PRISTINA (AP) - Kosovo’s negotiating team agreed on Saturday to meet with Serbia’s officials later this month, paving the way for the start of talks on the province’s final status. Fatmir Sejdiu, Kosovo’s newly elected president who took up the position Friday, said the province’s representatives will attend the meeting with a Serbian team on the reform of local government on February 20, in the Austrian capital Vienna. Sejdiu made the announcement after the group’s hour-long meeting in his offices in downtown Pristina, the province’s capital. He also said the team approved a position paper outlining the principles on the local government reforms meant to give Kosovo’s Serbs and other minorities greater say in where they live.

ISTANBUL (AFP) - Turkish police yesterday detained seven people when demonstrations calling for the release of jailed Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan turned violent in Istanbul and Antalya. In Istanbul, Turkey’s biggest city, about 250 demonstrators pelted police with Molotov cocktails and stones in the Gaziosmanpasa district, the Anatolia news agency said. Riot police in armored vehicles used tear gas to break up the rally and arrested five people. In the southern city of Antalya, Ocalan supporters also clashed with police and two people were arrested.

Montenegro will hold a referendum on April 30 to decide whether to break off from its larger federation partner Serbia, according to Foreign Minister Miodrag Vlahovic. The date of the vote, which could see Serbia-Montenegro, the last remaining vestige of the former Yugoslavia, break into two independent states, will be formally decided by Parliament but Vlahovic on Saturday said it would take place the last Sunday in April. “It’s almost unthinkable that the referendum is not going to be successful,” he told a conference at the International Institute for Peace, a Vienna-based organization involved in social, economic and political development in the Balkans. The European Union must prepare to face a “new situation” on May 1, Vlahovic said, quoted by the ANA press agency. (AFP)

An avalanche near the central Turkish town of Nigde killed four university students on Saturday, the Anatolia news agency reported. The students were members of a mountaineering club at Hacettepe University in Ankara and were part of a group of 14 beginning to ascend the 3,756-meter (12,300-feet) Demirkazik Mountain. Earlier reports that four students were killed in the avalanche and two remained missing turned out to be false. (AP)