Armenian National Assembly Speaker Hovik Abrahamyan met Thursday with Georgian Ambassador Revaz Gachechiladze, who is completing his mission in the republic. The Armenian Speaker thanked Ambassador Gachechiladze for his contribution to the development of the Armenian-Georgian cooperation. The two discussed possibilities to strengthen interparliamentary ties and other issues of mutual …

ROME  – When police arrested two Romanians for the rape of an Italian teenager in Rome, Il Giornale, a paper owned by the family of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, reported: “The Romanian beasts have been caught.” Three weeks later, prosecutors admitted the “beasts” could not be guilty — DNA tests …

Bucharest. Romania could slip into recession this year, when the economy could show a contraction of 1.0 percent to growth of 1.5 percent, Finance Minister Gheorghe Pogea said on Thursday. Romania is currently in talks with the International Monetary Fund and the European Union over a possible financial bailout.

Officials from the UN’s High Commission for Refugees, UNHCR, and Romania on Thursday officially opened an emergency transit refugee centre in Timisoara, western Romania, to house refugees facing acute danger and in need of immediate evacuation. The centre, the first of its kind in the world, has been set up …

Bulgaria’s Ministries Council granted authorization Thursday to design and build a waste treatment facility in the “Sadinata” site, near the village of Yana, in Sofia’s “Kremikovtzi” district. The “Integrated System of Facilities for Treatment of Household Waste from Sofia’s Municipality” will be built on nearly 333,000 square meters of lands …

Bulgaria’s Parliament Speaker Georgi Pirinski is visiting Ankara Thursday amidst a growing scandal regarding some Bulgarian cities recognizing the 1915 Armenian Genocide carried out by the Ottoman Empire. Three Turkish cities have broken their twin cities agreements with Bulgarian ones and nine more are about to do so due to …

Bulgaria’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ivaylo Kalfin, has underlined the need for more energy security in the Baltic region and across Europe during a meeting late Wednesday with US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Matthew Bryza. Their meeting was attended by the US Department of …

Before the incoming census in both Kosovo and Albania, the Bulgarian Government has mobilized and is on a quest to find Bulgarians among the Gorans (Macedonian muslims) in Kosovo. For this purpose offices have been opened in both Kosovo and Albania where Bulgarian citizenship is offered to anyone who walks …

The European Parliament in Strasbourg, Thursday expressed its support for Macedonia’s EU candidacy and urged the EU to grant the country a date for the start of accession talks by the year end, local media report. In the progress report for the country that was adopted, MPs expressed regrets that …

The Serbian government plans to debate the controversial anti-discrimination bill on Friday, and says it will consider some of the changes that religious communities have requested. Branko Ruzic from the Socialist Party of Serbia told B92 he did not expect any problems at today’s cabinet meeting and believed the bill …