VARNA (AFP) - President Georgi Parvanov yesterday called for the creation of an independent bureau to fight corruption “at the highest levels of power” in Bulgaria, which is attempting to show it is ready to join the EU. “I insist on an anti-corruption unit, independent from the government,” Parvanov told a news conference called to discuss the European Commission’s decision to delay until October a decision on Bulgaria’s entry to the EU in January 2007. “No one should be untouchable, not in government, not in Parliament,” he said. Parvanov said Bulgaria’s neighbor Romania, which also wants to join the EU in 2007, has done better at fighting corruption. He called for “more trials of organized crime bosses” in Bulgaria but said this would be done without violating human rights and without a witch hunt. “It is important to cut the economic resources of organized crime,” Parvanov said.

BUCHAREST (AP) - Romanian authorities quarantined a street and restricted access to other areas of the capital over the weekend after domestic poultry tested positive for H5 bird flu, the city’s mayor said, but officials appealed for calm. “The virus has been confirmed in the second district” of Bucharest, where there are more than 400 households that have some 4,400 chickens, Mayor Adriean Videanu said, adding that authorities were also conducting tests on dead domestic poultry found in another area of the capital. Authorities quarantined at least one street in an eastern part of the capital, and began culling birds and disinfecting streets in the two districts. Access was restricted to 65 streets in both districts, where about 2,000 residents live, Videanu said. Further tests will determine whether the dead poultry had the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu virus. Authorities, meanwhile, were giving residents the antiviral drug Tamiflu.

Turkish doctors said yesterday they had decided to keep former premier Bulent Ecevit in a medically induced sleep to prevent further swelling in his brain following a stroke. Ecevit, 81, was in critical but stable condition, doctors said. “The decision was made to keep former prime minister Bulent Ecevit in induced sleep for some time longer to solve the swelling in his brain,” doctors said in a written statement from the military hospital in Ankara where he was being treated. Ecevit had a stroke Thursday after attending the funeral of a high court judge shot in his courtroom, allegedly by an Islamist extremist. (AP)

The death toll from a road accident in southern Turkey has reached 44, most of the victims believed to be illegal immigrants from Afghanistan and Bangladesh, officials told the Anatolia news agency on Saturday. The accident occurred Friday when a truck packed with illegal immigrants rammed a trailer truck from behind near a toll booth on a highway near the town of Osmaniye. The death toll rose after four illegal immigrants died from their injuries — one on the way to the hospital after the crash and three others on Saturday, Anatolia reported. The Turkish driver of the truck and a man accompanying him were also among the dead. (AFP)