TIRANA (AP) - More than 300 tons of pesticides and other toxic chemicals considered a public health risk have been removed from a communist-era chemical plant that has been closed for 15 years, authorities said yesterday. There is no indication that any chemicals from the vacant plant in Bishti i Palles, 40 kilometers (25 miles) west of Tirana, have run off into the Adriatic Sea, but some residents in the area have reported health problems, and pesticides have entered the local water supply. The chemicals have also affected agriculture in an area where 70 families live.

Washington (AFP) - The USA renewed late Tuesday its call for Libya to free Bulgarian nurses convicted of injecting children with the HIV/AIDS virus, after the prosecutor called for their execution. “Our view on this remains the same. We wish to see these individuals allowed to return home to their families and to their country,” Tom Casey, a spokesman for the State Department, said. On Tuesday the prosecutor in the retrial called for the defendants to be executed and adjourned the trial until September 5.

Montenegro yesterday formally applied for NATO’s Partnership for Peace program and introduced a professional army by revoking obligatory military service, officials said. “Montenegro is determined to share the values of the Partnership for Peace (program) and other Euro-Atlantic institutions,” Foreign Minister Miodrag Vlahovic said in a letter to NATO chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. President Filip Vujanovic also announced his decision to revoke obligatory military service and introduce a professional army of some 2,400 soldiers. (AFP)

The war crimes court for the former Yugoslavia fined a Croatian journalist yesterday for publishing the name and part of the testimony of a protected witness. Josip Jovic, editor in chief of the daily Slobodna Dalmacija, was fined 20,000 euros (25,660 dollars) for revealing the identity of the witness, Croatian President Stipe Mesic. He was not in The Hague, where the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) sits, to hear the judgment. He was prosecuted for revealing that Mesic had testified at the 1997 trial of General Tihomir Blaskic, a Bosnian Croat. He ignored court warnings not to publish extracts of his oral and written evidence. (AFP)

Prosecutors at the UN tribunal in The Hague are seeking a life sentence for Bosnian-Serb politician Momcilo Krajisnik, accused of genocide in the 1992-95 Bosnian war, the tribunal said yesterday. “Each count of the indictment individually, if found to be true, merits the highest possible sentence,” a tribunal spokesman cited prosecutor Alan Tieger as saying on Tuesday. “Mr Krajisnik should be sentenced to prison for life.” Krajisnik, a former right-hand man to Bosnian-Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic, went on trial in February 2004 charged with genocide, complicity in genocide, crimes against humanity and violating the laws or customs of war. (Reuters)