BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Croatia has not met the conditions for starting European Union entry talks because of its failure to cooperate fully with a UN war crimes tribunal, EU president Luxembourg said yesterday. Summing up after ambassadors of the 25-nation bloc discussed whether to open negotiations as planned with Zagreb next week, “the presidency concluded that there was no agreement that the conditions had been met on cooperation with ICTY and they intended to tell the Croatians,” an EU diplomat said.

BUCHAREST (Reuters) - Key parties in Romania’s ruling centrist coalition yesterday backed away from supporting President Traian Basescu’s call for an early election, saying the government was not in crisis. Romania’s pro-business government has a fragile parliamentary majority and Basescu said an early vote would strengthen the Cabinet’s hand as it readies the country for EU entry in 2007. “We’ll tell the president that we’re not in a crisis and this government needs to be backed by all sides. Romania doesn’t need early polls,” Eugen Nicolaescu, spokesman of the Liberal Party (PNL), a key ally in the ruling coalition, told Reuters.

Bulgaria’s government gave the green light yesterday for NATO to modernize two of its military airports in a 59-million-euro ($79 million) deal expected to precede the eventual arrival of US troops. The Balkan country joined the military alliance last March and is soon expected to host US forces, as Washington shifts from large deployments in Central Europe and Asia to smaller sites closer to potential conflicts in the Middle East. (Reuters)

A former Bosnian-Serb minister will surrender to the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague today, the seventh senior figure from the Balkan wars of the 1990s to give himself up in two months. A Serbian government statement said yesterday that Mica Stanisic would report to the tribunal on March 11. He is the fifth Serb or Bosnian Serb to do so via Belgrade since late January. (Reuters)

Some 6,000 transport workers from around Romania held a rally yesterday outside government headquarters to protest planned labor reforms. The Liberal government wants employers to be able to issue short-term contracts and decide the length of the work week, with labor contracts no longer negotiated collectively. The proposals are part of a reform package that the government hopes will help clinch EU membership in 2007. (AP)