases, prosecutors said yesterday. Deputy Chief Prosecutor David Schwendiman said there were thousands of war crimes cases waiting to be opened against Bosnian Muslim, Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat suspects. Prosecutors said the gravest atrocities were the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslims, the mass murders of non-Serbs in detention camps and ethnic cleansing of members of other ethnic groups by all three groups. But the families of victims said they feared not all perpetrators would face justice. Schwendiman said: “Nobody is going to be left out. We are just reordering the pieces.” “There are so many, we are not going to get everybody but we are going to get as many as we can,” he told survivors after a presentation of the study to prioritize the cases.

An Albanian artist has entered the Guinness Book of World Records for a third time, this time with a large mosaic constructed out of bottle corks. Saimir Strati, 42, used more than 200,000 corks in the mosaic of a young man playing a guitar, measuring 12.94 meters wide by 7.1 meters high (39 by 21 feet). “This work is dedicated to the Mediterranean spirit which is nourished by music, the sun and wine,” Strati said at a ceremony to unveil the latest artwork. (AFP)

Police in southwest Bulgaria seized 2.4 tons of marijuana in the latest in a series of drug raids in the region, the Interior Ministry said yesterday. The seizures were made in fields around the towns of Blagoevgrad, Petrich, Sandanski and Gotze Delchev, long known for cultivating cannabis. Raids in the region in August led to the confiscation of almost six tons of marijuana. (AFP)

Serbia could try a student wanted in the USA on assault charges if the US hands the case over to Belgrade, the justice minister said, according to a newspaper interview published yesterday. Miladin Kovacevic, 21, fled to Serbia in June to avoid prosecution in New York state while out on bail. Kovacevic, a towering Serb who played basketball for Binghamton University, is accused of severely beating fellow student Bryan Steinhauer of Brooklyn during a fight in a Binghamton bar in May. Steinhauer, 22, has only recently started to emerge from a coma. The case has strained relations between Washington and Belgrade, which has insisted its laws do not allow extradition. (AP)