Bulgarian election date set

Bulgaria's President Petar Stoyanov has announced that parliamentary elections will be held on June the Seventeenth.

It's the first time since the end of the communist era in 1990 that parliament has served out its full four-year term.

Opinion polls put the reformist prime minister Ivan Kostov's party United Democrat Forces in the lead on twenty-one per cent, with the former communists on fourteen per cent.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service