ISTANBUL - A bomb exploded in the restroom of an Istanbul train station, causing minimal damage, but no injuries, police said yesterday. The bomb was left in the restroom of Istanbul’s Haydarpasa station restaurant late Saturday. The explosion caused limited damage to the restroom, breaking tiles on the walls. Haydarpasa, in Istanbul’s Kadikoy district, is the city’s main station. There was no claim of responsibility for the blast. Radical leftist, Kurdish and Islamic groups have, however, carried out bombings in the past in Istanbul. Bomb squads evacuated the station and found a package they suspected may have contained a second bomb. The package was destroyed in a controlled explosion, but did not contain a bomb, a police officer said on customary condition of anonymity. Train services were halted while police evacuated other stations along the railway line to search for other bombs. No other explosives were found. (AP)

SOFIA - Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov called yesterday for experts to assess the safety of two nuclear reactors before they are shut down at the insistence of the European Union. Bulgaria has agreed to shut down the two oldest reactors at the Kozlodui plant by the end of this year and to negotiate a timetable for the closure of another two by 2004. The EU has rewarded this move by starting accession talks with Bulgaria in 2000. However, the prospect of shutting down units 3 and 4 has prompted calls for tougher bargaining with the EU. In the Bulgarians’ view, those reactors’ lifespans expire in 2010 and 2012 respectively, but the EU wants them shut down in 2006. (AP)

Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit has ruled out the offering of classes at schools and universities in the Kurdish language, denouncing such efforts as a move “aimed at dividing Turkey.” “We cannot accept it; it’s impossible,” Ecevit said in an interview late Friday with CNN-Turk. The prime minister lashed out at organizers of recent protests demanding that classes be taught in Kurdish, saying they were “maneuvers using young people, originating in certain European countries, aimed at dividing Turkey.” Education in Kurdish is banned under the Turkish constitution, but the country is under pressure to grant its Kurds cultural freedoms in line with prevailing EU standards, as Ankara hopes to join the bloc. (AFP)

Authorities at Sofia airport yesterday canceled 30 scheduled flights because of dense fog, the state BTA news agency reported. The only flights to take off were bound for Moscow and Prague, and the only scheduled flight landing came from Vienna,the report said. It did not identify the airlines involved. (AP)

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban handed out the first documents granting social benefits to ethnic Hungarians living outside the country under a controversial new law on Saturday, Croatian national television reported. Orban was in Croatia to open a Hungarian consulate in Osijek in the east of the country, some 200 kilometers (120 miles) east of Zagreb, and home to the majority of Croatia’s 25,000 ethnic Hungarians or Magyars.

The situation of ethnic Hungarians in Croatia “was not being watched too closely, partly because there is a smaller number of Magyars here, but also because relations between Croatia and Hungary were always better than elsewhere,” Orban said at the ceremony. (AFP)