BUCHAREST (AFP) - Romania has no plans to reverse a ban on international adoptions, despite pressure from several countries including the United States, the head of the country’s adoption service said yesterday. “We are determined to abide by the law as it stands. At the moment a change in the wording is out of the question,” said Theodora Bertzi during a press conference. Bertzi said Romania had received nearly 1,100 requests from foreign couples wanting to adopt since the moratorium came into force in June 2001, and had rejected them all. “The 1,092 children affected by these requests are no longer eligible for adoption,” said Bertzi, adding that some of the children had already been adopted by Romanian couples while others had been reintegrated into their families. Republican Representative Christopher Smith, who sponsored the US resolution, said earlier this month inter-country adoption was “far better than languishing in an orphanage somewhere where the child is warehoused.”

BELGRADE (AP) - Serbia’s war crimes prosecutor has launched an investigation against 10 former Kosovo Albanian rebels for alleged atrocities against civilians during the province’s 1999 war, the prosecutor’s office said yesterday. The investigation will focus on three separate alleged war crimes when two people went missing and two others were seriously injured and robbed, the office said in a statement. The statement added that the violations of international law took place near the western Kosovo towns of Pec and Djakovica, in March and June 1999. The victims were Serbs, ethnic Albanians and Roma, the statement said, providing no other details. The rebel KLA troops have been accused of kidnappings and killings of hundreds of Serbs and other non-Albanians during the war and after the 1999 pullout of the Serb troops.

An explosion at a police academy in Belgrade injured 10 people yesterday, Serbia’s Interior Ministry said. The apparently accidental blast took place during a training session involving explosive devices during a course in anti-terrorist protection, the ministry said in a statement. Nine trainees and their instructor sustained light injuries when “an explosive device went off prematurely,” the statement said. (AP)