BUCHAREST (AFP) - Romanian authorities are investigating a dozen cases in which children supposedly adopted by foreign couples were substituted between 1991 and 2002, the president of the Adoption Office (ORA) said yesterday. The affair came to light when the ORA tried to find 40 minors officially adopted by foreigners and taken abroad but discovered that 11 of them were still in Romania. The children were listed as having left the country with their adoptive parents, ORA President Theodora Bertzi told AFP. «We do not know who these minors were substituted by, maybe they are kidnapped children and their parents are still looking for them,» she said.

DIYARBAKIR (Reuters) - Two Turkish soldiers were killed in clashes with Kurdish militants in southeast Turkey yesterday, security officials said. They said army operations against Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) rebels in the mountainous region bordering Iraq were continuing.

The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia's prime minister designate announced his future Cabinet yesterday and sought formal approval from Parliament for his conservative coalition government. Nikola Gruevski, 35, leads the VMRO-DPMNE party, which won the most votes in the July 5 elections, and will form a coalition with ethnic Albanian DPA party and two other smaller parties. (AP)

A senior Romanian politician who spent years in communist prisons resigned Monday as honorary chairman of the ruling Liberal Party, after being accused of having informed on fellow former dissidents. Mircea Ionescu Quintus, a former justice minister, said he was resigning to avoid dragging the party through a public scandal. (AP)