ISTANBUL (AP) – Turkey’s military hit Kurdish rebel targets in northern Iraq with artillery and airstrikes in a two-day operation that killed at least 15 rebels, the military said Saturday. The Turkish military shelled areas in northern Iraq on Thursday after it detected a group of Kurdish rebels preparing to attack Turkish targets from their bases in Iraq, the military said in a statement. It said 15 rebels were killed in the shelling.

BRDO PRI KRANJU (AP) – Serbia has told the EU it soon will arrest war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic, as the EU insists, but expressed concern that the dispute over Kosovo is driving the country further apart from the bloc. In the first high-level EU-Serbia encounter since the recognition of Kosovo, Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic said EU nations’ recognition of Kosovo was dangerous, counterproductive and illegal and that it played into the hands of nationalists running in Serbia’s May 11 elections. Jeremic stressed Belgrade realized its role in bringing Balkan war crimes suspects to the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague was key to normalizing relations.

German police are not ruling out a xenophobic motive after an arson attack on a building mostly occupied by Turkish people. Five people were treated for the effects of smoke inhalation on Saturday following the fire which broke out in the town of Backnang near Stuttgart after a pram was set alight in the hall of the building in the western state of Baden-Wuerttemberg. Graffiti including two swastikas and the phrase “Now everyone die” had been sprayed on a wall. “A xenophobic background to the attack cannot be ruled out at this stage,” a police spokesman said yesterday. (Reuters)

The international high representative in Bosnia, Miroslav Lajcak, warned Saturday of political stagnation or worse in Bosnia if it fails to pass key police reforms next week. “It would mean political stagnation at best,” Lajcak told journalists on the sidelines of an informal meeting of EU foreign ministers in Slovenia. He recalled that the police reform laws were the last substantial hurdle set by the EU for working toward eventual membership of the bloc. (AFP)

Portuguese President Anibal Cavaco Silva on Saturday said Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence was “abnormal” and called on his country’s government to consider any recognition carefully. “The unilateral declaration of independence is something very abnormal, there are no provisions for it in international law,” he told Antena 1 radio station. (AFP)