Donald Duck

The last round of the ten-year dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina this time ended in less than two hours. The unwritten rule of Brussels diplomacy was confirmed that the longer a meeting lasts, the greater the possibility for a positive outcome.

Reacting to the demands of Kosovo PM Ramush Haradinaj for starting work on making a border between Serbia and Kosovo Dacic said that there was no border between Kosovo and Central Serbia but only an administrative line so the demarcation could not happen.

A Serbian rights organisation, the Gay Lesbian Info Centre, GLIC, has said that it will sue the Serbian Ministry of Culture for discrimination, after it ordered the removal of a statue showing Donald Duck pressing against Micky Mouse's groin from the country's culture centre in Paris.

Slovenia's money-laundering office has opened an investigation into claims by opposition parties that the country's biggest state-owned bank, Nova Ljubljanska Banka (NLB), may have laundered nearly €1bn from Iran between 2008 and 2010, breaking an international embargo and failing to enforce rules on the financing of terrorism.

As opposed to Graham Greene?s 1955 novella ?Loser Takes All,? in Turkey, six decades later, it appears that the ?winner loses all.? On the night of June 7, the winners will win again. All the same, as always, they will be tense ? probably even tenser than before. They will cheer victoriously but they will look pensive and unhappy.

Orson Wells was at least partly right when he said: “Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and The Muppets would take seats in the Senate.” Unfortunately, we don’t yet have a better instrument for democracy than the ballot box.