Balkans

Croats will elect their first 12 MEPs on April 14, President Ivo Josipovic announced on Friday.Josipovic has scheduled European parliamentary elections in Croatia under a law which says Croatia should elect European MPs before it joins the European Union on July 1. The country has the right to 12 MPs …

Serbia has massively increased the permitted level of aflatoxins in milk, posing a potential threat to the country’s dairy exports.Serbia has raises the maximum permitted concentration of aflatoxins in milk to 0.5 micrograms per kilo from 0.05 micrograms – a tenfold increase. Goran Knezevic, the Agriculture Minister, said the government …

Opposition MPs interrupted Prime Minister Hashim Thaci on Thursday – angered by his decision to permit local authorities in the Serb-run north to form an ‘association’.Liburn Aliu and Visar Ymeri, MPs from the opposition nationalist Self-Determination Movement, went up to podium of parliament holding a banner as Prime Minister Thaci …

General election all but inevitable, if as seems likely the ethnic Turkish party refuses to form a government.Bulgarians will go to the polls on May 12, President Rosen Plevneliev announced on Thursday in a special address to parliament. The date is predicated on the likely refusal of the ethnic Turkish-dominated …

Turkey will deliver a verbal note to the United Nations in reply to a recent Greek motion that argued that the areas Turkey had granted exploration permits in the Mediterranean were deemed to fall within the Greek continental shelf.

Macedonian political parties on Friday reached a deal ending months of political deadlock and an opposition boycott of Parliament that had threatened the country’s efforts to join the European Union and NATO. In a deal brokered by EU officials, conservative Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski

Mr. Dimitrios Kourkoulas, First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Greece will visit Baku on 6-8 March, 2013. He will meet with members of the Government of Azerbaijan, according to the Greek Embassy in Azerbaijan. He will also lead a business delegation which will participate in the Greek-Azerbaijani business forum.

The Hague Tribunal acquitted Yugoslav Army general Momcilo Perisic on appeal, quashing his 27-year prison sentence for war crimes during the 1990s conflict.The appeals chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia ruled on Thursday that Perisic was not responsible for the wartime crimes committed by the Bosnian …

PM says media reports of supplying weapons to Syrian rebels have compromised safety of troops.Croatia said on Thursday that it was about to withdraw its soldiers stationed on the Golan Heights as part of a UN force, after a US newspaper reported said that Syrian rebels battling the regime of …

Annual celebrations of Bosnian independence day have again proved ethnically divisive and will only be marked in the Bosniak-Croat Federation entity, not by the country’s Serbs.On Friday, March 1, Bosnia and Herzegovina will mark 21 years from the 1992 referendum in which mainly Bosniak and Croat citizens declared their wish …