ANKARA (AFP) - Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged US President George W. Bush in a telephone conversation yesterday to throw his weight behind efforts for a ceasefire in Lebanon, aides told the Anatolia news agency. Erdogan, on a visit to the Turkish-occupied north of Cyprus, told Bush that the US-backed Israeli offensive was undermining the Beirut government and that a safe corridor was urgently needed to transport humanitarian aid to Lebanon, the sources said. Erdogan renewed his call for an end to hostilities in telephone calls to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to whom he also expressed support for the creation of an international force to stabilize southern Lebanon, Anatolia reported.

SOFIA (Reuters) - Bulgaria said yesterday that it had detected bird flu in three backyard farms in a village in the south of the country near the Turkish border and suspected it was the feared H5N1 strain of the virus. “It’s proven that it’s bird flu, we don’t know the exact strain yet. We are working on the presumption that it is a highly pathogenic strain of H5N1,” Agriculture Minister Nihat Kabil told reporters. Bulgaria reported four cases of H5N1 infection in wild swans earlier this year, but has not suffered to the same extent as neighbors Turkey in the south and Romania in the north.

Albania’s defense minister said yesterday that objects thought to belong to six people, including a former Albanian deputy prime minister, flying aboard a helicopter that disappeared over the Adriatic Sea had been found. Fatmir Mediu also said that an Italian ship specialized in searching up to 1,000 meters would start searching for the Bell 222 helicopter, which disappeared on Sunday while carrying Gramoz Pashko, a former Albanian deputy prime minister, to a hospital in Italy, as well as his 24-year-old son, two pilots, a technician and a doctor. The cause of the accident remains unknown. Italian and Albanian navy ships and helicopters have been searching the area. (AP)

Europe’s most wanted war crimes fugitive, Ratko Mladic, was hiding in the Serbian capital until January this year, according to an indictment against 10 of his alleged aides published by a newspaper yesterday. The Politika daily, citing the indictment from Serb prosecutors, listed seven Belgrade addresses where the wartime Bosnian-Serb army commander hid between June 1, 2002, and January 25, 2006. The apartments, mostly located in the new section of Belgrade built after World War II, were allegedly used by Mladic and provided by his alleged helpers who are charged with “aiding a fugitive in his escape from justice.” (AP)