BURGAZADA (Reuters) - Turkish firefighters struggled yesterday to control a blaze that swept through woodland and threatened an historic tourist site on an island near Istanbul, leaving two dead. Ten other fires raged in different parts of northwestern Turkey, private news station CNN Turk said. Dozens of homes and hundreds of hectares of forestland were destroyed in the fires. One person died on Burgazada after suffering a heart attack, television channels reported. A second person was killed after falling from a rooftop on Burgazada, one of four inhabited islands some 10 miles off of the Istanbul coastline.

BUCHAREST (Reuters) - A Gypsy child bride in Romania whose forced wedding prompted international protests went to school yesterday after authorities separated her from her teenage groom, who could face charges for having sex with her. “We broke up,” 12-year old Roma princess Ana Maria told reporters before entering State School No. 10 in the Transylvanian town of Sibiu. Ana Maria is the daughter of Florin Cioaba, the self-proclaimed “king of all Roma.”

A local court in volatile southern Serbia has ordered the state to compensate an ethnic Albanian whose house was burned by Serb soldiers in 1999, a human rights group said yesterday. A local court in the town of Presevo has ruled that authorities must pay 604,800 dinars (about $10,000) to Arifi Gani from the nearby village of Bujic, said the Humanitarian Law Fund. The ruling came four years after Gani’s house was looted and torched by Serb troops in the area, said the group. (AP)

The US oil services group Halliburton has protested being cut from a short list of groups bidding for part of the Romanian national oil group Petrom, saying yesterday it was shocked at the decision. “We are both shocked and surprised with the message of disqualification,” said the US oil group, which was run until 2000 by US Vice President Dick Cheney. (AFP)