Balkans

Talks between Greece and Macedonia at the UN over the ‘name row’ are practically blocked with no signs of progress, Macedonia’s President Branko Crvenkovski claims. “The stalemate in negotiations means that our integration into NATO and the European Union are also blocked,” Crvenkovski said in an interview with the local …

The European Commission is to send a new technical mission to Bulgaria in January to assess the progress made in addressing irregularities in the management of EU funding. This was announced by Michael Leigh, the Commission’s director general for enlargement, said during a visit to Sofia on Monday.

Croatian authorities withheld for one year information that may have led to an earlier arrest of a fugitive general, now standing trial before a United Nations war crimes court, a newspaper reports. In April 2004, the state’s attorney’s office, the police and secret services all had information that then-fugitive general, …

MADRID (Reuters) – Youths in the Spanish cities of Madrid and Barcelona attacked a police station and a bank on Wednesday night following protests over the shooting by Greek police of a teenager in Athens, Spanish police said on Thursday.

ATHENS (Reuters) – Greek high school students attacked police stations around Athens with stones and firebombs on Thursday, injuring one bystander, in a sixth day of rioting sparked by the shooting of a teenager, police said. “An elderly bystander was taken to hospital after he was hit by a rock,” …

New tactics are emerging in protests over the shooting of a teenager in Greece. In what students say is organised action, a group of about 100 young people surrounded the office of the Mayor of Athens. Elsewhere, demonstrators gathered outside the main prison in the capital and a college building.

Demonstrations against the response of the Greek police have spread well outside the country’s border. In Italy, police blocked off roads around the Greek embassy as protestors tried to gather. The Greek police have been violent and cowardly said demonstrators from the Italian communists and some anarchist parties.

A delegation led by Serbia’s Human and Minority Rights Minister, Svetozar Ciplic, has been presenting Belgrade’s rights’ records to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. Serbia’s national report reflects the joint work of several ministries and non-governmental organisations and highlighted the benchmarks of human and minority right issues in …

Local police deployed strong special police forces in Bosnia’s southern town of Capljina, to prevent clashes between supporters of rival wings of the local Roman Catholic Church. The incident took place on Sunday, as the regional Roman Catholic Bishop Ratko Peric came to Capljina to consecrate the construction of a …

Bosnian Serb leaders have shrugged off the latest criticism from the international community’s top envoy to Bosnia and Herzegovina as “incorrect and generic.” “People in the Office of the High Representative, OHR, think that their opinions are imperative and that they should remain in Bosnia and Herzegovina but we will …