EmergencyNet NEWS Service-Friday, April 23, 1999-10:08CDT

CRISIS NEWS BRIEFS

SERBIA (EmergencyNet News) - NATO reduced a Serbian state television building to rubble on Friday in a strike which Yugoslav officials were quoted as saying killed nine people. The television was back on the air in just six hours.

UNITED KINGDOM (EmergencyNet News) - NATO allies, emitting mixed signals over the latest peace feelers from Belgrade, said Friday they needed more details before deciding if this was just another bargaining ploy by Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic. On the eve of the alliance's 50th anniversary celebrations, Milosevic sought to seize the diplomatic initiative by agreeing, according to Russian envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin, to accept a United Nations-led presence in Kosovo.

WASHINGTON (EmergencyNet News) - Leaders of 19 NATO nations open a summit on Friday that was to have been a celebration of the alliance's 50th anniversary but has become a strategy session on the course of the air war against Yugoslavia. The event, bringing together officials of NATO and 23 European partner countries, was planned as a festive reminder of the alliance's success in warding off Soviet aggression during the Cold War and to mark the admission of three former Warsaw Pact countries, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

From the ERRI Watch Center

SERBIA (EmergencyNet News) - State-run television said NATO struck the headquarters of Serbia's state television on Friday, knocking the country's main station off the air. The attack came hours after a Russian envoy said Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic had accepted the idea of a U.N.-controlled "international presence" in Kosovo.

POTUS and British Prime Minister Tony Blair later said the proposal fell short of NATO's demands for an armed force in the southern Serbian province.

Radio Television Serbia, the major source of news and entertainment for most Yugoslavs, had been broadcasting a taped interview with Milosevic by Houston's KHOU-TV when its downtown Belgrade headquarters were hit by a missile. The attack knocked down the network's transmission tower and collapsed its top two floors. Officials said the missile also destroyed the satellite link with Eurovision, used by foreign TV crews to transmit material abroad.

Yugoslav media also reported NATO jets pounded the area around the southern town of Vranje with 40 missiles in two hours, and blasted the center of Uzice, 75 miles southeast of Belgrade, damaging the post office and other buildings.

NATO jets also reportedly destroyed a bridge over the Rasina river near Krusevac, 95 miles south of Belgrade.

Pentagon officials gave one of their most-detailed briefings yet on the damage done by the airstrikes Thursday, saying more than 9,000 air missions over Yugoslavia have heavily damaged roads, bridges and resupply depots, as well as important communications systems and significant percentages of Serb weaponry.

Rear Admiral Thomas Wilson, director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Milosevic's army had been made more vulnerable to a NATO ground campaign, should the alliance decide to undertake such a step.

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