Danas

Tanja Ivic, the mother of the first Serb football player invited to play for a national Kosovo team, told BIRN on Monday that she has been fired from her job at the Serb-run Pristina Cultural Education Centre in the Kosovo town of Gracanica as a result.

Serbian Trade Minister Rasim Ljajic and Macedonian Agriculture Minister Ljupco Nikolovski will meet in Skoplje on Wednesday to discuss how to resolve an ongoing row over Serbian flour imports, the trade ministry in Belgrade confirmed to BIRN.

Previously Serbia had said it would impose counter-measures on Macedonia after Skopje adopted new procedures for imports of Serbian flour.

A former judge who controversially returned a passport to the Serbian tycoon Miroslav Miskovic, so that he could travel to the UK, has welcomed the decision of the High Judicial Council to withdraw the public warning it issued to him in 2015.

Kosovo's bid to join Interpol has caused fears in Serbia that international warrants could be issued for members of its security forces who participated in the 1999 Kosovo war, but watchdog NGOs say that the prosecution of suspected war criminals depends on political will in Serbia itself.

Back under a new and catchier name, Belgrade's annual film festival is now called the Martovski Festival [the March Festival] and is taking place from March 30 to April 2 at Dom Omladine.

After starting out in Pula back in 1954, then known as the Yugoslav Film Festival, the event moved to Belgrade in 1960 where it has remained ever since.

The German ambassador in Montenegro, Gudrun Steinacker, on Monday said Montenegrin citizens planning to live and work in Germany illegally will "certainly fail to succeed".

She said it was difficult to obtain accurate data on the number of citizens from the north of Montenegro who had gone to Germany to find jobs but noted that "a few thousand people are being mentioned in public.

Jadranka Joksimovic, Serbia's Minister for European Integration, said the government had started interviewing potential members of the Serbian negotiating team with the EU.

"We have a lot of names. Soon we will have suggestions for members," Joksimovic told the daily newspaper Danas on May 21.

Serbia's Prime Minister says he intends to visit Albania to improve regional relations, frayed by the recent violence in Kumanovo, Macedonia.

"For each of our countries it is important to invest in peace and stability in the region, so that what happened in Kumanovo does not happen again," Vucic said in Sarajevo, where he is participating in a business forum.

Oliver Antic, the advisor to Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic, has rejected claims made in an official report that the plane due to take Nikolic to Rome on April 17 had to return to Belgrade because "coffee was spilled in the cockpit".

Antic on Wednesday instead laid the blame for the incident on Zorana Mihajlovic, the Serbian Transport Minister.

Serbia plans to penalise locals who go off to fighting in foreign conflicts, jailing those who organise volunteers by up to 12 years, while the fighters themseslves could get from one to five years.