LONDON (AFP) – Britain is confident that progress will be made this year on getting Turkey into the European Union, despite recent “difficulties,” Prime Minister Gordon Brown said yesterday. “We will support the Turkish accession negotiations to the European Union,” said Brown, speaking to reporters with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, after holding talks at 10 Downing Street. “We believe that these can, despite some of the difficulties of recent days and weeks, move forward,” the British leader said without specifying the problems. The December 13-14 meeting of EU leaders in Brussels should see them agree on the next stage of Turkey’s bid to join the club, Brown said.

BELGRADE (AP) – The Serbian intelligence agency knows the whereabouts of Europe’s most wanted war crimes fugitive, General Ratko Mladic, and is considering whether to arrest him, Serbia’s most prominent human rights activist claimed yesterday. “The Security Information Agency has absolutely precise information on where Mladic is hiding and where he is moving,” Natasa Kandic, Serbia’s most prominent human rights activist, told AP. Serbian security officials were unavailable to comment on Kandic’s claims. They have repeatedly denied knowing where Mladic is. Kandic said that chief UN war crimes prosecutor for former Yugoslavia Carla Del Ponte has received assurances from agency officials that Mladic will be apprehended.

The Romanian Orthodox Church yesterday complained that a state body deliberately and illegally leaked information to the media about clerics accused of collaborating with the feared communist-era secret police. The Holy Synod, the church’s top decision-making body, said it will register a complaint with parliament about the Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives, which is said to have leaked information with the aim of manipulating public opinion. “The Council does not take into account the very difficult circumstances that the church had to overcome to survive (during communism) and cannot understand the humiliation and blackmail that Orthodox clerics had to endure,” said Bishop Vicentiu Ploiesteanul, after the Synod meeting. (AP)

Bulgaria’s Socialist-led government, pressured by a long-running teachers’ strike, survived a no-confidence vote yesterday, fending off opposition claims that it had failed to fund schools adequately. The motion, tabled by the parliamentary opposition, was rejected in the 240-member legislature along party lines by 160-61, with one abstention. The remaining 18 lawmakers were absent. It was the third confidence vote the center-left government had survived since taking office in 2005, and the second since the country joined the EU on January 1. A teachers’ strike has left most schools in Bulgaria shut for more than a month. (AP)