BELGRADE (AP) – NATO gave Belgrade yesterday a list of locations hit with cluster bombs during the 1999 air war against Serbia, the Foreign Ministry said. The ministry said in a statement that Serbia had received the information at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. “The received information is of utmost importance for the project of clearing up of locations that were contaminated by unexploded cluster munition,” the ministry said. The statement added that existence of unexploded cluster bombs “jeopardizes the safety of the civilian population eight years after the bombing campaign.”

BRUSSELS (Reuters) – European Union countries have struck Turkey off the map of Europe as represented on new euro coins, prompting protests from some lawmakers about a bias against the potential future EU member. The European Commission proposed Turkey and other countries on the EU’s borders should feature on a new series of EU coins. But the final design approved by EU governments excluded Turkey, whose membership of the bloc is opposed by some European countries such as France. A European Commission spokeswoman confirmed the original design featuring Turkey had been changed by the Council. “The design which has been adopted is not exactly what we proposed... but this is design we have,” she said.

A previously unknown painting by the early 20th century Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani will be displayed in November in the Serbian capital, Belgrade, experts said yesterday. “Portrait of a Man,” dating from around 1918, is owned by an unnamed Serbian collector and is authentic, said Christian Parisot, president of the Modigliani Institut Archives Legales Paris-Rome. “It took us 17 years to verify the authenticity and I can now say for certain that it is Modigliani,” Parisot said. (Reuters)

Armenia said yesterday the EU would be making a “strange” decision if it admitted Turkey before Ankara had made progress in settling disputes with Yerevan. Turkey shut its borders with its tiny neighbor Armenia in 1993 in protest at Armenian forces’ capture of territory inside Azerbaijan, Ankara’s historic Muslim ally, during fighting over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. “I believe it would be very strange for the Europeans to accept to their family a country which sometimes employs principles running counter to the principles of the EU,” Armenian Prime Minister Serzh Sarksyan said during a visit to Russia. (Reuters)

The European Commission warned Bosnia yesterday that it was hurting its own interests by failing to agree on the key issue of police reforms. “Your country is inflicting on yourself very serious sanctions by delaying” the signing of an agreement on closer ties with the EU, Dimitris Kourkoulas, head of the EC mission to Bosnia, told journalists. (AFP)