Kurir

BELGRADE - Serbia's incumbent President Tomislav Nikolic has decided to hand in a retirement request on May 31, but is not necessarily leaving politics, Belgrade-based Kurir reported Tuesday.

Nikolic says he has not made a decision or reached an agreement on a role he could be given when his presidential term expires, but his retirement is certain, the paper said.

After a tense few days, Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic has decided not to run for another term in this spring's presidential elections.

The decision was announced after a meeting on Monday between Nikolic and current Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, who emerged last week as the favoured presidential candidate of the Progressive Party to which they both belong.

A new movement dedicated to countering the influence of billionaire US philanthropist George Soros has been formed in Macedonia, shortly after the leader of the main ruling VMRO DPMNE party, Nikola Gruevski, stepped up attacks against NGOs financed from aboard.

BELGRADE - On April 20 1955, Marijan John Markul entered the FBI's Los Angeles office and told a shocking story. The man who then introduced himself as Marshal Josip Broz Tito was not actually him, but a Russian agent who assumed the identity of Tito after Josip Broz disappeared in Russia in 1937.

A slur campaign against three independent media organisations in Serbia, led by the Serbian tabloid Informer and national broadcaster TV Pink, is ramping up again with Informer claiming today that foreign grants were given to NGOs on dates that coincide with the publication of "false affairs against people close to the government".

Experts from Russian state-owned Gazprom are to visit Macedonia's capital Skopje for talks over the construction of a South Stream gas pipeline section.