SOFIA (AP) - The United Nations envoy mediating the Kosovo talks said yesterday he was still hopeful that a solution for the status of the breakaway province could be found by the year’s end despite the lack of progress so far. Four rounds of talks in Vienna between the ethnic Albanian and Serb sides on the future of the breakaway province have failed to yield results. A fifth is expected to start May 22 and to tackle the issue of protection of Serb religious sites in the province. But the target of having a solution by the end of the year “is the only time frame we have for the moment and we are trying to follow it,” Martti Ahtisaari told reporters in Sofia after meeting Bulgarian Foreign Minister Ivailo Kalfin.

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish Economy Minister Ali Babacan said yesterday the government had no plans to call early elections. “Elections are not on the government’s agenda. There is no reason why next year’s elections would cause a deviation from the (economic) program,” he told a news conference. The government has reiterated it will not call early elections, but some foreign investors continue to believe a poll could be called ahead of schedule.

Both police and the military are intensively searching for war crimes fugitive Gen. Ratko Mladic, Serbia’s minister in charge of cooperation with the UN war crimes tribunal said yesterday. Rasim Ljajic was responding to criticism by several opposition officials and security experts that the latest security operations, portrayed by authorities as attempts to arrest the wartime Bosnian Serb army commander, were just a show for the international audience that something was being done to bring him to justice. On Sunday, masked police backed by helicopters searched a western Serbian town as part of an apparent hunt for Mladic. “There is no bluffing, the search actions are credible,” Ljajic said. (AP)

A reality TV show in which eight men dressed up and portrayed themselves as women has been scrapped before transmission in Turkey following heavy criticism in this mainly Muslim country, the station said yesterday. The decision followed a wave of calls to the country’s audiovisual watchdog RTUK complaining about the program — inspired by the US show “He’s a Lady” — which was set to run on the Kanal 1 network, the channel’s programme director Aydin Erdem told AFP. “There was a lot of criticism. So, in consultation with RTUK, we decided not to run the show,” Erdem said. (AFP)

Twenty-three minors went on trial yesterday in the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir over deadly rioting that shook Turkey’s restive southeastern region a month ago. They are the first batch of 80 youths to appear in court on charges ranging from membership of an armed group — a reference to the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) — to violating the law on demonstrations. The remaining minors were expected to be brought to court in groups throughout the week. (AFP)