Security

BELGRADE - Serbian Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic met Wednesday with the representatives of the Ministry of Justice, the Prosecutor's Office and the trade unions, and stressed that the government will take measures to protect police officers in view of the growing number of assaults on them, some of which ended fatally.

Greek citizens will now be faced with less red tape when applying for police identity cards following a joint ministerial decision, it was announced on Tuesday.

Applicants will now submit a form at police stations where they reside and information regarding their personal details will be checked via the Interior Ministry’s online National Registry.

Albania has agreed to issue emigrants born abroad with new birth certificates, identity cards and passports where the birthplace is  written in the local language of the country of birth rather than in Albanian.

...

Regional police benefit from introducing EU standards, practices

Nations are sharing ways to accomplish the goals of community policing.

Balkan police forces are introducing EU norms and practices in their work, leading to more accountable and transparent police forces, experts said.

...

Turkey's Foreign Ministry has summoned the US charge d'affaires over a media report that the United States had spied on Turkey intensively since 2006.

The last of three suspects linked to the attempted murder of an Australian businessman on the Ionian island of Zakynthos was taken into custody on Saturday, police reported.

An exchange of fire between two gunmen who held up a meat hypermarket in the area of Rendi, southern Athens, and officers of the police's motorcycling unit DIAS late on Thursday resulted in the fatal injury of one of the suspects while the other was arrested, police said.

Nikos Maziotis, the leader of the Revolutionary Struggle urban guerrilla group who was arrested earlier this year, was planning another bomb attack when officers seized him after shots were fired in the busy Monastiraki area of Athens, police sources have told Kathimerini.

Bulgaria's caretaker government has decided to allow experts from the European Commission to examine its capacity to manage disaster risks.

The peer reviews may be conducted on the basis of a decision of the EU concerning the Union's Civil Protection Mechanism, which envisages the creation of a common framework for disaster risk prevention.

A survey laid bare the distrust the public harbors toward police in the United States on Monday, the same day a funeral was held for a black teenager shot dead by a white policeman.