ANKARA (AP) – The coast guard rescued 12 people from the Aegean Sea yesterday after a boat carrying illegal migrants sank, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported. Five people were missing and feared dead. The boat, carrying mostly Palestinians and Iraqis, sank off the Turkish coast near the resort town of Kusadasi, which is close to the Greek island of Samos. Three Iraqis and two Palestinians were missing. The migrants’ alleged smuggler – a Turkish national – was among the survivors and was arrested, Anatolia said.

ISTANBUL (AP) – A homemade video clip set to a popular folk song that allegedly praises the suspected killer of an ethnic Armenian journalist has received hundreds of thousands of hits on the popular video-sharing website YouTube. A radio DJ says the month-old song quickly rose to become one of the most requested songs on his show after word of the clip spread. But a human rights group has asked prosecutors to take action against the singer and the songwriter for allegedly inciting ethnic hatred and violence. Prosecutors have launched a probe into the video that shows Hrant Dink’s dead body, followed by a heroic pose of his suspected teenage killer, who will stand trial next week.

A small street in a residential district of the Croatian capital collapsed into an underground building site, turning dozens of citizens into homeless refugees, Zagreb police said yesterday. The cave-in happened after construction workers digging a 27-meter-deep hole beneath the street to lay foundations for an office block disturbed a strong underground stream, the Jutarnji List daily reported. Some houses collapsed into the crater, others were left teetering on the edge. Residents of some 20 houses and flats were evacuated to a hotel on Sunday, and police emptied part of a nearby office block and a bank yesterday, Hina said. (AP)

Romania’s main opposition party said it would register a no-confidence motion against the government yesterday, to prepare for a vote by parliament next week. The motion from the leftist Social Democratic Party called “1,000 days of chaos: the end of a right-wing government,” will be read out in parliament on Thursday with a vote on October 3, said party spokesman Cristian Diaconescu. It is the third no-confidence motion filed by the party since the minority center-right government came to power in 2004. (AP)

Schools and nurseries across Bulgaria canceled classes and sent their pupils home yesterday as tens of thousands of teachers went on strike seeking to double their pay, unions said. The biggest union, KNSB, said that around 61 percent of the country’s 77,000 schoolteachers and 19,000 nursery teachers took part in the first day of the nationwide strike, with many more expected to join in today. (AFP)