TIRANA (AP) - Albania’s opposition Democratic Party won the third seat in a partial rerun of last month’s disputed election, thus completing the voting process and enabling former President Sali Berisha’s party to form a government, election authorities said yesterday. Counting of the votes ended late Monday in Shkodra, 100 kilometers (62 miles) north of the capital, giving the victory to the Democrats’ candidate. The result followed two other Democrat victories in Sunday’s repeat election in three districts. Berisha appeared to be a step closer to forming a government as his Democratic Party and allies now have 80 of parliament’s 140 seats.

ANKARA (AFP) - A ranking US official is expected in Ankara tomorrow for talks on bilateral ties and particularly measures to combat armed Turkish Kurd rebels holed up in the mountains of northern Iraq, a US spokesman said yesterday. Matt Bryza, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, “will be visiting Ankara for two days to discuss general matters... The PKK (the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party) issue could also be brought up,” the spokesman, who requested anonymity, said. Bryza is also expected to meet officials in charge of the economy and “possibly” military officials, he added.

Kosovo’s UN administrator said yesterday that talks to determine this disputed province’s future should start by the year’s end. “I do not see any gains in delaying status talks,” warned Soren Jessen-Petersen, the top UN official in the province. He said the next three months in Kosovo are the “most crucial months in this crucial year.” Kosovo has been disputed between the province’s ethnic Albanian majority who want full independence and Serb minority and Serbia who insist the province remain part of Serbia-Montenegro, the union that replaced Yugoslavia. (AP)

Germany’s Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, campaigning yesterday for September 18 national elections, attacked as “criminally blind” conservative challenger Angela Merkel’s opposition to Turkish EU membership. During a campaign stop in eastern Germany, Greens party member Fischer said Turkey was important during the Cold War, “but then it lay on the fringe, and now it is in the center of our security,” Fischer said. (AP)

An inmate has escaped from Belgrade’s maximum-security prison — a facility also housing a key suspect in the deadly Madrid bombings and the alleged killers of Serbia’s prime minister, officials said yesterday. Zoran Raskovic, 27, accused of robbing a bank in 2003, fled the Central Prison in Belgrade on Monday during a visit by his lawyer, said Dragoljub Loncarevic, a Justice Ministry official in charge of prison security. (AP)

Eleven people have been arrested and charged with smuggling 28 tons of cigarettes that were seized over the weekend, police in the Montenegrin coastal town of Kotor said yesterday. The contraband cigarettes were valued at about two million euros and the seizure was one of the biggest ever in Montenegro, which is considered a key trafficking route toward the EU. (AFP)