Emilia Maslarova, Bulgaria’s Minister of Labor and Social Policy, has suggested that unemployment in the country will rise sharply over the next few months. Maslarova expects many more people to be looking for work in 2009, Darik Radio reported Saturday.
Maslarova stated that the government’s new work program will aim to stimulate unemployed Bulgarians to fill [...]

Plovdiv. New coalition is forming between Democrats for Strong Bulgaria /DSB/ and Union of Democratic Forces /UDF/ after long circle of negotiations. This is what MP and DSB member Ivan Ivanov said at press conference FOCUS News Agency reporter informs.
Negotiations are almost finished, Ivanov added. The new coalition will be a fact until 25 days, [...]

Bulgaria is already technically prepared to re-boot unit 4 of the Kozloduy nuclear power plant according to Peter Dimitrov, Bulgaria’s Minister of Economy and Energy, the Bulgarian daily Standart newspaper reported late Friday.
Dimitrov stated; “We are technically prepared to switch Kozloduy’s unit 4 back on. We are ready to notify the European Commission, but we’ll [...]

Bulgaria’s Minister of Environment and Waters (MOEW), Dzhevdet Chakurov, has confirmed Bulgarian support for the Hungarian government’s decision to put a temporary ban on the production, distribution, import and sale of genetically modified corn in the country, Bulgarian information agencies reported Saturday.
Minister Chakurov stated Bulgaria’s support to the Hungarian Ambassador to Bulgaria, Judit Lang, during [...]

The battle for inclusion on the EU election lists of Romania’s main political parties has reached new heights as a 28 February registration deadline approaches. The prospect of salaries five times higher than those of current Romanian MEPs appears to be an irresistible incentive.
A “war of candidates” is raging between the major parties in the [...]

LAGOS, – Marian Parjol, Romanian ambassador to Nigeria, has pledged his country’s readiness to assist Nigeria in the area of military training, reported the News Agency of Nigeria.
Parjol made the pledge on Thursday in Abuja when he visited Nigeria’s Minister of Defense Shetimah Mustapha in his office.
The envoy said the government of his country is [...]

Romania’s Defence Ministry said a soldier serving in the country’s peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan was killed when his vehicle drove over an explosive device.
The ministry said the soldiers were on patrol on Thursday on the highway between Kabul and Qalat, a town near Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. The dead soldier was identified as 30-year-old Sgt. [...]

Former Serbian president Milan Milutinovic, acquited of war crimes relating to the 1998-99 Kosovo conflict, will return to Belgrade on Friday after more than four years spent in detention in The Hague.
On Thursday the United Nations war crimes court found five senior Serb officials guilty of orchestrating the murder, torture and deportation of ethnic [...]

Bernard Rabatel, the deputy head of justice of EULEX, the newly deployed EU rule of law mission in Kosovo, says his mission will move fast in going through Kosovo’s war crimes cases because ‘justice delayed is justice denied’.
The UN mission in Kosovo, UNMIK, has handed over to EULEX all the files on investigations on [...]

Italy will be donating 2 million euros to the newly formed Kosovo Security Force, a NATO sponsored army established as part of Kosovo’s status arrangements for its declaration of independence of last year.
Kosovo’s deputy Prime Minister Hajredin Kuci announced the grant after meeting with Italy’s ambassador to Kosovo, Michael Giffoni, on Thursday, along with Fehmi [...]

United States Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has reconfirmed Washington’s support for Kosovo during a visit of Kosovo’s senior leaders to the US..
Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in February 17, 2008 and has since been recognized by 55 states, including the majority of EU members.
“We support the new state of Kosovo which has attained a [...]

Serbia, and especially its northern province of Vojvodina, has the highest rate of suicides in Europe, with 19 out of 100,000 people opting to kill themselves compared to a European average of 13 per 100,000. In Vojvodina the rate is the highest – 28.5 per 100,000.
Between 1,300 and 1,400 people kill themselves in [...]

The Appellate Chamber of the Hague Tribunal is due to pronounce a second-instance verdict in the case of Momcilo Krajisnik, a former Republika Srpska senior official, in mid March.
In September 2006 Krajisnik, former President of the Republika Srpska Assembly, was sentenced to 27 years’ imprisonment for crimes against humanity, and persecution, extermination, murder and deportation [...]

The United Nations war crimes court in The Hague found five senior Serb officials guilty on Thursday of orchestrating the murder, torture and deportation of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, acquitting former Serbian President Milan Milutinovic.
This is the first verdict on atrocities committed by Serb forces in the 1998-99 crackdown on Albanian separatists guerrillas that [...]

Albania’s Foreign Minister Lulzim Basha appeared in front of the Supreme Court in Tirana on Friday on charges of abuse of power related to a mammoth highway project linking Albania’s Adriatic coast with Kosovo.
The charges relate to the time when Basha served as Albania’s Minister of Transportation and Public Works from 2005 to 2007.
Basha’s lawyer [...]

Albania’s Minister of Finance accused the World Bank on Friday of damaging their excellent relations with a probe by an independent investigative panel on a coastal management project that has embarrassed the conservative government of Prime Minister Sali Berisha.
“We regret to note that Bank’s internal issues are being transposed as problems of the Bank with [...]

International human rights group Front Line accused Kosovo’s public telecoms company of harrassing civil society group COHU!, and called for a prompt investigation into the matter.
The managing director of Kosovo’s Post and Telecommunications Kosovo, PTK, Shyqyri Haxhaj, accused the wife of COHU! director Avni Zogjani, a PTK employee, of releasing company information to the civil [...]

Macroeconomic indicators over the past three months confirm that the global financial and economic crisis is spreading to the economy of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the World Bank said, suggesting a list of immediate and medium-term countermeasures.
This World Bank statement, carried out by local media on Friday, came only a few days after workers and [...]

Macedonia has problems organizing transparent public procurements tenders and is ending up with many of them getting scrapped , shows the latest research by the local Centre for Civil Communications.
Having monitored public procurements and tenders in the last year , the Centre noted that only 60 percent of the state issued tenders are successful in [...]

Macedonia’s industrial output dropped a staggering 16.7 percent in January 2009 compared with the same month last year, the State Statistical Office said.
The industry has been marking a steady decline over the past few months due to the global financial downturn. The latest figures show that the situation in the manufacturing sector is the worst, [...]

Afghanistan’s defense minister warned Thursday that the Obama administration’s proposed changes in U.S. war strategy risk undermining Kabul’s civilian government because they appear to scale back U.S. goals in the country.Abdul Rahim Wardak said he was troubled by recent comments from senior U.S. officials that they were “lowering expectations” in Afghanistan in order to set [...]

Zmago Jelincic, the president of the Slovenian National Party, had a change of heart. This morning, before a meeting between Croatian and Slovenian prime ministers Ivo Sanader and Borut Pahor, he told the media he was against a referendum on Croatia’s membership in NATO because his party “does not want to cooperate with those on [...]

The number of Eastern Europeans applying to live and work in Britain has fallen sharply, in part due to the ailing UK economy, a weaker pound and new building work in Poland, the government said on Tuesday.
Immigration Minister Phil Woolas said applications from eight Eastern European countries nearly halved to their lowest level since they [...]

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has said he will insist Estonia prosecutes the killers of an ethnic Russian whose death in a riot two years ago became a source of tension between the ex-Soviet neighbours.
Relations between Russia and Estonia reached a recent low two years ago when the Estonian authorities removed a Soviet war monument from [...]

The European Commission applauded Tuesday’s meeting between Croatian and Slovene prime ministers Ivo Sanader and Borut Pahor, saying it was a “positive step”, but stressed it could notcomment on the meeting’s outcome because it did not have the details available.
Wishes for an agreement
A source from the European Commission confirmed that the EC wanted Croatia and [...]

An Estonian court on Wednesday sentenced a former senior security official to more than 12 years in jail for spying and treason in a case that caused deep concern in NATO.
It was the most serious case of espionage since the former Soviet state joined NATO in 2004.
Herman Simm, 61, was arrested last September. He had [...]

Serbian security services are still on the hunt for The Hague defendant Ratko Mladic. They came across information that he vacationed in Montenegro and are looking into the details, the Vecernje novosti daily writes.
- The renegade general spent 15 days at the Montenegrin coast, in Rezevici in 1997. He rented out a 2-storey house, while [...]

A Turkish Airlines plane with 134 passengers and crew aboard crashed in light fog while trying to land at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport on Wednesday, killing nine people and injuring dozens.
Officials said some 84 people were taken to hospitals, including 25 who were severely hurt, when flight TK 1951 from Istanbul crashed into a field short [...]

Romania’s centre-left government approved new judicial codes on Wednesday, hoping to align its criminal and civil proceedings to European standards and end anti-corruption monitoring by Brussels.
Earlier this month, the European Commission said Romania had taken “backward steps” in fighting corruption over the last year, urging it to amend the judicial codes and do more to [...]

Protests against economic hardship are spreading in Bosnia and the war-scarred and divided country is finding it hard to cope.
Bosnia’s Muslim-Croat parliament cancelled a session on Thursday rather than confront protesters complaining about its plans to pass a law cutting benefits to narrow a big budget gap.
Earlier in the week, mainly disabled protesters had burst [...]

A Greek court gave a prison guard a three-year suspended sentence for assisting a high-profile prisoner to escape by helicopter for the second time in three years, court officials said on Thursday.
The Hollywood-style getaway of Vassilis Palaiokostas, 44, and his Albanian accomplice Alket Rijai, who had escaped from the Athens jail once before in 2006 [...]

The United Nations war crimes court in The Hague found five senior Serb officials guilty on Thursday of orchestrating the murder, torture and deportation of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, acquitting former Serbian President Milan Milutinovic.
This is the first verdict on atrocities committed by Serb forces in the 1998-99 crackdown on Albanian separatists guerrillas that [...]

Despite the burning Skopje-Athens dispute over the name Macedonia and its historical and cultural heritage, Macedonia plans to ask Greek scientists for help in a project to excavate four major archeological sites, local media said on Wednesday.
The country will spend a record 20 million euros in the next three years on the archaeological [...]

Bulgarian MPs on Wednesday passed a near-unanimous decision to to expel independent MP Vladmir Kouzovc from parliament after his conviction for sexual relations with a 13-year old boy.
Kouzov was elected to Parliament in June 2005 on the ticket of the ultra-nationalist Ataka party. In 2006, once it turned out there was an investigation pending against [...]

The UK government has announced plans to reduce its staff in Kosovo’s EULEX mission as part of a cost-cutting drive resulting from the global financial crisis.
“We have received some signals that the UK government is planning to reduce its staff under the law and order mission in Kosovo”, said Christophe Lamfalussy, spokesman of the mission.
The [...]