News archive of August 2016

A stronger migratory pressure can now be felt on the EU's external borders, the head of the common border protection agency has said.

The march of "more migrants" en route to Bulgaria from Greece or Turkey has been singled out as an issue, but the numbers are small compared to those in the Western Balkan countries last summer, he has added.

The Good Music in Town series, organized by IEG Live, will continue with the chilling story of Baroque genius Antonio Vivaldi, "Vivaldianno City of Mirrors," staged on Nov. 5 at Istanbul's Ülker Sports Arena and the musical theater show "Belcanto the Luciano Pavarotti Heritage" on Dec. 17 and 18 at the city's Volkswagen Arena. 

To mark the International Day of the Disappeared on Tuesday, Serbian officials and missing persons associations told a press conference in Belgrade that finding the 10,653 people who disappeared during the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s remains a critical priority.

NEW YORK - A third round of an informal vote to select the new UN secretary-general ended in the UN SC Monday. According to unofficial sources, former Portuguese PM Antonio Guterres received 11 "encourage", three "discourage" and one "no opinion" vote, followed by Slovak FM Miroslav Lajcak with nine "encourage", five "discourage" and one "no opinion" vote.

BELGRADE - The ICTY Office of the Prosecutor on Tuesday appealed a judgment acquitting Serbian Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj of all charges of war crimes committed during the armed conflicts in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina and persecution of ethnic Croats from Serbia's Vojvodina province.

Businessman Spas Rusev has been officially announced as the new owner of Levski PFC, one of Bulgaria's key football teams.

Rusev, 62, has received voluntarily all shares of the trio that ran the club over the past year.

This has been the second transfer of ownership in a bit more than a year after June 2015.

Bosnian journalist Lejla Colak told BIRN on Monday that she had received a series of threats of violence after criticising Islamic garments like the burka and niqab in a post she wrote on Facebook.

In her post on August 26, Colak, an atheist, compared wearing such garments in public to wearing a "strap-on dildo in the streets".

Eight former Bosnian Serb Army troops were acquitted of crimes against humanity including expulsions and murders in the Rogatica area in September 1992.

The prosecution at the UN court in The Hague has filed an appeal against the verdict acquitting the leader of the Serbian Radical Party, Vojislav Seselj, of crimes against humanity in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia.

While praising German Chancellor Angela Merkel's policies, Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov has also shown himself as a practical person ready to make his case outright, a piece in German newspaper Die Welt says.