ANKARA (AFP) - Syrian Prime Minister Mohammed Naji Otri will visit Turkey next week for two days of talks on regional and international issues, a Turkish government source said yesterday. Otri is expected to meet his Turkish counterpart during the July 13-15 visit. Turkey has pushed for better relations with Syria since the US-led invasion of Iraq despite warnings from Washington to limit cooperation with Damascus. Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is also due to arrive in Turkey on July 13 following angry words between the regional allies over the Jewish state’s crackdown on Palestinians. Olmert is set to attend a meeting of the Israeli-Turkish joint economic commission set for July 14-15, Foreign Ministry spokesman Namik Tan said.

BUCHAREST (AP) - Western diplomats yesterday accused the Romanian government of exerting economic and political pressure on the media and said it could harm the country’s chances of joining the European Union. Iain Lindsay, charge d’affaires at the British Embassy, criticized the lack of investigation into the beatings of 14 journalists in Romania last year. “Physical aggression against journalists is totally and utterly unacceptable,” Lindsay said at conference on press freedom organized by a Romanian think-tank and sponsored by the US, British, German and French governments, and two Romanian newspapers. “We take the issue of press freedom very seriously and we are willing to support you,” Lindsay said. “We will be monitoring this” until Romania joins the European Union.

A Turkish minority leader in Bulgaria said yesterday that he would return the country’s highest state order to protest a decision to award the same honor to a former chief prosecutor whom he holds responsible for the forced assimilation of ethnic Turks by the former communist regime. Ahmed Dogan, the leader of a party representing Bulgaria’s 800,000 ethnic Turks, was awarded the order Stara Planina last March for his contribution “to preserve ethnic peace in the country.” President Georgi Parvanov last week decided to award the same honor to Vasil Mrachkov, a prominent law professor and former chief prosecutor. Dogan said this constituted “an insult to the victims of the assimilation — one cannot put the executor and the victim on the same bench.” (AP)

Five people have died in Romania as a result of a heatwave sweeping the country for the past five days, the Health Ministry said. Authorities have warned the population against the dangers of heat and dehydration, while forecasters expect the hot spell to last until the end of the week with temperatures between 35C and 38C (95F and 100F). (AFP)

A trans-Atlantic security group yesterday urged Albanian news groups to report more independently of their owners’ interests, saying biased reporting had compromised the media’s credibility. Osmo Lipponen, the chief of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s mission in the country, said Albanians had become “very skeptical toward the truth as presented by the media.” (AP)