North Macedonia

Tobias Zech, a legislator from the centre-right Christian Social Union, CSU, the ruling party in Bavaria and sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel's CDU, has quit after Germany's Spiegel revealed that he lobbied for Nikola Gruevski's ousted authoritarian regime in North Macedonia in 2016.

Kosovo's potential Prime Minister, Albin Kurti, has used his growing popularity in the wider Albanian diaspora to call on ethnic Albanians from North Macedonia to take part in that country's census.

In snap elections in Kosovo on February 14, Kurti's Vetevendosje party received the support of more than 75 per cent of the more than 50,000 votes that Kosovars living abroad cast.

North Macedonian law enforcement has placed the businessman Orce Kamcev in 30 days' detention in Shutka prison near Skopje, on the request of the Organised Crime Prosecution, which said there was a risk he might flee the country.

The prosecution on Sunday said it requested his detention after receiving "info from the National Security Agency that he might be preparing an escape".

The head of the Anti-Corruption Commission in North Macedonia, Biljana Ivanovska, on Friday said that before launching an official inquiry into the country's COVID vaccine troubles, they had "started collecting information on the affair" in which Health Minister Venko Filipce is accused of trying to procure Chinese vaccines through a questionable intermediary firm.

NATO on Wednesday declined to comment on claims by North Macedonia's leader that the country's NATO commitments had got in the way of timely purchases of COVID vaccines.

Channel BNT4 of the Bulgarian National Television (BNT) is now available in North Macedonia.

Yesterday, the special representative of the country in the history dispute with Bulgaria Vlado Buchkovski was the first to announce this.

Prime Minister Zoran Zaev on Wednesday unexpectedly asked North Macedonia's parliament to take an immediate vote of confidence in his cabinet after the main opposition right-wing VMRO DPMNE party claimed Zaev's wafer-thin majority in parliament was shaky, and that it could soon muster enough support to topple him.

North Macedonia's long-overdue national census, a key operation that the country has failed to carry out for 19 years due to ethnic and political interference, is already facing serious attempts to disrupt it.

Bucharest, Feb 22 /Agerpres/ - Senate President Anca Dragu said on Monday that the possibility of opening a direct air route between Bucharest and Skopje will be considered, when the epidemiological context allows the relaunch of air transport at an optimal capacity. Anca Dragu had a meeting with Gabriel Atanasov, the ambassador of the Republic of North Macedonia to Romania.

Ilhan Kyuchyuk, the European Parliament's standing rapporteur for North Macedonia, is on an official visit to Skopje. He has already met with North Macedonian President Stevo Pendarovski, PM Zoran Zaev, Minister of Foreign Affairs Bujar Osmani, Vice-PM Nikola Dimitrov, Minister of Local Self-Government Goran Milevski and opposition party leader Hristijan Mickoski.