Thursday 00:48
The Examiner
by Skënder Minxhozi (Tirana) At the World Cup in South Africa years ago, a background noise like the buzzing of bees accompanied the matches, following the entire game. These were the famous African vuvuzelas, simple instruments like whistles that produced an uninterrupted, monotonous sound. For many watching on television it was an acoustic nuisance, …
The Examiner
A response to the open letter of eleven UK based Albanian associations By Ardit Rada (Tirana) Eleven Albanian associations in the United Kingdom, among them the student societies of Cambridge, LSE, UCL and Edinburgh, have addressed an open letter to Albania’s Government and Parliament. Lea Ypi shared it, which is why you have read …
The Examiner
Serbia’s minister stood at Khamenei’s funeral because Tehran judged that he had earned the place Drizan Shala On the third of July, in the vast hall of Tehran’s Grand Mosalla, the coffin of Ali Khamenei lay draped in the flag of the Islamic Republic, flanked by the smaller caskets of the family members who …
The Examiner
Renada Bici (Tirana Examiner Legal Desk) On Friday, the Coordinating Group of the protest movement delivered a formal declaration to the State Police and to the embassies of friendly states. It invoked Article 47 of the Constitution, cited the monitoring of the Albanian Helsinki Committee, and accused the police of disproportionate force on July …
The Examiner
(Narco-Patriots, continued) The political class diagnoses a narco-state. The data point instead to tourism, capital flows, and a textbook case of structural transformation. by Keler Marku (Washington D.C) In the first installment of the alleged narco-tale — narco-money in cooperation with the narco-state building narco-resorts for narco-influencers to take Instagram photos of the narco-free flamingos — …
The Examiner
Albania does not run on drug money, and its prosecutors never behaved as if it did. The dependency myth survives anyway, because it has customers, and some of them are hostile. By Bekim Besimi (Venice) There is a sentence about Albania that circulates in London tabloids, in Rome courtrooms, in Brussels corridors, and in …
The Examiner
By Drizan Shala, Security Desk Violence inside a protest movement is never a single data point. It is a signal that must be read against the movement’s trajectory, and on Day 33 of the Tirana protests the trajectory tells a specific story. The turn to street violence reveals two things at once, and neither …
The Examiner
The cold arithmetic of a very warm country by Keler Marku (Washington D.C) In the spring of 2026, tens of thousands of Albanians took to the streets of Tirana. They called it the Flamingo Revolution — after the flamingos of Zvërnec, a protected coastal wetland threatened by a resort project on a nearby former …
The Examiner
By Ylli Manjani (Tirana) There are commentators who say it with a strange calm: “Come on. They only threw eggs. No harm done.” Very well. What exactly must happen before we agree that we are looking at violence? Must bombs be thrown? Must there be casualties? Or does violence earn its name only once it is …
