BUCHAREST (AFP) - Bucharest rejected as “pure speculation” accusations in a Council of Europe report published yesterday that it harbored CIA detention centers. “This is pure speculation. Mr Marty’s report does not provide any proof of the presence of detention centers in Romania,” Norica Nicolai, president of the parliamentary commission investigating alleged CIA flights to Romania, told AFP. Swiss parliamentarian Dick Marty’s report identified a “spider’s web” of landing points around the world used by the US authorities for the practice of “extraordinary rendition.”

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union leaders will declare at a summit next week they are convinced Romania and Bulgaria can make the necessary reforms to join the bloc on January 1, 2007, according to draft conclusions for the June 15-16 meeting. “The European Council remains convinced that, with the necessary political will, both countries can overcome the deficits stated to reach the envisaged date of accession on 1 January 2007,” said a draft of the EU summit’s conclusions obtained by Reuters yesterday.

Forensic experts who excavated a mass grave in eastern Bosnia have recovered the remains of 43 Muslims killed by Serb forces at the beginning of Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, the head of the team said yesterday. The exhumations from a mass grave in the northeastern Bosnian village of Buk Bijela were completed on Tuesday afternoon and “we found 43 bodies,” the head of the team, Dr Zdenko Cirhlaz, said. (AP)

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier will meet tomorrow with Turkish-Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat in Berlin, the Foreign Ministry said. “Like other European countries we are trying to make a contribution to resolving the Turkish-Cypriot conflict,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Jaeger said. (AFP)

A governing coalition member demanded yesterday that Serb authorities ban an extreme nationalist party that once ruled with former president Slobodan Milosevic. The request by the G17 Plus party, a key member of PM Vojislav Kostunica’s government, followed an incident in Parliament on Tuesday, when a deputy from the Serbian Radical Party blasted a Cabinet minister from G17 Plus for her Croat background. (AP)

A court yesterday ruled that a former Turkish prime minister who was convicted of corruption can serve his prison sentence at home, after the governing party changed laws to allow him to do so. Necmettin Erbakan, a longtime leader of the country’s Islamic political movement, was convicted of falsifying party records and hiding millions of dollars in cash reserves ordered seized after his Welfare Party was shut down in 1997. The court upheld a 28-month sentence for Erbakan and ruled that he can serve the term at his residence. (AP)