BUCHAREST (AFP) - Twelve new cases of the potentially deadly H5N1 bird flu virus have been confirmed in domestic poultry in a village near Bucharest, the local veterinary health authority said yesterday. The village of Magurele, 15 kilometers from Bucharest, was put under quarantine and authorities began culling over 1,000 poultry yesterday as a result, it added.

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A United Nations appeals chamber cut a sentence for an ex-Bosnian-Serb mayor to 40 years from life yesterday for orchestrating the 1992 extermination, expulsion and brutal detention of non-Serbs in Bosnia. The court also dismissed an appeal by the prosecution that Milomir Stakic was guilty of genocide. Stakic was the top official of the Prijedor municipality in northwest Bosnia during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM)’s interior minister will not accept questioning by EU lawmakers on a German national’s claim that CIA agents kidnapped him from the Balkan country to Afghanistan, a spokesman said yesterday. Ljubomir Mihajlovski planned to meet a visiting group of European Parliament members next month. “Questioning is for people who are charged with a crime, and the minister is not,” Goran Pavlovski told AP. (AP)

Police have caught two men suspected of desecrating a memorial for the victims of Croatia’s WWII pro-Nazi Ustasha regime and will charge them with aggravated theft, they said yesterday. “The two men tore off 14 metallic plaques with victims’ names from a memorial in Veljun,” near the central town of Karlovac, and intended to sell them as raw material, a police statement said. (AFP)

Romanian peacekeepers will take command of Afghanistan’s Kabul international airport on April 1, the Defense Ministry said yesterday. (AP)

Afghan President Hamid Karzai arrived in Turkey yesterday to attend a terrorism conference aimed at strengthening international cooperation. Karzai will attend the symposium on “Global Terrorism and International Cooperation” today as a keynote speaker along with General Hilmi Ozkok, chief of the Turkish military. He is also expected to meet with President Ahmet Necdet Sezer before returning to Afghanistan. (AP)