PARIS (Reuters) - Romania is prepared to allow investigations at two military bases to show they were not used by the CIA as secret detention centers, President Traian Basescu said in an interview published yesterday. Basescu denied the US intelligence agency had used any Romanian facilities in what the Washington Post said was a secret operation to hide al-Qaeda captives in Central and Eastern Europe. “I am categorical: There are no such prisons in Romania,” Basescu, who is visiting Paris for talks with President Jacques Chirac, told the French newspaper Le Figaro.

SARAJEVO (AP) - Blood collection teams from the International Commission on Missing Persons will be visiting Bosnians living in the United States to collect samples from family members of people missing since the wars in the former Yugoslavia, officials said yesterday. The visit from November 29 to December 14 will be the first ICMP blood collection campaign in North America and will focus on 12 US states. The blood samples are needed for DNA identification of remains found in grave sites across the former Yugoslavia.

Romania yesterday confirmed new cases of the deadly strain of bird flu in four hens in a remote village, the agriculture minister said. Tests from a British laboratory confirmed that the hens have the H5N1 strain, Gheorghe Flutur said. The birds were from the village of Caraorman, a small community surrounded by channels of the Danube River. “We are keeping things under control,” Flutur said in an interview with news channel Realitatea TV. (AP)

The resumption of the trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic has been postponed until November 29 while a medical report is prepared, the war crimes tribunal at The Hague said yesterday. The trial was suspended last Wednesday for the 22nd time after Milosevic, 64, said he “was not feeling well” and failed to resume yesterday. (AFP)

One of seven men suspected of war crimes against Muslim civilians at the start of Bosnia’s 1992-95 war has died in a Serbian prison a week before his trial was due to open, his lawyer said yesterday. Dusko Vuckovic died of a heart attack on Sunday in his Belgrade prison cell after complaining of longstanding cardiac problems on Friday, his lawyer said. (AFP)