PRISTINA (AFP) - The UN mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) said yesterday it will not prevent a former rebel commander whom Serbia accuses of war crimes from becoming the province’s next prime minister. “UNMIK’s point of view is very clear. The democratic process must go on in its course. We will not intervene in this process in Kosovo,” Neeraj Singh, the spokesman for the UN administration in the disputed province, told AFP.

ISTANBUL (AFP) - Turkey’s main pro-Kurdish party called on the government yesterday to make Kurdish an official language and scrap legal restrictions barring Kurdish representation in Parliament. The Democratic Society Party (DTP) also criticized Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for failing to follow up on promises for a democratic solution to the Kurdish conflict. “The political parties law, primarily the election threshold, should be revised so that everybody can use their right to political representation,” it said.

Serbian health authorities yesterday confirmed the country’s first cases of the H5N1 virus in at least two swans found dead in northern and western Serbia. “Based on results from tests we have carried out, it is H5N1,” the director of the Veterinary Institute of Serbia, Dejan Krnjaic, told AFP, adding that samples were sent to a laboratory in Britain for full confirmation. (AFP)

Israel must accept the “new political reality” of a Hamas-fronted Palestinian government, Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said in an interview published on Saturday in Spanish newspaper El Pais. Israel, Gul said, “must recognize Hamas as the new political reality in Palestine. Otherwise, why would it have allowed (the group) to participate in elections?” Speaking after a two-day visit to Madrid the Turkish FM added that Hamas must abandon violence and recognize Israel, which a Hamas delegation refused to do on a visit Friday to Moscow. (AFP)

A gunman opened fire on Sunday at a busy marketplace near Belgrade, wounding two people, police said. The suspect, armed with an automatic rifle, randomly shot at people and nearby vehicles at the crowded open-air market in Pancevo, 10 kilometers (six miles) east of the capital, police spokeswoman Tatjana Dakic said. (AP)

In a bid to show he has nothing to hide, a former Romanian premier opened his apartment to journalists on Saturday, which is built on land he allegedly bought for a fraction of it real price. Adrian Nastase, prime minister from 2000 to 2004, is charged with taking a bribe in a real estate case. Nastase invited TV journalists into his luxury 300-square-meter (3,330-square-foot) apartment in an upscale area of Bucharest. (AP)