BELGRADE (AFP) - The Serbian Parliament yesterday passed a key set of reform bills that the International Monetary Fund had made a condition for securing financial aid for the country’s economic transition. The pension reforms were one of two IMF requirements for Serbia to receive its sixth and final installment of a three-year 994-million-dollar (826-million-euro) credit arrangement. The other condition was for the reconstruction of state-owned oil company NIS. The bills were passed just days before an IMF delegation arrives in Belgrade to negotiate the 250-million-dollar final installment.

TIRANA (AP) - Albania’s Foreign Minister Besnik Mustafaj said yesterday that conditional independence would be the best choice for the Serbian province of Kosovo. Mustafaj said achieving full independence would take time and the process leading up to it would need to be monitored by the international community. Mustafaj appealed to the Serb minority in Kosovo to be part of the talks. “The surest way to guarantee their rights today and in the future would be their participation at these negotiations,” he said.

Three militants from the rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) were killed yesterday in clashes with security forces in Turkey’s southeast, officials said. Two were shot dead in the province of Sirnak, which borders Iraq, and the third was killed in a shootout in Bitlis, to the north. (AFP)

Serbian President Boris Tadic met yesterday with Pope Benedict XVI and said he hoped the pontiff could visit the country “very soon,” but said certain preconditions had to be negotiated first with the Serbian Orthodox Church. Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said Tadic had invited the pope to visit, and that the pope had thanked him for the invitation and “expressed hope that such a visit could take place in the future.” A pope has never visited Serbia. (AP)

US special envoy Karen Hughes met with the head of the Orthodox Church, Patriarch Vartholomaios I, in Istanbul yesterday at the end of a three-country regional tour, sources from her delegation said. No statement was issued after the meeting, as Hughes, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, left for Washington at the end of a tour that also took her to Egypt and Saudi Arabia. While in Istanbul, Hughes also met with representatives of the Muslim, Orthodox, Armenian, Jewish and Syriac communities. (AFP)