Balkans

ATHENS (Reuters) – Greek police fired teargas at small groups of protesters who threw stones and firebombs in central Athens Monday in a second week of anti-government demonstrations since a policeman shot dead a teen-ager. Youths outside Athens’ main court and central police station clashed with riot police, while acts …

Dismayed by the parliamentary speaker’s decision to prolong Monday’s session, opposition lawmakers spent four hours citing breaches in the parliamentary code instead of debating laws. The session ended at 0200 in the morning on Tuesday, with little ground being covered in the debates needed for a set of important judiciary …

Corruption in Bosnia is of “humongous proportions” and the governments’ anti-corruption efforts are “disappointing,” the top international envoy to Sarajevo has said. Bosnia’s High Representative Miroslav Lajcak has said that all aspects of corruption – including bribery, fraud, nepotism, tax evasion and all others – are present in the country.

Moldova’s President Vladimir Voronin has been cited as saying by his country’s state-owned news agency, that he wants good relations with often tense neighbour, Romania. “We have absolutely nothing against the Romanian people and state. Romania is our neighbour, a member of the European Union. That is why, it would …

Nobel Peace Prize winner Martti Ahtisaari says Serbia must recognise past wrongs in its relationship with Kosovo before it is ready to join the European Union. The former Kosovo envoy says the Serbs “have to be able to live with their past.”

The ethnic Greek mayor of the Albanian southern town of Himara has come under harsh criticism after asking Greece not to ratify a key deal seen as a vital step in Albania’s EU bid. According to a memo leaked to the local media, the mayor, Vasil Bollano, who is also …

A leader of a Kosovo opposition party claims he has had success in securing two more recognitions of Kosovo’s independence – from Qatar and the Maldives. Behgjet Pacolli, the head of the Alliance for a New Kosova, said that during his stay in the United States, he was promised by …

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, …