Europe

The European Court of Justice on Monday heralded a new fine against Greece for violation of European regulations, noting that the country has failed to enforce a six-year-old ruling ordering it to “adequately treat and dispose of urban wastewater.”

Members of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS) believe that the main cause of the devastating floods in Bulgaria is human negligence, not the torrential rains.

"There are no natural disasters, there is human negligence",  the head of the National Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology at BAS, Georgi Korchev, told Vesti.bg.

BELGRADE - Serbia's First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Ivica Dacic and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov stated Monday in Belgrade that Serbian-Russian relations are at a high level.

Bulgarian hospitals will get BGN 120 M for their activities in September and October, according to Kiril Ananiev, Chair of the Supervisory Board of the National Health Insurance Fund (NHIF).

BELGRADE - Serbia's First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Ivica Dacic met Monday with the prosecutor of the newly established Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT) Hassan Jallow, and underlined that more convicted Serbian citizens should serve their sentence in Serbia.

Foreign Affairs Minister Titus Corlatean in a meeting with Turkey's Ambassador to Romania Omur Solendil on Monday highlighted the good cooperation between the two states on the stability and security in the Black Sea region, informs a press release remitted to AGERPRES on Monday.

Protagora, a group that campaigns for secular values, criticised on Monday what it said was the widespread practice of Croatian schools taking pupils to mass on the first day of the new school year.

"EU is moving target that we must follow"

BELGRADE -- As a country in membership negotiations with the EU, Serbia must align not only with its legal framework and practice, but also the Union's new developments.

This is what head of Serbia's EU accession negotiating team Tanja Miščević wrote in an op-ed published in the Belgrade-based daily Danas.

The number of asylum seekers in Bulgaria has increased five times in 2013 compared with 2012, according to a report on the implementation of the revised National Program for Demographic Development until 2013.

In 2013, the number of asylum seekers in Bulgaria exceeded 7,000, which is over five times more than in 2012 and ten times more than in the previous years.

BELGRADE - Serbia's War Crimes Prosecutor's Office and the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT), which is the successor to the ad hoc Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) based in The Hague, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in Belgrade on Monday.