ANKARA (AFP) – An international commission designed to protect the bluefin tuna has effectively increased the fishing quota for 2008, environmental group Greenpeace said yesterday, saying the move was unsustainable. Greenpeace said the annual meeting of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), held in Turkey, had approved a nearly 1,000-ton increase in the 2008 catch above the official quota. The group said the move was another blow to a fish that is being hunted to extinction. The increases will add to an “already unsustainable quota that will again in 2008 be around 29,500 tons,” Sebastian Losada, Greenpeace Spain’s Oceans Campaigner, said. “Countries are approving a bigger quota for a species that is on the verge of collapse instead of acting immediately to save it.” Greenpeace had a delegation at the 10-day ICCAT conference in the Turkish Mediterranean resort of Antalya that ended yesterday.

BELGRADE (AP) – Serbian police have arrested a person in connection with a clash between rival Muslim groups that left four people injured, including two who were shot, authorities said yesterday. The suspect was detained Saturday on suspicion of throwing a stone at a policemen during the incident, according to an investigative judge in Novi Pazar, the administrative center of the predominantly Muslim region of Sandzak in southwestern Serbia. The clash Friday was between Muslims who support a local cleric and those who back one appointed by the Muslim leadership in Belgrade.

Thousands of Croatians gathered yesterday in the eastern town of Vukovar to commemorate the 16th anniversary of its fall to Serb forces at the beginning of the 1991-95 war after a three-month siege, national television reported. The country’s leaders and some 13,000 mourners, including those from other parts of Croatia, walked in a long column to the city’s cemetery where they laid flowers and lit candles. The anniversary was marked by bitterness over the leniency of the first verdict for atrocities in Vukovar against three Yugoslav army officers handed out by the Hague-based UN war crimes court in September. “Unfortunately we’ve lived to see the shameful verdict of the Hague court which hurt us after all that we had gone through, but only for a moment because we know the truth,” said Vesna Bosanac, director of Vukovar hospital at the time. (AFP)