The Hague - Banks and insurers that receive government support should not pay bonuses to their employees, Dutch Finance Minister Wouter Bos said on Monday.

In a letter sent to the Dutch parliament, Bos wrote that he supports more stringent rules concerning bonus payments for all companies that receive government support.

Among others, banks should no longer pay bonuses that are higher than than those agreed in collective employment contracts previously negotiated by the unions and the employees.

The Hague - The appeal chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on Tuesday cut the jail sentence for convicted Bosnian Serb war criminal Momcilo Krajisnik.

Krajisnik was convicted in 2006 of various charges of persecution, extermination, murder, deportation and the forced transfer of non- Serb civilians from Bosnia during the
1992-95 conflict, and sentenced to 27 years in jail.

That was cut to 20 years on Tuesday by the ICTY appeals chamber.

The Hague  - Seven terrorist suspects, identified as Dutch citizens of Moroccan heritage, were arrested Thursday in the Netherlands on charges they planned bombing attacks around Amsterdam, Dutch radio reported.

The suspects included six men and a woman, aged between 19 and 64 years.

Police chief Bernard Welten said investigators received a phone tip-off Wednesday from an informant in Brussels about the attack plans. The goal was to kill as many people as possible, the report said.

Police searching for explosives went through businesses near Amsterdam's football stadium Thursday morning and closed down the stores, including a large furniture firm. It was not clear if explosives were found, the report said.

The Hague - A former Yugoslav army general, sentenced by the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for the 1991 shelling of Dubrovnik in Croatia, was released Friday because of poor health, ICTY said.

The now defunct Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) General Pavle Strugar, 75, had served just over two-thirds of the sentence ICTY handed to him on January 31, 2005.

Strugar was charged as the commanding officer in the JNA siege of Dubrovnik in the early days of the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia. His troops shelled Dubrovnik, a UNESCO-protected Adriatic port in late 1991, following Croatia's independence.

The Hague - Belgium has instituted proceedings against Senegal at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) demanding that the country extradites former president of Chad Hissene Habre to be tried in Belgium, the ICJ confirmed on Friday.

In its application filed to the Hague-based court on Thursday, Belgium maintains that Senegal, where the former Chad dictator has been living in exile since 1990, has taken no action on repeated requests to see the former Chadian President prosecuted in Senegal.

The Hague - The Netherlands is to develop Europe's next climate satellite, it was announced by the European Space Agency (ESA) at the close of the agency's tri-annual conference in The Hague on Wednesday.

Dutch Economics Minister Maria van der Hoeven had been lobbying for collective European financing of a new climate satellite.

The Dutch government has reserved 78 million euros (101 million dollars) to finance the 115- to 130-million-euro Tropospheric Ozone- Monitoring Instrument, or Tropomi.