The number of Eastern Europeans applying to live and work in Britain has fallen sharply, in part due to the ailing UK economy, a weaker pound and new building work in Poland, the government said on Tuesday. Immigration Minister Phil Woolas said applications from eight Eastern European countries nearly halved …

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has said he will insist Estonia prosecutes the killers of an ethnic Russian whose death in a riot two years ago became a source of tension between the ex-Soviet neighbours. Relations between Russia and Estonia reached a recent low two years ago when the Estonian authorities …

The European Commission applauded Tuesday’s meeting between Croatian and Slovene prime ministers Ivo Sanader and Borut Pahor, saying it was a “positive step”, but stressed it could notcomment on the meeting’s outcome because it did not have the details available. Wishes for an agreement A source from the European Commission …

An Estonian court on Wednesday sentenced a former senior security official to more than 12 years in jail for spying and treason in a case that caused deep concern in NATO. It was the most serious case of espionage since the former Soviet state joined NATO in 2004. Herman Simm, …

Serbian security services are still on the hunt for The Hague defendant Ratko Mladic. They came across information that he vacationed in Montenegro and are looking into the details, the Vecernje novosti daily writes. – The renegade general spent 15 days at the Montenegrin coast, in Rezevici in 1997. He …

A Turkish Airlines plane with 134 passengers and crew aboard crashed in light fog while trying to land at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport on Wednesday, killing nine people and injuring dozens. Officials said some 84 people were taken to hospitals, including 25 who were severely hurt, when flight TK 1951 from …

Romania’s centre-left government approved new judicial codes on Wednesday, hoping to align its criminal and civil proceedings to European standards and end anti-corruption monitoring by Brussels. Earlier this month, the European Commission said Romania had taken “backward steps” in fighting corruption over the last year, urging it to amend the …

Protests against economic hardship are spreading in Bosnia and the war-scarred and divided country is finding it hard to cope. Bosnia’s Muslim-Croat parliament cancelled a session on Thursday rather than confront protesters complaining about its plans to pass a law cutting benefits to narrow a big budget gap. Earlier in …

A Greek court gave a prison guard a three-year suspended sentence for assisting a high-profile prisoner to escape by helicopter for the second time in three years, court officials said on Thursday. The Hollywood-style getaway of Vassilis Palaiokostas, 44, and his Albanian accomplice Alket Rijai, who had escaped from the …

The United Nations war crimes court in The Hague found five senior Serb officials guilty on Thursday of orchestrating the murder, torture and deportation of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, acquitting former Serbian President Milan Milutinovic. This is the first verdict on atrocities committed by Serb forces in the 1998-99 crackdown …