SKOPJE (AP) - FYROM’s top law enforcement official yesterday urged his predecessor — accused of ordering the 2002 slayings of six Pakistanis and an Indian in a bid to appear aggressive in the US-led war on terrorism — to surrender to authorities. But Interior Minister Hari Kostov said that despite a standing arrest warrant, police will not try to detain Ljube Boskovski unless he attempts to leave the country. “We know where Boskovski is hiding, but police will take no action for his arrest,” Kostov said.

LONDON (Reuters) - International police and troops are fueling the growth of a sex industry in Kosovo based on trafficked women being forced into prostitution, rights group Amnesty International said yesterday. The group said the UN Mission in Kosovo and the NATO-led KFOR peacekeepers had failed to protect the women and estimated about a fifth of the people paying for sex with them were foreigners. “It is outrageous that the very same people who are there to protect these women and girls are using their position and exploiting them instead — and they are getting away with it,” Amnesty said in a statement.

The pilots of a plane which crashed in February, killing president Boris Trajkovski of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) and eight others, were not responsible for the accident, a member of the investigating commission said yesterday. “I cannot agree with the conclusion that the pilots are responsible for the crash that killed Boris Trajkovski,” Valentin Jovanovski was quoted as saying by Macedonian news agency (MIA). (AFP)

Romania declared October 9 Holocaust Day as a key step in facing up to its Nazi past following a diplomatic row with Israel last year, officials said yesterday. Until last year Romania had denied the Holocaust took place on its territory, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed in WWII. (Reuters)

No one could figure out why Lara the cow stopped giving milk until an Albanian veterinarian pulled plastic from her guts as heavy as the average woman. Veterinarian Agim Nelaj has a video of him wrenching the oozing brownish plastic out of the anaesthetized cow to back up his claims that the bovine had ingested masses of the plastic litter that has become a blight on the Albanian landscape. “I extracted 60 kilos (132 pounds) of plastic material from the left pre-lumbar area,” Nelaj told Reuters. “She is giving up six liters of milk a day,” he said, a month after the operation. (Reuters)

Negotiations to seal Bulgaria’s 2007 entry into the EU could be concluded by the middle of the year, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder said yesterday. The chancellor said Sofia had made “such strong progress” that there was “a very, very big chance” that the negotiations could be concluded by the end of the Irish EU presidency on June 30. (AFP)