BANJA LUKA (AFP) - Negotiations are afoot in Belgrade on the surrender of Ratko Mladic, one of the former Yugoslavia’s most wanted war crimes suspects, according to a press report here yesterday. “Contact was established with the fugitive 10 days ago and intensive negotiations for his surrender are being held,” said the newspaper Nezavisne Novine, quoting an unidentified source in the Bosnian-Serb Interior Ministry.

BRUSSELS (AP) - Political leaders from Bosnia’s Croat, Serb and Muslim communities struggled yesterday to agree on reforms of their complex postwar state that the EU says are essential for the country as it moves toward EU membership. The American mediating the talks acknowledged the difficulties in reconciling the three groups 10 years after the end of the Bosnian war. “If this were easy, we wouldn’t need negotiations,” said Donald Hays of the United States Institute for Peace.

Police evacuated a landmark twin towers home to international companies and agencies in Sarajevo following a bomb threat on Saturday, but no explosives were found when the buildings were searched, police said. A caller telephoned the police’s anonymous crime hotline in the early evening, saying a bomb had been planted in each tower, Sarajevo canton police officer Jerko Budimir told Reuters. (Reuters)

The continued presence of the United States in Kosovo is “vital” to ensuring stability and determining the final status of the region, Kai Eide, the United Nations secretary-general’s special envoy to Kosovo, said on Saturday. In an address to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly being held in Copenhagen, Eide presented a report on the fragile situation in the province, calling for the US to remain involved. “To the US delegate in this assembly, I want to say the US must continue to be engaged in Kosovo as long as necessary,” he said. (AFP)

Slobodan Milosevic’s foreign and Serbian supporters demanded yesterday that the former president’s genocide trial before a UN court be adjourned due to his poor health. Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark and other members of a pro-Milosevic committee also said that any attempt by the court in The Hague, Netherlands, to appoint a lawyer for Milosevic, or try him in absentia, would amount to “cruel disrespect of truth.” (AP)