Albania

Young people from Serbia and Albania completed on Thursday their five-day long Summer School on inter-cultural dialogue in the digital era, Tanjug reported.

They "discussed and shared experiences and ideas on challenges facing the youth in their countries," the agency said.

Russia is not ruling out the possibility of introducing "reciprocal measures" toward Montenegro, Albania, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Ukraine.

This has been reported by Sputnik. These countries have joined EU's anti-Russian sanctions.

The two countries have stepped up joint efforts this week to stop Albanian migrants heading for Germany after more than 20,000 arrived over the past few months.

On Wednesday, about 70 asylum-seekers from Albania landed at Tirana International Airport after being deported from Germany.

Prosecutors in Albania on Tuesday said they had charged former central bank governor Fullani with dereliction of duty over the theft of some 713 million lek (five million euro) and over the purchase by the bank of a state-owned property in 2010.

Fullani, 60, was arrested on September 2014 but released pending further investigations few weeks later.

A defence lawyer for one of the so-called Drenica Group ex-guerrillas, who were sentenced to a total of 65 years in jail for war crimes, said on Tuesday that they will appeal against the convictions, which he called a "legal massacre".

Albania’s capital is experiencing a water supply crisis this summer, blamed by the authorities on illegal connections to the water distribution network and many consumers’ failure to pay their bills. 

Albania police on Thursday said they had uprooted 216,000 marijuana plants over the last six months, almost the same amount as in the previous year - adding that growers have changed their strategy by planting smaller plots, making it harder for the police to find them.

New small hydropower plants and the privatization of several medium-sized hydropower plants have increased private sector electricity production in Albania to almost a fifth of total production, a report by the Energy Regulatory Agency for 2014 shows.

It says the private electricity production market in Albania is now worth 8.1 billion leks (about 58 million euros).

Greek FM Nikos Kotzias briefed political party representatives on Wednesday of recent visits of southeast European capitals, declaring afterwards that crisis-plagued Greece is “returning to the Balkans”.

The venue was a meeting of a national council on foreign policy, with Kotzias briefing participants on his talks and contacts in visits to no less than seven regional countries.

The current developments in southeast Europe top the agenda at the National Council on Foreign Policy on Wednesday after the current visit of Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias to the Western Balkan countries.