BUCHAREST (AFP) – Romania’s Health Ministry reported a new case of swine flu yesterday, bringing the country’s total number of infections since late May to 50. The latest case was a 38-year-old man who had been in contact with a person infected with the H1N1 influenza virus during a stay in Britain, the ministry said. Thirteen people were still in hospital with swine flu but their conditions were improving, the ministry also said. Romania reported its first case of swine flu on May 27. More than 98,000 cases of swine flu, including over 440 deaths, have occurred since the outbreak was first reported in Mexico on April 24, according to the World Health Organization.

STEPANAKERT (AFP) – The reconciliation process between Armenia and Turkey must not be linked to the resolution of the Nagorny Karabakh conflict, the leader of Azerbaijan’s separatist enclave said yesterday. “Karabakh’s independence is an accomplished fact and cannot be under discussion,” separatist leader Bako Sahakian told journalists on the sidelines of the All-Armenian Conference on Karabakh. “Progress in Armenian-Turkish relations cannot and must not be made to the detriment of the Karabakh conflict’s settlement,” he said. “Such attempts to tie up the issues that lie on different planes will certainly lead to a deadlock.” Nagorny Karabakh, inhabited mostly by ethnic Armenians and effectively controlled by Armenia, declared independence from Azerbaijan in 1991, sparking a conflict that has claimed between 25,000 and 30,000 lives and displaced up to a million people.

SOFIA (AFP) – EU Consumer Protection Commissioner Meglena Kuneva of Bulgaria said yesterday she had decided not to take up a seat in the European Parliament, despite being elected there last month. Kuneva, who has been an EU commissioner since Bulgaria joined the 27-nation bloc in January 2007, said she preferred to serve out her term as commissioner, which ends in October, instead. “I have taken my decision... I will complete my term as commissioner,” she told a news conference here. In the European parliamentary elections on June 7, Kuneva was elected as deputy for the liberal NMSP party of former King Simeon II, which is part of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe. But she would have had to give up her job at the EU Commission if she wanted to take up her parliamentary seat when the new parliament is sworn in next week.

European Union police in Kosovo say forensic experts have unearthed the remains of at least eight people from a mass grave in eastern Kosovo. The spokesman for EU policing mission in Kosovo, Christophe Lamfalussy, says experts located the mass grave where Yugoslav army troops had set up a roadblock in 1998. He said yesterday that EU and local police are still working on the site and that more remains could be uncovered. (AP)

A Bosnian court yesterday sentenced a former Croat soldier to 13 years in jail for detaining and raping Muslim civilians during the country’s 1992-95 war. Ante Kovac, a wartime commander of the Bosnian Croat militia (HVO) in the central town of Vitez, “issued orders to military police officers and together with them took part in unlawful arrests and detention of [Bosnian Muslim] civilians,” the Court of Bosnia-Herzegovina said. Some 250 civilians were held at a cinema in Vitez, 60 kilometers (38 miles) northwest of Sarajevo, between April and August 1993. “Military police officers used to take the detained civilians for interrogation, as well as to perform forced labor at the separation line... exposing them to a life-threatening situation in which a number of detainees were killed,” the court said without revealing the exact number of victims. (AFP)

Serbian human rights groups are urging authorities to declare July 11 a day of remembrance for the victims of the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica. Dozens of activists rallied in front of the presidential building yesterday calling for the support of President Boric Tadic. They say Serbia has a “moral obligation and responsibility” to remember the roughly 8,000 Muslims who were killed by Bosnian Serb troops in July 1995. (AP)