THE HAGUE (AP) - A former UN interpreter took the stand yesterday with her identity concealed as the first prosecution witness in the trial of three Croat generals accused of orchestrating a 1995 campaign of murder and persecution of Serbs. She testified that she was forced to flee to a bomb shelter as shells rained down on the town of Knin in the early morning of August 4, 1995, during the deadly opening of a Croatian army blitz known as Operation Storm. The operation snatched back a region known as the Krajina seized four years earlier by rebel Serbs as the former Yugoslavia crumbled. It is widely regarded as a military triumph in Croatia and the three generals on trial here - Ante Gotovina, Mladen Markac and Ivan Cermak - are considered national heroes. But prosecutors say the operation began with the shelling of Knin and continued through August and September with a brutal campaign in which Croat forces murdered Serb villagers, torched their houses, killed their livestock and poisoned their wells.

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkish soldiers have killed 10 members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in an operation near the border with Iraq this week, the military said yesterday. The General Staff said in a statement on its website that soldiers had seized hand grenades, explosives and food from the rebels in the border province of Sirnak.

A court in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia convicted a bear of theft and damage for stealing honey from a beekeeper who fought off the attacks with thumping «turbo-folk» music. «I tried to distract the bear with lights and music because I heard bears are afraid of that,» Zoran Kiseloski told top-selling daily Dnevnik after the yearlong case of the bear vs the beekeeper ended in the beekeeper's favor. (Reuters)

Turkey yesterday blocked access to the popular video-sharing website YouTube in response to a video clip allegedly insulting the country's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, state-run media said. A prosecutor in the Turkish capital of Ankara asked a court to ban access to the website due to a video clip that the prosecutor deemed was disrespectful of Ataturk. (AP)