Balkans

The Tahiri family from the western Macedonian town of Tetovo were shocked to find out they had mistakenly mourned and buried a Turkish man instead of their mother. Both the Turkish man and the 65-year old woman died in Germany and their remains were supposed to be transported by plane …

Serbs from north Kosovo blocked the roads at the border with Serbia on Thursday morning in protest at the European Union reopening two customs points that were burnt down just after Kosovo’s declaration of independence last February. The two border points, known as 1 and 31, were set on fire …

The two presidential candidates viewed as favorites in Macedonia’s March 22 election, both employed as professors at the Skopje law faculty, have not received pay checks for two months, sharing the fate of thousands of Macedonians who are still awaiting late salary payments. According to a report in Macedonian daily …

Serbia’s dinar currency, that has lost 25 percent of its value in the last three months, will soon become stable and the state will keep its floating rate to avoid big wage cuts, Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic said. “We expect the dinar to become stable, ” he said in an …

Two months into the mandate of the European Union police and justice mission, officials and legal professionals in Kosovo say they find the EULEX-operated courts stricter, more procedural, but also more professional and effective compared to the judicial authorities run by the United Nations mission . The United Nations mission …

Kosovo named a former senior police officer as the chief of its new Intelligence Service on Wednesday, after months of delays blamed on clientelism and political horse-trading with foreign intelligence agencies. The Intelligence Agency is one of the central security institutions of the new country, that declared independence from Serbia …

Croatia and Iceland have a chance of joining the European Union in 2011, while Albania, Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia may enter all together as a bloc sometime between 2015 and 2020, the Financial Times says in an editorial this week. With the global economy in crisis, the bloc’s leaders …

The European Commission wants Croatia and Slovenia to find a negotiated solution to their border dispute so that Croatia could join the European Union, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said in Brussels on Tuesday evening. “There is a Croatian-Slovene bilateral issue and we would like the two countries to …

A Kosovo parliamentary commission has recommended that the government implements an embargo on Serbian and Bosnian goods as a tit-for-tat response to Serbia and Bosnia blocking and taxing Kosovo’s exports. Serbia rejects the secession by Kosovo’s Albanian majority last February and has vowed never to accept it as an independent …

The case of a teenage girl who wants to wear her headscarf to school is creating waves in Macedonia, with educational authorities, local officials and teachers locked in a tug-of-war over religous freedom and the right to education. The girl, who attends a high school in the western Macedonian town …