January 30, 2004
Just one month after the Turkish holding company Koc weighed in with a $30 million investment, in the form of a new shopping mall for Skopje’s city center, a project at least twice as costly has just been announced: the complete renovation and enlargement of Skopje’s SAEM Exhibition Center. At a press conference in Skopje [...]
January 28, 2004
In significant ways, the post-9/11 world is unlike any before it. In previous epochs, when empires that made all the rules and made all others play by them were defeated, their powers of domination were merely transferred to a successor. Today, however, there exists no potential usurper that could possibly replace America’s hold on empire. [...]
January 26, 2004
An upstart newspaper, ‘Vreme’ (’Time’) will open in Skopje within days, Balkanalysis.com has learned. The paper comes as a result of a defection of first 15 and now 20 members of the country’s largest daily, ‘Dnevnik,’ which had been taken over by the German WAZ (Westdeutsche Allemeiner Zeitung) in the summer. While the Vreme team [...]
January 25, 2004
An email making the rounds, dispatched by Democrat National Committee chairman Terry McCauliffe, calls on supporters to “…help us shape America’s future without George W. Bush” by donating money in return for various gimmicks. Depending on the size of the donation, one gets gimmicks of greater or lesser value. For example, we have the “Presidential [...]
January 24, 2004
Like a pig slowly roasting on a spit, the American taxpayer is being cooked- most often, without even knowing it. It’s business as usual in Washington, where pork-barrel politics continue to shape defense spending. The irony here is that spending deemed to be necessary for homeland security and anti-terrorist efforts so often turns out to [...]
January 23, 2004
By Gabriel Kolko 2002, 165 pp. Reviewed by Christopher Deliso Regarded as the “foremost modern historian of war” by the Guardian, scholar Gabriel Kolko is the author of many books on American history and its policy of foreign intervention. His 1994 opus, Century of War, covered the 20th century’s destructive and almost cataclysmic pattern [...]
January 21, 2004
Yesterday was the official ‘name day’ for St. Jovan in Macedonia, a mini-holiday for all those born with that name in the country. There was little celebrating, however, for “Jovan the Schismatic,” as Reality Macedonia memorably dubbed this sycophant of the Serbian church, bent on causing disruption and defamation of the Macedonian Orthodox Church. For [...]
January 20, 2004
An explosion in downtown Sofia on Monday, in which four people were killed and seven injured, comes as “…the latest in a series of violent attacks attributed to turf wars in Bulgaria’s organised crime,” according to the Bulgarian News Network. In other words, despite al Qaeda fears every time a bomb goes off, US-friendly Bulgaria [...]
January 19, 2004
Balkanalysis.com would like to remind readers, first of all, of the growing links directory (located through clicking on the ‘web links’ box on the left side of this page), which contains links to useful websites organized in the same fashion as are our topic folders. Also interesting for travelers and those interested in international affairs [...]
January 18, 2004
Among the many fears Western officials have for non-conventional terrorist threats, the ‘dirty bomb’ ranks near the top. The legacy of shoddily maintained Soviet nuclear facilities housing the raw materials for a homemade nuclear device, one that could be placed even in a suitcase, has prompted international cooperation for removing said materials across the former [...]
