Municipalities

Ljubljana – An increasing number of people are using Ljubljana’s bicycle self system. On average, each bike is rented eight times a day, show data released by the city.

In 2021 the number of Bicikelj users went up by 26.8% compared to the year before, to 235,334, of which 63,823 were active.

There are currently 253,933 registered users and 55,061 active users.

Ther arrival of a group of Ultra-Orthodox Jews in the northern town of Kumanovo this weekend, wearing traditional clothing that residents never saw before, has raised concerns among some local residents.

"These persons respect the laws of North Macedonia, have a completely legal right to stay here and are here only temporarily," Kumanovo police told the media on Sunday.

Nova Gorica – As news of a tragic death of a young Slovenian firefighter and diver reached North Macedonia, a country where he helped fight wildfires this summer, the mayor of Berovo decided to propose that a street in the town be named after him.

Ljubljana – Renovation work on the eastern tube of the Golovec tunnel, located on the south-eastern section of the Ljubljana ring road, got under way on Monday after work on the western tube was completed. The upgrade, during which the tube will be closed to traffic, is expected to take two months with replacement train transport available at discount prices.

Thousands of ethnic Albanians took to the streets of Skopje on Friday for a "protest for justice", demanding freedom for the five ethnic Albanians who were sentenced to prison on Tuesday for the 2012 murders of five ethnic Macedonians.

Police in North Macedonia say they have discovered 148 migrants crammed into trucks in two separate operations in central and northern parts of the country, and have arrested two men on suspicion of trafficking migrants.

Slavko Milovanovic, who was acquitted of involvement in an attack on the village of Resagici, near Srebrenica, in May 1992, launched his case on Wednesday for compensation for the suffering caused by 15 months of restrictive measures that were imposed on him during his trial.

The government of Bulgaria approved the granting of EUR 112,000 of financial assistance to the countries of the Western Balkans and Vietnam.

The money is for coping with the consequences of Covid-19 and will be used for the implementation of 6 projects in fulfillment of the Team Europe initiative - the global EU response to Covid-19.

Yet asked about Srebrenica, the Bosnian enclave where some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed by Serb forces in 1995, Nebojsa is equally adamant in rejecting UN-court findings that it constituted genocide. "I don't think it was genocide," he said.

The appeals chamber of the Bosnian state court on Thursday upheld a prosecution appeal and increased Suad Smajlovic's sentence from one year and two months in prison to three years.