Okay, someweird stuff has come out of Russia. Weird stuff comes out of everywhere, no biggy.
But this is… really weird.
If any Russian readers can give some context to this, I’d be fascinated.

Breaking news in the last hour is that Radovan Karadzic has been arrested in Belgrade. Karadzic, you may recall, was the President of the Bosnian Serb Republic. He’s under indictment for about twenty different war crimes, and has been on the run since 1996.
Few details are available yet. The arrest [...]

How about that. Surprising the new government would go so far.

Well some times I agree with Wolfgang Munchau, and sometimes I don’t. This is one of the occasions when I do, especially the following passage which can be found in his Financial Times op-ed this morning:
“Some degree of competitive adjustment is probably needed but the huge scale of the shock that is unfolding in Spain [...]

(This story is a week old. Somehow, inexcusably, I missed it until now.)
Anyway: the Miss Universe pageant was held last weekend. It was in Vietnam this time, and a nice young lady from Venezuela won, but what’s interesting to your hardcore Balkanologist is that
1) the pageant accepted Kosovo as a [...]

“Look, Doctor, he’s just faking……. Even now in the hour of his death he has to trick us.”
The opening sentence: ‘There’s a long silence, and then I say …’ indicates the three functions of this book. It is an attempt to find a self through utterance, after a lifetime of non-communication; this was prompted by [...]

Nicolas Sarkozy is going to Dublin for a few hours on Monday.  Going by the Elysee website, his agenda for Barack Obama’s visit on Wednesday is far clearer than for his visit to Ireland.   On what is ostensibly a listening tour to understand the reasons for Ireland’s rejection of the Lisbon treaty, the signals are already [...]

Via the invaluable Osservatorio sui Balcani comes a fascinating report on crime in the Balkans. It’s by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (ONODC), and it offers some surprising conclusions:
[The] Balkans is safer than thought…
With detailed, comprehensive statistics, the report concludes that the Balkans, contrary to widespread opinion, does not have a [...]

The Prime Minister of Belgium has offered to resign, setting up an unwanted rematch with Serbia to see which European parliamentary republic can go the longest without a national government. Serbia’s recent entry in the contest is a mere 57 days. The BBC says that the last round took nine months to give birth to [...]

Back in January, I posted about how Macedonia’s young Prime Minister, Nikola Gruevski, was for some reason the most popular head of government in the Balkans.
Well, they had Parliamentary elections at the beginning of June, and Macedonia said: yes. Gruevski’s center-right coalition won a whopping 63 out of 120 seats, giving them [...]