Centar

Participants carry placards and rainbow-coloured flags at Sarajevo's first Pride parade, in Sarajevo, September 8, 2019. Photo: EPA-EFE/FEHIM DEMIR

The parade, which comes after the first-ever march in 2019, is being held under tight security. A hardline Muslim political campaign group is organising a counter-protest against this year's parade.

The mayor of Skopje's municipality of Centar, Sasa Bogdanovic, said on Monday that a large unfinished memorial complex dedicated to Skopje-born Mother Teresa should not be completed but erased from the city's urban plan because it blocks an important pedestrian street leading to the main square.

A Sarajevo municipality has temporarily stopped issuing birth certificates due to a computer virus that locks documents in its database for the second time in some two weeks.  

Legal marijuana mogul Mike Straumietis, also known by his Instagram nicknames Big Mike and the Marijuana Don, posted photos on Wednesday of his meetings with North Macedonia's Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, Health Minister Venko Filipce and the mayor of Skopje's Centar municipality, Sasa Bogdanovic.

Sarajevo's Centar municipality on Friday signed a lease to provide premises to the Association of Parents of Children Killed in Besieged Sarajevo from 1992 to 1995 to establish a memorial room for children killed during the siege of Sarajevo.

The mayors of Macedonia's 80 municipalities, plus the capital, Skopje, over the last four years delivered less than half the capital projects they promised, a new BIRN database, "Municipalities Uncovered," shows.

The database analyzes the municipal budgets for capital investments as well as their overall budgets from 2013 to 2016.

After receiving significant numbers of complaints from angry residents, traffic police in Skopje say they have already started arresting street racers who breach the peace and cause potential dangers at night-time and weekends.

"We are determined to establish traffic order and that's that," said Biljana Milevska from the Skopje police force.

Macedonia's Special Prosecution, SJO, tasked with probing high-level crime and corruption, on Thursday said it was raising its first criminal indictments.

Fourteen persons are indicted for "enticement and carrying out a criminal act against public order", while the other case concerns seven people employed in the secret police, for "illegal destruction of documentation".

A first-ever local referendum in Macedonia, on the future of a famous mall in Skopje, appeared to have failed on Sunday after only 40 per cent of residents of the municipality of Centar cast ballots.

A 50-plus threshold was needed for the vote to be pronounced successful.

At their 23rd press conference in recent weeks on the subject of alleged government wiretapping, the opposition Social Democrats on Sunday presented covertly-recorded tapes that they say prove that Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski was behind unrest in Skopje's opposition-governed municipality of Centar in June 2013.