ANKARA (AP) - Two lawmakers resigned from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party yesterday, bringing to nine the number of legislators who have left since February 15. Erdogan’s party still holds 357 seats, an overwhelming majority in the 550-seat Parliament. But the resignations show increased frustration with the party, which has been in power for two-and-a-half years. Serpil Yilmaz, a legislator from the Aegean coastal city of Izmir, and Ibrahim Ozdogan, a legislator from Erzurum in eastern Turkey, said they were quitting Erdogan’s Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party.

BELGRADE (AP) - Serbia’s justice minister said half a dozen more war crimes suspects would soon surrender to the UN tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, a newspaper reported yesterday. Those expected to surrender include the former Serb police commander in Kosovo, Gen. Sreten Lukic, and former Croat-Serb leader Goran Hadzic, who went into hiding in July, Justice Minister Zoran Stojkovic was quoted as saying by the Blic newspaper. “I expect they will surrender in the coming days,” Stojkovic reportedly said.

A Turkish court yesterday released an Austrian journalist after she spent more than one month in jail pending trial on charges of membership in a militant Turkish leftist group, a news agency reported. The court did not drop charges against Sandra Bakutz, but adjourned the trial to June 1, the Anatolia news agency said. Bakutz, of radio Orange 94.0 and the German newspaper Junge Welt, is accused of supporting members of the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front, or DHKP-C. (AP)

The European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee yesterday gave its backing to Bulgaria and Romania joining the EU, scheduled for January 2007. The full 732-member Parliament is to hold a vote on the subject in a plenary session on April 13, only days ahead of the April 25 signature of a treaty on Bulgaria and Romania’s accession. (AFP)

A Bosnian teacher, irritated by a zealous pupil who practiced math at home even though he had not been given homework, punished him by taping his mouth, a school headmaster said yesterday. Boban Jakovljevic, star pupil at the Banja Luka elementary school, had his mouth taped with adhesive tape for almost an hour after telling his teacher that he had solved 52 math problems at home, head teacher Jovanka Zavisa told AFP. (AFP)