STRASBOURG (AP) – The European Union will not conclude a pre-membership agreement with Bosnia unless the ex-Yugoslav republic makes progress on police reform and improves cooperation with the UN war crimes tribunal, EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn said yesterday. Bosnia has been negotiating the so-called Stabilization and Association Agreement – a precursor to eventual EU membership – with the EU since 2005. Technical talks on the agreement have finished, but Bosnian Serbs are blocking a proposal that would merge the country’s two police forces into one, one of the conditions for signing the accord. “Bosnia-Herzegovina and its citizens need an efficient police. It is important that the... authorities finally agree on the reform,” said Rehn.

DIYARBAKIR (Reuters) – Turkish prosecutors launched an investigation yesterday into two teenagers for allegedly making Kurdish separatist comments and insisting an ancient festival celebrated this month is Kurdish, not Turkish. They could be charged under an article of Turkey’s penal code that forbids the “incitement of hatred and enmity among people,” a court official said. The two students, aged 17 and 18, allegedly contradicted an army officer teaching a class at their school who said the Newroz festival was Turkish and had been celebrated by the Turks since they moved westwards from Central Asia many centuries ago.

Romanian Prime Minister Calin Tariceanu yesterday called on the senate to quickly adopt a law allowing the country to honor a promise to the EU to create a national anti-corruption agency. “Adopting the law on the National Integrity Agency is Romania’s institutional obligation toward the European Union and the politicians’ moral obligation toward Romanians,” Tariceanu said in an address before the senate. The prime minister’s speech came two weeks before Bucharest was to present a report on its anti-corruption drive to the European Commission. (AFP)

The daughter of Bulgaria’s once-exiled king delivered her first baby in Sofia yesterday, giving the country its first royal birth in 70 years in what observers said was a symbolic show of allegiance to the Balkan state. “It was so nice of her to give birth in Bulgaria,” the grandfather, formerly exiled king and former prime minister Simeon Saxe-Coburg, said. (AFP)