SARAJEVO (AP) - Countries guaranteeing Bosnia’s peace agreement decided yesterday to instate German diplomat Christian Schwartz-Schilling as the country’s top international official. Schwartz-Schilling takes over from Paddy Ashdown at the start of next year in enforcing the deal that ended Bosnia’s 1992-95 war.

BUCHAREST (AP) - Four villages in southeast Romania have been quarantined after authorities confirmed the presence of an H5-subtype of bird flu in the area, authorities said yesterday. The virus was detected late Tuesday in two new villages — a sign that the virus was spreading westward outside the Danube Delta, where the deadly H5N1 virus was confirmed in recent weeks, said Gabriel Predoi, who heads the National Animal Health Agency. The H5N1 strain was also confirmed in the villages of Scarlatesti and Dudescu, just west of the delta region.

Turkey will take to the Council of Europe a long-running row over Belgium’s failure to extradite or try a far-left Turkish militant for her suspected involvement in the murder of a prominent Turkish businessman, the Foreign Ministry said yesterday. “Fehriye Erdal has neither been extradited to Turkey nor tried in Belgium for the crimes she committed in Turkey. Due to a failure to resolve this problem on a bilateral level, Turkey has decided to take the issue to an international platform,” ministry spokesman Namik Tan told reporters. (AFP)

Albania yesterday banned the use of small ships and speedboats in an effort to stop human, drugs and weapons smuggling across its waters into the EU, the government said. The government’s moratorium, which must be passed by Parliament, will ban for the next three years the use of small boats apart from those licensed for fishing and transport and those for the police and military. (AP)