Sofia - Bulgarian farmers blocked border crossings and roads in the north and south of the country Wednesday, demanding higher prices for agricultural products, local media reported.

At Russe, the only bridge across the Danube along Bulgaria's border with Romania, was also blocked. The barricades were being briefly lifted once in every two hours to allow some of the waiting trucks passage to Romania.

To the east, at Vidin, police removed a human chain formed by protestors to end the blockade of a ferry across Danube and a roadblock was lifted on a road leading to Romania at Oryachovo, between Russe and Vidin.

Sofia - Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov would travel to

Athens - Greek farmers protesting low prices for their products continued to block the main border crossing with Bulgaria on Friday.

Thousands of farmers lifted their road blocks in the northern prefectures of Macedonia and Thrace after accepting an emergency aid package by the government.

In the past week and a half, thousands of farmers used their tractors to create more than 70 roadblocks along all the main highways across Greece.

Sofia- Saying the country is under pressure from the global financial troubles and wary of another gas crisis, Bulgaria's parliament ordered Prime Minister Sergey Stanishev's cabinet on Friday to explore the possibilities for the restart of dormant nuclear reactors.

The assembly voted 140-48 for the motion to prod the government into trying to negotiate a new lease of life for two of the four Soviet-era reactors at the Kozloduy power plant.

The 2006 closure of two 440-megawatt reactors, considered unsafe by the European Union, was one of the conditions Bulgaria had to meet to join the bloc in 2007.

Sofia - Bulgarian Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev said on Friday that his country would restart a Soviet-era nuclear power reactor at Kozloduy, in the face of severe ongoing gas shortages due to the energy dispute between Ukraine and Russia.

Bulgarian news agency Focus reported that Stanishev said his government had decided to begin the 45-day technical preparation process to restart the reactor, because the country had still received no gas from its Russian supplier.

Earlier on Friday, Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov called for a new European Union energy policy in the wake of the ongoing dispute.

Sofia - Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov has called for a new EU energy policy in the wake of the ongoing gas dispute between Russia and Ukraine.

In a speech on national security Friday in Sofia, Parvanonv said that it was "important to build a dependable partnership" between the states of the Caspian littoral.

Parvanov added that the proposed Nabucco pipeline project, which would see gas distributed from the Caucasus without passing through Russian or Ukrainian territory, was not just about a physical project, but also about politics.