Banja Luka

The government of Bulgaria approved the granting of EUR 112,000 of financial assistance to the countries of the Western Balkans and Vietnam.

The money is for coping with the consequences of Covid-19 and will be used for the implementation of 6 projects in fulfillment of the Team Europe initiative - the global EU response to Covid-19.

The Serb-led entity in Bosnia, Republika Srpska, has halted all projects being implemented with Chinese companies owing to concerns about the possible spread of the coronavirus.

Milorad Dodik, Serbian member of the Bosnian Presidency, announced the move on Sunday to Serbian television Pink, noting the potential economic consequences of the continued spread of the virus.

The health minister of Bosnia's Serb-led entity has confirmed the first two coronavirus cases in the country - one for a man who works in Italy and the other for his child. Both tested positive for Covid-19 virus, the Republika Srpska Health Minister Alen Seranic said in Banja Luka on Thursday. 

According to the portal, the case was confirmed by the RS Ministry of Health.
There are no details yet on the person who contracted the virus, and the Ministry of Health announced at a press conference today at 9 o'clock that the Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Alen Seranic, will address the public, RTRS reports.

Bosnia's mainly Serb entity has opened a new front in its disputes with the country's Bosniaks over a demand for the establishment of a clear line of demarcation between Bosnia's two entities.

Courts in the towns of Doboj and Sokolac have rejected requests to ban 16 associations whose titles contain the words 'Chetnik Movement' or 'Ravna Gora Movement', while three more courts in Bosnia's Serb-majority Republika Srpska entity are still considering requests to ban the associations, BIRN has learned.

Several thousand people gathered in Banja Luka, the administrative centre of Bosnia's Serb-dominated entity, Republika Srpska, RS, on Thursday night for two rival rallies, one a protest against the RS authorities and the other a counter-protest in support of RS institutions.

Belgrade Higher Court on Friday sentenced Joja Plavanjac to 15 years in prison and Zdravko Narancic to seven years for their roles in the killings of 11 civilian detainees at a prison in Bosanska Krupa in Bosnia on August 3, 1992.

Plavanjac was convicted of killing the prisoners and Narancic of helping him.

The paramount leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Milorad Dodik, says he is ready to move the case of a murdered 21-year-old student - who was killed in March last year and whose death has not been resolved - from the district attorney's office to the state prosecutor's office in Bosnia.

Today, she works in a local betting shop in Tuzla. In hindsight, she regrets that her parents came back to their Bosnian homeland. "I believe that if they'd known in the mid-1990s that they would be worse off today, they wouldn't have done it," she says.