Bosnia

Five Bosnian coal miners were killed after an earthquake triggered a tunnel cave-in, trapping dozens of men underground for 20 hours, a union leader said Friday.
      
"Twenty-nine (trapped miners) came out, but unfortunately five did not survive," Sinan Husic said on national television, without offering details on the circumstances and time of the men's death.        

BELGRADE - The fourth Danube Fest, which will commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, is to be held on September 5-13 at the Belgrade Fortress, a press conference was told on Wednesday.

As in the previous years, the programme was conceived by the artistic council, comprised of three renowned Serbian artists - Katarina Jovanovic, Goran Markovic and Nebojsa Bradic.

The bill for the May floods in Bosnia in terms of agriculture tops 150 million euro and, coming on top of earlier bad weather, the value of the sector is expected to drop by 30 to 50 per cent this year.

This key branch of the Bosnian economy was devastated by the May floods, farmers and experts say, as many of the the most fruitful lands were underwater this spring.

Sarajevo's one-time national library and city hall, the Vijecnica, reopens on July 17 to all visitors after a restoration process that has lasted more than two decades brought it back to its long-lost splendour.

Armies in the Balkans show co-operation in crisis situations

The President of Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, has accused Bosnia's mainly Bosniak and Croat Federation entity of seizing more donations for flood relief than it was entitled to.

Dodik said the issue of forming a solidarity fund at state level in Bosnia and Herzegovina had become stuck - and he rejected the idea of simply dividing the donations by half.

Power company workers repairing the transmission system and cleaning the area last week found human bones on the banks of the river Bosna near flood-stricken Doboj.

Lejla Cengic, of the Institute for Missing Persons, on May 26 said the flood had washed away part of the river bank, which is why the bones became visible.

The recent floods have seriously damaged several Bosnian judicial institutions, destroying files, evidence and archives.

As hundreds of tons of relief collected in Bosnia and elsewhere reaches victims of the severe floods in Bosnia, the authorities have been criticized for failing to react on time.

Over 1 million Bosnians have been affected by the devastating floods and some 100,000 houses have been damaged.

The exact death toll in Bosnia and Herzegovina is still unknown, but it is estimated around 30.