Both sides claimed victory in a presidential election in Montenegro on Sunday, raising the prospect of a dispute over the largely ceremonial post in the tiny Adriatic country as it bids to join the European Union.
With no independent exit poll or official word from the state electoral commission, both incumbent Filip Vujanovic and opposition challenger Miodrag Lekic took to the airwaves to announce they had won.
Lekic compared his rival’s claim to a “coup d’etat”.
The president is largely a figurehead for Montenegro’s 680,000 people, with real power vested in the prime minister. But a Lekic victory would set up an awkward cohabitation and deal a significant blow to the ruling Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) after more than two decades in power.
Based on his camp’s own count, the DPS’s Vujanovic said he had won 51.3 percent of votes compared to 48.7 for Lekic, a former diplomat.
“This is the winning result,” Vujanovic said in a televised address.
The opposition Democratic Front said Lekic was ahead according to its own count, by 50.5 percent to 49.5.
“I can announce that the people of Montenegro have entrusted me with the post of president,” Lekic said in a televised address. Reacting to Vujanovic’s own victory claim, he added: “We will not accept theft.”
(Source.)
Proscansko Lake in Plitvice National Park, Croatia.
March 12, 2003 - Zoran Đinđić, the Prime Minister of Serbia, is assassinated.
Đinđić was one of the founders of Serbia’s Democratic Party, and during the 1990s was a fierce critic of Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević. In October 2000, he was one of the leaders behind the revolution that saw Milošević overthrown from power, and in December of that year, he was elected Prime Minister.
In his short career as Prime Minister, Đinđić made an impression, reversing Serbia’s policies in many areas. He met with many Western leaders, and talked about European integration. He played an important part in turning Milošević over to the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in the Hague.
He was killed by a mafia-connected sniper in broad daylight in downtown Belgrade. Đinđić, he claimed, was a traitor to Serbia.
The hundreds of thousands of people who turned out to Đinđić’s funeral (top photo) would probably disagree.
Thousands of people again turned out earlier today (bottom photo) to commemorate Đinđić’s life and career.
Bay of Kotor, Montenegro, in February.
A sign tells us who the fastest and slowest workers are.
Derviçan, Albania, in 1988.
This is a story on my Google News right now. SO CONFUSING. Did Bulgaria save its Jewish population or not?!
The answer, as it so often is, is somewhere in the middle.
The 48,000 Jews who lived in Bulgaria (a Nazi ally) during World War II escaped unscathed. Not a single one of them perished in the Holocaust.
However, this period, Bulgaria occupied neighboring Macedonia, and the Bulgarian military there deported 11,000 Jews to concentration camps.
The Bulgarian parliament took responsibility for its actions for the first time last Friday:
“The objective evaluation of the historic events cannot ignore the fact that 11,343 Jews were deported from northern Greece and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, then under German jurisdiction,” legislators said in a declaration and expressed regrets that “the local Bulgarian administration had not been in a position to stop this act.”
The Shalom Organization of Jews in Bulgaria had repeatedly demanded the state to take responsibility for the deportations.
“The Bulgarian government must assume the moral responsibility for the Nazi death camp deportation of ethnic Jews from the regions of Thrace and Macedonia regardless of the fact that Bulgaria saved its almost 50,000 Jews,” the group’s chairman, Maxim Benvenisti, told The Associated Press before the declaration.
Hajduk’s Door is a natural arch on Čvrsnica, a mountain in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Hey, Google Streetview for Bulgaria is now a thing!
This is a street in my village. So glamorous.
A new poll shows that about 63 per cent of Serbian citizens accept that Kosovo is in practice an independent state - and that Serbia can only fight now to secure the best position for the Serbs still in Kosovo.
About one third of citizens, 32 per cent, say Kosovo is not independent while 5 per cent do not have an answer.
The survey of 1,003 people was conducted by B92 TV and by the agency Ipsos Strategic Marketing.
Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, which Belgrade opposes. At the same time, normalisation of relations with Kosovo is the EU’s main precondition for Serbia as it continues to pursue EU membership.
Serbia obtained EU candidate status in March 2012 and is hoping to obtain a start date for accession talks in June.
While most Serbs acccept the status quo in Kosovo, the survey shows that most Serbians would still rather see Kosovo as part of Serbia, than Serbia as a part of the EU.
Given a choice, some 65 per cent of those surveyed said the priority for Serbia was Kosovo, while the EU was a priority for 28 per cent of people and 7 per cent were indecisive.
(Source.)
Nine Views
Nine Views (Croatian: Devet pogleda) is an ambiental installation in Zagreb, Croatia which, together with the sculpture Prizemljeno Sunce (The Grounded Sun), makes up a consistent model of solar system.
Prizemljeno Sunce by Ivan Kožarić was first displayed in 1971 by the building of the Croatian National Theatre, and since then changed location a few times. Since 1994 it has been situated in the Bogovićeva Street. It is simply a bronze sphere around 2 metres in diameter.
In 2004, artist Davor Preis had a two-week exhibition in the Josip Račić Exhibition Hall in Margaretska Street in Zagreb, and afterwards he placed 9 models of the planets of the solar system around Zagreb, to complete a model of the entire solar system. The models’ sizes as well as their distances from the Prizemljeno Sunce are all in the same scale as the Prizemljeno Sunce itself.
Preis did this installation with very little or no publicity, so his installation isn’t well known among citizens of Zagreb. On a few occasions individuals or small groups of people, particularly physics students, “discovered” that there was a model of the solar system in Zagreb. One of the earliest efforts to find all of the planets was started in November 2004 on the web forum of the student section of Croatian Physics Society.
The locations of the planets are as follows:
- Mercury - 3 Margaretska Street
- Venus - 3 Ban Josip Jelačić Square
- Earth - 9 Varšavska Street
- Mars - 21 Tkalčićeva Street
- Jupiter - 71 Voćarska Street
- Saturn - 1 Račićeva Street
- Uranus - 9 Siget
- Neptune - Kozari Way
- Pluto - Bologna Alley (underpass) - included in the installation before being demoted to dwarf planet
