ANKARA (AP) - President Ahmet Necdet Sezer flew to Russia yesterday for a three-day official visit, which Turkey hopes will help boost bilateral trade, officials said. Turkey and Russia are expected to discuss ways to improve trade, including a Turkish proposal to build an overland pipeline that could carry Russian and Central Asian oil from a Black Sea port to Turkey’s Mediterranean oil terminal of Ceyhan. Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul flew to Moscow on Tuesday to lay the groundwork for Sezer’s visit. Turkey says that the narrow Bosporus strait, which runs through heavily populated Istanbul, is overcrowded with tankers, many carrying crude from the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, and poses a major environmental threat.

BUCHAREST (AP) - Romania’s centrist coalition yesterday easily defeated a no-confidence motion filed by the left-wing opposition. Parliament voted 235-145 to support Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu’s Cabinet, with only the Social Democratic Party voting against the government. The Social Democrats said the government had failed after 500 days in office to resolve problems in the health, pensions and education systems and called for it to be replaced with a caretaker government until new elections could take place.

Police said yesterday they had destroyed some 7,300 marijuana plants in northern Albania. The plants were found Tuesday in an abandoned area in the village of Bene, some 110 kilometers (70 miles) north of the capital, Tirana. Police said they were continuing their investigation. Authorities have destroyed more than 14,500 marijuana plants in the last two weeks in the same area. (AP)

A party in Serbia’s coalition government launched a legal bid yesterday to ban an ultra-nationalist opposition political group for using hate speech and inciting ethnic hatred. Officials of the neo-liberal G17 Plus Party, a junior partner in Serbia’s government, filed the suit to the country’s prosecuting attorney along with a petition signed by more than 70,000 citizens in recent weeks. The move came after a deputy of the Serbian Radical Party (SRS) insulted a G17 Plus minister during a session of Parliament earlier this month. (AFP)

Three children sustained injuries when an explosive device they found in a field near their home in eastern Turkey exploded, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported yesterday. The children were grazing their livestock in a restricted military zone close to their village near the town of Dogubayazit on Tuesday when they found the device and began playing with it. One of the children was reported to be in serious condition. (AP)

Kurdish guerillas staged a hit-and-run attack in Turkey early yesterday, killing a Turkish soldier before escaping into Iraq, local officials said. Turkish troops were hunting for the guerrillas but it was not clear whether they also crossed into Iraq in pursuit, local government officials said. (AP)