Albin Kurti

Kosovo's President Hashim Thaci wrote on Twitter on Thursday that Ambassador Vlora Citaku has notified him that Jamaica had recognized Kosovo's independence.
However, Jamaican MFA Johnson-Smith re-tweeted Thaci's claim of recognition by her country with a short comment, clearly saying that "to date, Jamaica has not recognized Kosovo as an independent state".

Impatient with its poor results, growing debts and reputation for corruption, Albin Kurti's new government axed the whole board of Kosovo Telecom on Wednesday.

At a meeting, the cabinet voted unanimously to dismiss the board of directors of the public enterprise, the country's largest telecommunications provider.

On the 12th anniversary of Kosovo's independence, new Prime Minister Albin Kurti visited the Kosovo Security Force, KSF, and, after paying homage to war martyrs and veterans, again declared his aim to introduce compulsory military service.

"We can discuss things that pertain to the economic progress, we have no problem with that, but we will not discuss the status until the fees are abolished. That is on hold, and we are waiting for the fees to be abolished", Vucic said when asked by Al Jazeera journalists in Munich, where he participates in the Munich Security Conference.

Much Ado About Nothing

The EU's new enlargement methodology has been pitched as reinvigorating the accession process, breathing new life and dynamism into it. Yet in the Balkans, it has received a cool and muted response. Many local officials and observers are sceptical, seeing it as just a way to repackage the same old enlargement process in a slightly different way.

Within less than 24 hours, Kosovo's Prime Minister, Albin Kurti, has received two high-level letters calling on him to abolish the tariffs imposed on goods from Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, in order to help restart the stalled dialogue with Serbia.

Russia's Ambassador to Belgrade, Alexander Botsan Kharcheno said that there is nothing new in Western efforts to find a compromise in the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue.

Kosovo's new government under Albin Kurti has pledged to carry out a long list of social and economic reforms, which many observers say will be hard to pull off.

At its second official meeting on Wednesday, Kosovo's new government under Albin Kurti scrapped several decisions made by the former government of Ramush Haradinaj.

Prime Minister Kurti for a start asked his cabinet to withdraw the decision of the former government to increase ministerial salaries by almost 100 per cent, and restore wages to their previous level.

Albin Kurti's new government is under pressure to address serious problems in higher education that have led students to claim they paid to enroll at colleges that they did not know were not accredited.