Macedonia

Foreign nationals have filed 4,267 applications for protection between January 1 and April 5, the head of Bulgaria's State Agency for Refugees, Petya Parvanova, has said.

The defence ministers of Bulgaria and Greece have discussed the need to hold talks at the level of contact groups from the two countries' armed forces about joint tackling of the migration pressure at EU borders.

The planned dissolution of Macedonia's parliament takes place on Wednesday amid complaints by smaller opposition parties and NGOs that the country is not yet ready to organize free and fair elections.

"Not one of the three key reforms set by the EU and US has been met," the head of the NGO CIVIL, Xhabir Derala, said.

According to forecasts of the Institute for tourism studies and analyses, Bulgarians will spend more than BGN 350 M on trips during the forthcoming May holidays.

Macedonia's junior ruling party, the Democratic Union for Integration, DUI, says the main ethnic Macedonian parties should stop arguing and prevaricating and erect long-promised monuments to Albanian figures as part of the government-funded Skopje 2014 revamp.

The Macedonian parliament approved on Monday the extension of the state of emergency in force on the country's southern and northern borders until the end of the year.

Macedonian Defence Minister Zoran Jolevski said the extension was a necessary measure against the increasing number of refugees entering and passing through the country.

While there is still tension between SYRIZA and ANEL due to the statements of Alternate Minister for Migration Policy Yannis Mouzalas who called FYROM ‘Macedonia’, SYRIZA MP Makis Balaouras stated that he would not rule out the possibility of accepting ‘Macedonia’ as the official name for FYROM.

Bulgarian citizens completed a total of 281 360 trips abroad in February this year, which represented 9.8 % increase compared to the same month in 2015.

This becomes clear from the latest figures of the National Statistical Institute (NSI) released on Monday.

About 11,600 people have remained at the camp at Idomeni, on Greece's border with Macedonia, as of Saturday after the Greek authorities started evacuating refugees to nearby camps the day before, AFP reported, citing official Greek figures.

A court in Skopje has sentenced six radical Islamist recruiters and fighters to jail terms of between 5-1/2 to 7 years, Macedonian news agency MIA reported on Friday.

The six entered a plea bargain with the prosecutors.