BUCHAREST (Reuters) – Two people died in Romania yesterday as temperatures reached 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), raising this week’s death toll to seven, Health Minister Eugen Nicolaescu said. Meteorologists said scorching temperatures of up to 42C might last until July 22. Authorities reported a record number of ambulance calls, with more than 1,000 requests in the last 24 hours in the capital of 2 million people. A previous two-week heat wave in June claimed the lives of 30 people, scorched thousands of hectares of farmland and plunged the country’s cereal crop to a four-year record low.

SOFIA (AP) – Bulgaria’s president thanked his French counterpart for France’s efforts to speed up the release of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor imprisoned in Libya, the president’s office announced yesterday. In a phone conversation late on Thursday, Georgi Parvanov “expressed gratitude for the support provided over the years by French politicians, diplomats and people and for Nicolas Sarkozy’s personal position.”

Former Kosovo Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj, standing trial on UN war crimes charges, will not be allowed to return home for the summer, judges ruled yesterday, saying his release could add to an “atmosphere of fear” surrounding the case. Several prosecution witnesses have said they are unwilling to testify against Haradinaj, who is charged along with two other former leaders of the ethnic Albanian dominated Kosovo Liberation Army, with 37 counts of atrocities against Serbs and their suspected supporters in Kosovo in 1998. (AP)

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe yesterday praised Croatia’s progress in rehabilitating ethnic Serb refugees and its judicial reforms, key to its bid to join the EU. “In the refugee problem, we have advanced very much,” said OSCE Chief of Mission in Croatia Jorge Fuentes, while presenting an annual report. He said the OSCE mission here could close shortly. The OSCE chairman, Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, earlier this month said he supported winding up the mission in Croatia by the end of this year. The future of the mission will be decided by the OSCE ministerial council in November. (AFP)