WASHINGTON (AP) - President George W. Bush’s administration opposes a measure passed by the House of Representatives forbidding Turkey to use US aid to lobby against a separate measure that would officially recognize the Armenian genocide, a State Department spokesman said Friday. “The House has passed it, the Senate has not and the administration is opposed to it,” Richard Boucher said. The House used a voice vote Thursday to approve language by Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California on Turkey that was added to a $19.4 billion foreign aid bill the House approved. Tens of thousands of Armenians live in Schiff’s district, which includes Pasadena and other communities east of Los Angeles.

BELGRADE (AP) - Serbia’s prime minister yesterday called for the creation of a national strategy on how to cooperate with the UN war crimes tribunal, a step seen as another attempt to stall Western demands for arrests and handovers of indicted suspects. Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica called for a “responsible national strategy based on a consensus” to determine what Serbia should do to “overcome” problems in cooperation with the tribunal, Beta said.

Masked gunmen opened fire on a car in southern Serbia, wounding four ethnic Albanians from the same family, including a pregnant woman, officials said yesterday. The shooting took place late on Saturday in Serbia’s Presevo Valley, just east of UN-administered Kosovo. The area was scene of an ethnic Albanian guerrilla insurgency in 2000-01 and has seen sporadic violence in recent years. The gunmen’s identities and motives were unknown. (Reuters)

Thousands of Slav-Macedonians protested Friday in the capital of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) and other towns against plans to decentralize government and give ethnic Albanians control over municipalities where they represent a majority. Saying a draft decentralization law endorsed by the government Thursday was ethnically divisive, hundreds formed kilometers-long columns with their cars in the capital, Skopje, honking horns and chanting slogans against the plan. (AP)

Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s defense case against war crimes charges was postponed until Aug. 31 due to his ill health, the UN tribunal said. (AP)

A Romanian surgeon underwent a fit of madness while operating on a patient’s testicles and instead cut off the man’s penis and sliced it into three pieces, hospital officials said Friday. Naum Ciomu was described as a senior member of the hospital staff and a professor of anatomy. He was operating on a 34-year-old man for a testicular malformation when he committed the act, the officials said. (AFP)