WASHINGTON (AP) - The United States promised its support for Turkey’s efforts to improve its democratic system to bring about its membership in the European Union, the State Department said. “Turkey has made impressive strides in recent years on democratization and human rights issues, as reflected by the European Union decision to grant Turkey a date to open European Union accession talks,” the department said. The comments came in a written response to a question about Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s admission that Turkey’s strong-armed tactics against the restive Kurdish population in southeastern Turkey had been a mistake. He promised his government would spend more on education, housing and healthcare for Kurds.

SOFIA (AFP) - The new Bulgarian Parliament yesterday adopted a new criminal code aimed at meeting European Union demands for a more efficient justice system as a condition for Bulgaria’s membership of the union in 2007. The country’s legal system has often been criticized as too slow, inefficient and incapable of holding notorious criminals who are left at liberty to settle scores with a spectacular degree of violence. Suspects even in serious cases were released within 24 hours pending investigation by a national investigator’s office, said Bulgarian Justice Minister Georgy Petkanov. Parliament adopted the changes, including measures to hasten investigations and shorten the time taken for cases to go to trial, by 185 votes to 18. The code will take effect by the end of October.

A Turkish dry cargo vessel caught fire in the Black Sea off the coast of Turkey yesterday and 53 people on board were abandoning ship, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported last night. The Turkish emergency coordination center in Ankara said two coastguard vessels and a helicopter were heading to the scene, where the crew were boarding lifeboats. Anatolia quoted Huseyin Yavuzdemir, the governor of the eastern Black Sea province Trabzon, as saying the ship Ufuk-1 was some 60 miles (100 km) off the Turkish coast on the way from Trabzon to the Russian port of Sochi. It was not clear how the blaze started or how large it was. (Reuters)

A Bosnian Serb accused of raping and torturing dozens of women during the 1992-95 Bosnian war has been arrested in Russia, the Bosnian Serb news agency SRNA said yesterday. A spokesman for the Bosnian Serb Interior Ministry in Banja Luka said he had no immediate comment. Dragan Zelenovic, 44, was taken into custody by Russian police on Wednesday, SNRA said, without specifying where his arrest was said to have taken place. Zelenovic, an officer of the military police in the town of Foca during the war, is wanted by the UN war crimes tribunal. (Reuters)

Germany’s conservatives, leading in voter surveys ahead of a September election, do not expect their opposition to Turkey’s EU membership to harm German-US relations, a senior opposition leader said yesterday. Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) strongly oppose European Union membership for Turkey. Washington, however, has long lobbied its EU allies to grant the predominantly Muslim state and NATO member full membership of the bloc. “This will not be a point of conflict,” Wolfgang Schaeuble, Merkel’s foreign policy adviser, told reporters. Schaeuble said he discussed this issue with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Washington last month and that it was clear Berlin had its own views. (Reuters)