SARAJEVO (AFP) - Hundreds of tons of medical aid given to Bosnia during its civil war now poses a threat to the country’s environment and the health of its people, an official said yesterday. “We don’t know the exact amount of expired medical drug waste in Bosnia but estimate there could be up to 1,000 tons,” a Bosnian-Serb Health Ministry official who requested anonymity told AFP. Most of the expired drugs were delivered to Bosnia from abroad, notably Europe, as part of medical aid to help the country cope with shortages during its brutal 1992-1995 inter-ethnic war. “At the time, we were not in a position to choose which drugs to accept and reject, and unfortunately many pharmaceutical firms used the situation as a means of getting rid of these supplies to avoid paying high costs for their destruction,” said the official.

SARAJEVO (AFP) - A mass grave containing the remains of Serb victims of Croatia’s World War II fascist Ustasha regime has been discovered in Bosnia, 65 years after they were massacred, an official said yesterday. Uncovered from the burial site near the northwestern town of Novi Grad were the remains of 35 women and children and an elderly man, Milan Ivancevic of the Bosnian-Serb commission for missing persons told AFP. “The identity of the victims is already known because of the existence of photos presenting these women and children as having been slaughtered by Ustasha with knives” in 1941, said Ivancevic.

Romania will send hundreds of extra troops to insurgency-hit Afghanistan following a request from NATO, Romanian President Traian Basescu said during a visit to Kabul yesterday. Romania already has nearly 650 troops in the southern provinces of Zabul and neighboring Kandahar and the capital Kabul. “We have a new battalion, which was requested by NATO, being prepared to be placed in operation. And we’ll fulfill our obligations in NATO,” he told a joint press conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. (AFP)

Unemployment in Croatia has fallen to its lowest level in a decade, according to statistics released yesterday. Unemployment, which peaked at 23.3 percent in the former Yugoslav republic in 2002, dropped to 16 percent, or some 270,000 jobless, according to the state bureau of statistics. (AP)