Wednesday 16:52
Daily Briefing
Tirana Examiner Sali Berisha’s full endorsement of the Kushner-linked coastal investment removes the last partisan obstacle to a development model neither major party will now contest. The fight has not ended. It has moved to where votes cannot reach it. On Wednesday, before his parliamentary group, Sali Berisha settled the question of where Albania’s …
Daily Briefing
The Newsroom Albania’s Special Prosecution Against Corruption and Organised Crime has placed under preventive seizure the 195 million dollars paid out for land at Zvërnec, holding the sums in the accounts of Artur Shehu and the other owners who agreed to sell, after first releasing the account of the company controlled by the Qatari …
Daily Briefing
A preventive sequestration order against Albania Land Development, the company holding the coastal land for the resort tied to Jared Kushner and his Qatari partners, was placed on 29 May and lifted by the start of this week. The prosecution has confirmed neither step in public. The Newsroom Tirana. The Special Anti-Corruption and Organized …
The Examiner
by Christopher S. Hyland Every nation arrives, at intervals, at a threshold where it must choose between two definitions of itself – one open and one closed, one confident and one fearful – and Albania, a small country I have supported for the better part of my life, stands at such a threshold this week. …
The Examiner
by Albatros Rexhaj (Tirana) Belind Këlliçi went on A Show on Syri TV and did something specific. He placed the Zvërnec affair at the door of the Prime Minister, charged the government with favouring private interests against the public good, and demanded full transparency on ownership, permits and procedure. He folded the whole case into …
The Examiner
Albania’s prosecutors are right to examine property issues at Zvërnec. But the antisemitic incitement carried into the protest raises a separate question of public security, one SPAK cannot pretend it did not see. by Renada Bici (Tirana Examiner Legal Desk) Two investigations could have been opened in Tirana this week. One has been. The …
Daily Briefing
At a Palace of Congresses gathering, the prime minister praised the party’s grassroots organisers, recounted his own entry into the party, and drew a sharp line between the Socialists and the opposition over the jailed mayor of Tirana. Hundreds of Socialist Party members, among them serving and former senior officials, gathered at the Palace …
Daily Briefing
Tirana Examiner Look at the placard first, because everything else follows from it. A man holds it above the crowd in Tirana. On it, the Prime Minister of Albania has been redrawn as a Haredi Jew: black hat, beard, sidelocks. A red sniper’s reticle sits on his face, centred between the eyes. Beside him a …
Daily Briefing
Tirana Examiner On 1 June, hundreds of people marched in Tirana against the resort project at Zvërnec. They were protesting the violence of 30 May when private guards dragged a protester across the ground while police watched. Then, in front of the Prime Minister’s Office, some in the crowd chanted “Poshtë Izraeli.” Down with …
Hard Talks
Interview with Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Ferit Hoxha, on the program “World News” on Klan television 24 April 2026 Linda Karadaku: The main issue under discussion with Greece is the delimitation of the maritime border. Prime Minister Rama said the matter is in Strasbourg. Is there any movement, or has it simply …
Hard Talks
He built a publication in a language he does not fully speak, to cover a country the world largely ignores, with a team of volunteers working from laptops and smartphones. The idea came to him not in a Tirana office but in a hotel room in a distant country, reading a foreign magazine, thinking about …
Hard Talks
Albania’s new Foreign Minister spent his career inside the institutions the country now seeks to join. But as EU enlargement enters its most demanding phase, a parliamentary vote shields his former deputy prime minister from arrest, his prime minister co-signs a European initiative with a man who declared war on Albania days later, and Brussels …
US - International
Daniel Serwer delivered these remarks in Tirana on 28 May 2026, at an event organized by the Albanian Institute for International Studies, where Albert Rakipi posed the question that gives the talk its title. Serwer is Professor and Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and …
US - International
The same week Washington reaffirmed Dayton and signed into law sanctions on actors who threaten Bosnia’s territorial integrity, the host of the Banja Luka summit publicly aligned Flynn’s project with Putin’s strategic posture. The architecture, in the host’s own words. Drizan Shala The First European Economic and Security Summit, convened by the Gold Institute …
US - International
The Serbian Progressive Party’s written embrace of the Chinese Communist Party has placed before the European People’s Party a question its foundational identity was constructed to exclude. by Ngadhnjim Brovina (Pristina) The transnational party family is, in the scholarly literature on European political integration, treated as one of the more consequential institutional innovations of …
