Serbia warned on Thursday it would arrest the foreign minister of its former province of Kosovo for alleged terrorism if he turns up in Belgrade next week to attend a conference.
Hashim Thaci, who led a guerrilla insurgency against Serbia in the late 1990s, has been invited to the conference on reconciliation in the Serbian capital on April 24 and is "ready to go", an adviser said earlier.
A French law professor criticized on Tuesday the European Union's handling of corruption allegations involving an EU mission in Kosovo, the bloc's biggest civilian mission abroad.
EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini asked Jean-Paul Jacque to investigate last November after allegations emerged in the media that the EU mission had covered up evidence of bribe-taking by senior staff in cases of murder and corruption.
The International Monetary Fund cautioned Kosovo on Monday that its budget deficit may exceed a target of two percent of output and that the economy would grow less than the government hopes.
The landlocked Balkan state, which seceded from Serbia in 2008, does not currently have a loan arrangement with the IMF but Finance Minister Avdullah Hoti has said he will hold talks with the lender in Washington in April.
The leaders of Serbia and its former southern province Kosovo have spoken by phone in the first direct talks without foreign mediators since a 1998-99 war, both countries said on Thursday.
The telephone call late on Wednesday coincided with the first visit to Pristina and Belgrade by Federica Mogherini since taking over as the European Union's foreign policy chief, with Serbia impatient to start accession talks with the bloc.
World basketball's governing body FIBA has granted Kosovo full membership amid Serbia's request to make sure that clubs or national teams from the two countries never meet at any level.
"The decision comes on the back of the International Olympic Committee granting full recognition to the Kosovo Olympic Committee in December 2014," FIBA said on its official website (www.fiba.com).
Kosovo's government warned ethnic Serbs on Monday not to follow through on a decision to name a street after late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, whose crackdown in the former Serbian province triggered war with NATO in 1999.
An estimated 10,000 ethnic Albanians were killed in Kosovo and almost 1 million were put to flight during a brutal counter-insurgency war waged by forces under Milosevic in 1998-99, before NATO intervened with 78 days of air strikes and Kosovo embarked on a path to independence in 2008.
BERLIN (Reuters) - Kosovo's Foreign Minister Hashim Thaci urged the European Union and NATO to speed up integration of Balkan states or risk the spreading influence of both Russia and Islamist extremists.
Thaci, the first prime minister of independent Kosovo until last year, told Reuters he hoped for tangible results in the coming months, such as a new EU visa regime for Kosovo.
BY FATOS BYTYCI, PRISTINA Fri Feb 20, 2015 8:11am EST
Kosovo may write off a range of debts racked up by citizens before 2009, the government said on Thursday in a move to tackle widespread dissatisfaction fueling unrest and a new wave of emigration to western Europe. Just two months in office, the government has been rocked by some of the worst civil unrest since Kosovo declared independence in 2008. It is also grappling with a dramatic surge in the number of Kosovars smuggling themselves illegally into the European Union.
The European Union is experiencing a steep rise in the number of Kosovo citizens smuggling themselves into the affluent bloc, with 10,000 filing for asylum in Hungary in just one month this year compared to 6,000 for the whole of 2013. It follows a relaxation of travel rules allowing Kosovars to reach EU borders via Serbia and has coincided with political turmoil and street unrest in Kosovo fueled by poverty, high unemployment and economically debilitating corruption.