TIRANA (AFP) - Albanian Defense Minister Pandeli Majko said yesterday the UN-run southern Serbian province of Kosovo was a “lost cause” for Belgrade, which has vowed to resist the Kosovo Albanian majority’s demands for independence. “Kosovo is a lost cause for Serbia,” he told a local television station. “The current Serb political leadership still does not want to recognize that the responsibility for the loss of Kosovo is not theirs, but rather Milosevic’s and his former regime’s.”

SOFIA (AFP) - Gale-force winds and heavy rain hit Bulgaria yesterday leaving over 170 villages around the country without electricity and claiming the life of one man, Bulgarian national radio said. A 56-year-old resident of the village of Chernoochene in the south of the former communist country drowned in a cafeteria yesterday morning, after one of the building walls collapsed and water flooded the ground floor. Winds of up to 120 kilometers (70 miles) per hour hit the the central city of Veliko Tarnovo and left two women injured by falling roof tiles. National radio reported the city was littered with uprooted trees and overturned kiosks.

Two women were killed and 14 children were injured when their bus skidded off a road near Valjevo in western Serbia, police said yesterday. The bus carrying children returning from winter holidays crashed late Monday during a heavy blizzard, the Tanjug news agency reported. (AFP)

A Turkish businessman, Kahraman Sadikoglu, has been freed after almost two months as a hostage in Iraq and is expected home yesterday, the Turkish Foreign Ministry said. Sadikoglu, who was seized on December 19, was freed late on Monday. (AFP)

The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) denounced in a report published yesterday severe problems of racism in Bosnia-Herzegovina stemming from what it said were often nationalist policies. “Severe problems of racism and racial (including ethnic and religious) discrimination and segregation persist in the country, often as a result of nationalist policies pursued by ethnically based political parties,” the human rights monitoring group set up by the Council of Europe, said in the report. (AFP)

The Bosnian-Serb Parliament yesterday approved a new government led by Prime Minister Pero Bukejlovic of the nationalist Serb Democratic Party (SDS). The new government was formed after the previous SDS-led Cabinet resigned in protest at international demands for the arrest of war crimes fugitives including the party’s co-founder, Radovan Karadzic. (AFP)