New York  - Serbian President Boris Tadic on Monday urged the United Nations to remain in Kosovo and not cut its troops and budget, but the UN said it has drastically reconfigured its presence a year after Kosovo seceded from Belgrade.

Tadic appeared before the UN Security Council in New York to request that the UN mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) continue to function fully and protect the Serb ethnic population in the territory.

Belgrade rejected Pristina's unilateral declaration of independence in February 2008, still claiming it as a Serb province.

Belgrade - Civilians in Serbia are still in danger from thousands of unexploded cluster bombs almost a decade after NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, local media reported Saturday.

A study by Norwegian People's Aid said that some 2,500 unexploded pieces of cluster ordnance were scattered across 15 municipalities, mainly in southern Serbia near the border with Kosovo, and the second largest city of Nis.

Belgrade - Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader visited Belgrade Friday in a bid to thaw relations which Serbia froze over Zagreb's recognition of Kosovo.

Sanader and Serbian Premier Mirko Cvetkovic acknowledged the problems burdening bilateral ties since the conflict last decade and even before, but said they were willing to work for better relations.

"We expect some issues to be resolved quickly and that some we will begin resolving in the future," Sanader told reporters after meeting Cvetkovic.

Belgrade - When NATO bombed Serbia in 1999, it wanted to end bloodshed in Kosovo. Cracking Slobodan Milosevic's autocratic regime in the process and paving the way for his fall 18 months later was an added bonus.

But though the pro-Western reformist Zoran Djindjic replaced Milosevic in Belgrade, the list of Serbian achievement on the 10th anniversary of the NATO attack remains disappointing.

Brussels - After NATO bombed the then-Yugoslavia for 78 days in 1999 to force Serbian forces to pull out of Kosovo, the commanding US General Wesley Clark was asked how many targets were destroyed.

"Enough," Clark said. Now, 10 years since it launched its aerial campaign against the Serbian military, NATO still gives no figures about the number of targets it destroyed.

There is also no NATO figure on the number of civilian casualties of the bombing, as only the political goal mattered: to stop the ethnic cleansing carried out by Slobodan Milosevic's regime against the majority ethnic Albanian population in Kosovo.

The Hague - Bosnian Serb leader Momcilo Krajisnik will hear on Tuesday afternoon if his appeal against a 27-year jail sentence for war crimes has been successful at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Krajisnik was found guilty in 2006 of various war crimes during the 1992-95 conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Among others, he was found responsible for the deaths of approximately 3,000 Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats through murder or extermination.

The court also found Krajisnik responsible of participating in the forcible removal of more than 100,000 non-Serbs from Bosnia and Herzegovina.