ANKARA (AFP) - Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said Saturday he had conveyed Turkey’s concerns over the future of the ethnically volatile Iraqi city of Kirkuk to US Secretary of State Colin Powell, the Anatolia news agency reported. “Everybody should refrain from any kind of provocative action. I told (Powell) that Kirkuk is very important in this process and that everybody should be very cautious on that,” Gul told Turkish reporters in New York after talks with Powell on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. “The Americans will one day go, but we will continue to live in this region. That’s why an Iraq which has preserved its territorial and political unity and which has begun to use its resources in peace for the benefit of its people is very much in our interest,” the minister added.

ANKARA (AFP) - Fifteen people were killed and 10 others injured in eastern Turkey late on Saturday when a minibus that was carrying them to a wedding party crashed head-on with a truck, local officials told the Anatolia news agency. The accident near the town of Gurpinar in the province of Van occurred when the driver of the packed minibus lost control, Governor Niyazi Tanilir said.

Experts from Kosovo and Serbia plan to meet early next week in Austria to discuss municipal government reform in the UN-run province, an official said yesterday. The one-day meeting, to be held tomorrow in Vienna, was initiated by diplomats from United States, Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Russia and will be hosted by the United States, said Mechthild Henneke, a spokeswoman for the UN mission in Kosovo. Officials from the UN mission in the province of Kosovo’s government, local Serb leaders and representatives of Serbia-Montenegro have been invited to attend, Henneke said. “They will be speaking on decentralization in general,” she said. (AP)

President Mohammad Khatami has postponed a visit to Turkey after Iran’s Parliament effectively placed a hold on two major contracts with Turkish companies, the official news agency reported yesterday. Khatami was due to visit Turkey next week, but yesterday the Parliament — dominated by conservatives — gave preliminary approval to a bill that requires the government to seek its permission for contracts with a Turkish mobile phone network, Turkcell, and a Turkish-Austrian aviation consortium, TAV. (AP)

Romania’s President Ion Iliescu has signed a law allowing him to run in November 28 parliamentary polls on the list of the ruling Social Democrat Party (PSD), his office said on Saturday. (Reuters)