DIYARBAKIR (AFP) - A total of 225 people died in Turkey in escalating violence between Turkish forces and armed Kurdish rebels in the first half of 2007, the country's main human rights watchdog said yesterday. The announcement came as officials said two Turkish soldiers and two rebels from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) were killed in fresh fighting. «We see a serious increase in the number of daily clashes,» Mihdi Perincek, the Human Rights Association (IHD) representative for the mainly Kurdish east and southeast of Turkey, told a press conference here. «We are also concerned that clashes are spreading across the region,» he said.

PARIS (AFP) - France said yesterday it believed that foreign medics on death row in Libya would be released, following meetings in Tripoli between the wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Muammar Khadafy. «We can be reasonably optimistic,» Claude Gueant, a senior aide to the president, told AFP. Cecilia Sarkozy returned to Paris early yesterday, hours after a surprise visit to see five Bulgarian nurses facing the death sentence in Libya after being convicted of infecting children with the AIDS virus.

Bosnians are generally satisfied with their lives despite financial hardships, but don't trust each other, a survey by the UN Development Program (UNDP) showed yesterday. Nearly two-thirds of 3,580 people interviewed throughout the country said their lives have improved in the past year, but at the same time 88 percent said things had worsened in the country as a whole, the study showed. (Reuters)

Jerusalem's mayor has asked the Turkish government to return a famous 2,700-year-old tablet uncovered in an ancient subterranean passage in the city, Jerusalem officials said yesterday. Known as the Siloam inscription, the tablet was found in a tunnel dug to channel water from a spring outside Jerusalem's walls into the city around 700 BC - a project mentioned in the Old Testament's Book of Chronicles. It was discovered in 1880 and taken by the Holy Land's Ottoman rulers to Istanbul, where it is now in the collection of the Istanbul Archaeology Museum. Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski made the request in a Thursday meeting with Turkey's ambassador to Israel, Namik Tan, Lupolianski spokesman Gidi Schmerling said yesterday. (AP)