SOFIA (AFP) – Bulgarians voted yesterday in municipal elections that attracted a record number of candidates given the scheduled influx of millions of euros in EU funding over the next few years. Polling stations opened at 6 a.m. (0400 GMT) across the Balkan country that joined the EU in January. By 10.30 a.m. (local time) some 15.7 percent of the 6.9 million eligible voters had already cast their ballots, the central electoral commission announced. They were choosing from a total of 60,000 candidates for 5,232 municipal council seats and 3,223 mayoral positions.

JERUSALEM (AFP) – Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has acknowledged for the first time that Israeli warplanes may have violated Turkey’s air space during a raid on Syria last month, an official said yesterday. Olmert apologized to his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan when the two men met in London on Tuesday, the official said. “If in fact Israeli planes penetrated Turkey’s air space it was never meant intentionally or in any event to damage or hurt Turkey’s sovereignty which we respect,” Olmert said, according to an Israeli official present at the meeting. During the meeting Olmert “expressed Israel’s apologies to the Turkish government and the Turkish people for any damage caused,” the official added.

Britain is about to announce it will keep tight restrictions on the number of Romanians and Bulgarians who can work in the country despite a review of the policy, The Times newspaper reported Saturday. The government capped the number of low-skilled workers it would admit from the two countries to 20,000 per year when they joined the EU in January. But despite pressure from some employers’ groups and the Romanian and Bulgarian governments, the review, whose results could be announced within days, will maintain the restrictions, the paper said, without citing sources. (AFP)

A Serbian Jewish organization protested Friday at the presentation of anti-Semitic publications at the Belgrade Book Fair, the Tanjug news agency reported. At issue were two books by Serbian author Ratibor Djurdjevic, which the local Federation of Jewish Communities urged organizers to immediately withdraw from stalls at the fair. (AFP)