News archive of December 2016

A United Nations envoy will host a dinner for ethnically divided Cyprus' rival leaders in a bid to get stalled reunification talks going again.

A UN statement said Wednesday's dinner will be held inside the UN-controlled buffer zone. The zone separates the island's breakaway, Turkish Cypriot north and the internationally recognized, Greek Cypriot south.

Croatian media reports on Thursday said the governing centre-right Croatian Democratic Union, HDZ, plans to oust the controversial Mayor of Zagreb, Milan Bandic, by refusing to support his budget in the city assembly.

Greek PM Alexis Tsipras contacted German Chancellor Angela Merkel over the phone and discussed had a phone contact. The two leaders touched on the matters the EU-Turkish relations in light of the developments on the Cypriot negotiations and the implementation of the refugee agreement. The Greek PM also brought up the increasingly aggressive rhetoric on the part of Turkey against Greece.

Thousands of refugees and migrants will be relocated indoors from tent camps in Greece as temperatures fell below zero for the first time, the UN refugee agency said Thursday.

The operation began Wednesday in the snow-covered foothills of Olympus, Greece's tallest mountain, to move around 1,000 members of Iraq's Yazidi minority, said UNHCR spokesman Roland Schoenbauer.

Bulgarian MPs have approved the a new minimum wage that will be introduced on January 01, 2017.

Starting from that day, its value will be BGN 460 (EUR 230), up from the current value of BGN 420.

Turkey's military operation in Syria is not against any country or person but terror groups in general, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said, in contrast to earlier remarks that Turkey's objective was to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad following.  

“Ignorantia juris non excusat”, is a Latin legal principle adopted by most western countries, passed down by the Roman law tradition. It simply means that if someone is ignorant of the laws of the land, they are not excused. So whenever you plan on traveling around the world, you better do a crash course on the country of destination you plan to visit.

The election of Donald Trump as the U.S. president could postpone the process of Montenegro's NATO accession, Washington-based website Roll Call is reporting.

Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu on Wednesday referred to the eastern Aegean Imia islets as "Turkish soil."

Cavusoglu was responding in writing to a question tabled by a Turkish MP regarding the status of islands and islets in the Aegean.

The unemployment rate in the 19-country eurozone edged down further in October, to 9.8 percent from 9.9 percent the previous month.

Statistics agency Eurostat said Thursday that the number of people out of work fell by 178,000 over the month.