ANKARA (AP) - A freight train lost control of its brakes and derailed as it headed into the main train station in Turkey’s capital yesterday, killing two train workers and injuring three others, railroad officials said. Television footage showed train cars lying on their sides following the crash in Ankara, which killed the train’s chief and another worker, railroad officials said. Three other workers were slightly injured in the accident, a statement said, and were taken to a local hospital.

SOFIA (AP) - Two teenage girls were sentenced to prison for strangling a schoolmate, a news agency reported yesterday. A district court in the southern city of Plovdiv sentenced Maria Drandarova, 14, to a nine-year term, and Antonia Mateva, also 14, to eight years in prison. Both had committed “the murder in an especially cruel manner and after careful plotting,” the court was quoted as saying by state news agency BTA. The two girls and their parents were also ordered to pay a total of 75,000 leva (38,000 euros, $50,000) in damages to the family of the victim, 14-year-old Margarita Gergenenova. The trial in Plovdiv was seen as the latest evidence of a gruesome spate of teen violence in Bulgaria.

Two moderate quakes, measuring 4.1 and 4.2 on the open-ended Richter scale, shook western Turkey yesterday, but there were no reports of casualties or damage. The epicenter was the town of Kirkagac in Manisa province, the Istanbul-based Kandilli seismological institute said. (AFP)

Croatia’s leading election-monitoring group said yesterday there were “serious indications” that votes cast by Croats living in neighboring Bosnia could have been rigged during the first round of the presidential vote Jan. 2. GONG, a non-governmental group, did not say whether the newly discovered suspected irregularities could have influenced the result. In the first round, President Stipe Mesic missed an outright re-election by about 1 percent of votes, and will face the conservative governing party minister, Jadranka Kosor, in a runoff on Sunday. (AP)

A Romanian couple named their son Yahoo in gratitude for meeting over the Internet, the press said yesterday. Daily Libertatea said Cornelia and Nonu Dragoman, both from Transylvania, met and decided they were meant for each other following a three-month relationship over the Net. “We named him Lucian Yahoo after my father and the Net, the main beacon of my life,” Cornelia Dragoman was quoted as saying. (Reuters)