DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuters) – A Turkish court sentenced a woman to 18 months in jail yesterday for making a speech in support of jailed Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan. The court ruled that Nesrin Deniz, a member of a Kurdish group campaigning for Ocalan to be freed, was guilty of making propaganda on behalf of an illegal group. Deniz had told a large gathering during a festival in Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey in March: “Mr Ocalan is an irrefutable reality of this country. A solution cannot be found without seeing that.”

ZAGREB (AP) – The Croatian government decided yesterday to delay establishing jurisdiction over fishing just outside its waters in the Adriatic Sea until 2008, after the EU warned it against activating the measure now. The Fishing and Ecology Protection Zone, adopted by parliament in 2003 and then put on hold after Croatia’s neighbors Slovenia and Italy – EU members – protested against it, will be enforced “on January 2008 at the latest,” said Prime Minister Ivo Sanader. Sanader acknowledged the government had to satisfy two “national interests” – to protect fish stocks and make its fishing competitive, while also acting “not to harm our interest” in eventually joining the EU.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is to leave for the United States on Sunday, where he will attend a meeting on reducing Islamic-Western tensions, the state-owned news agency reported yesterday. Erdogan has been one of the prime movers behind the United Nations-backed “Alliance of Civilizations” initiative, which aims to find ways to increase dialogue between Western and non-Western cultures and to address the causes of conflict between them. (AP)

The Council of Europe said yesterday that political confrontation in Albania was delaying much-needed reforms of the electoral code and the media. A draft resolution prepared by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe said Albania’s January 20 local elections would be “a major test for the capacity of the Albanian authorities to organize free and fair elections.” Albanian opposition parties decided on Monday to boycott the elections, claiming the governing Democratic Party-led coalition was unwilling to reform the electoral code. (AP)

Bulgarian prosecutors charged four officials from Sofia’s heating distributor with misappropriation of funds, officials said yesterday, in the latest attack on graft before the country joins the European Union on January 1. Prosecutors charged the four men, including Executive Director Georgi Rogachev, with siphoning funds from distributor Toplifikatsia Sofia by signing contracts in which it paid a firm under their control to supply goods at inflated prices. The accused face between 10 and 30 years in jail if convicted, prosecutors said. (Reuters)