Albanian gangs controlling UK drugs trade offer minibus trip and Channel crossing for £4,000 on TikTok
Official data released on Thursday has confirmed suspicions that Albanians are now a prominent national group among the asylum seekers travelling across the Channel.
But the Home Office and refugee charities are still trying to explain why there has been a recent surge in demand.
Continue reading...Lea Ypi says vocal minority of Albanians have sent torrent of online insults criticising her bestseller, Free
A memoir about growing up before and after the fall of communism in Albania has won rave reviews in the west but has prompted “vicious” abuse from a vocal minority of Albanians, its author says.
Free by Lea Ypi, a Marxist Albanian professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, might seem an unlikely bestseller.
Continue reading...PM Edi Rama says he will ‘never receive refugees for richer countries’ after Raab said UK was exploring plans
Albania has strenuously denied it is willing to process people crossing the Channel to Britain, after the UK deputy prime minister, Dominic Raab, confirmed that the government is exploring ways of processing asylum seekers abroad.
Edi Rama, the prime minister, said he would “never receive refugees for richer countries”, after a report in the Times suggested Albania would be willing to host an offshore processing centre for people arriving in the UK from France in small boats.
Continue reading...Police say tourists who had been staying in village of Qerret were aged between 31 and 60 years old
Four Russian tourists have been found dead at a beach resort in western Albania, police have said.
Albanian police issued a statement on Saturday saying the tourists were found asphyxiated in a hotel sauna in the village of Qerret late on Friday.
Continue reading...When the state fell, Ypi went from party Pioneer to traitor - in this extract from her acclaimed memoir she reveals the trauma of discovering the truth about her family and her country
• Read an interview with Lea Ypi
Every year on 1 May, portraits of Stalin were carried by the workers through the streets of Tirana to celebrate socialism and the advance towards communism. On Workers’ Day, TV programmes started earlier: you could follow the parade, then watch a puppet show, then a children’s film, then head out for a walk wearing new clothes, buy ice-cream and, finally, have a picture taken by the only photographer in town, who usually stood by the fountain near the Palace of Culture.
The first of May 1990, the last May Day we ever celebrated, was the happiest. Or perhaps it just seems that way. Objectively, it could not have been the happiest. The queues for basic necessities were getting longer and the shelves in the shops looked increasingly empty. But I did not mind. Now that I was growing up I was no longer fussy about eating cheap feta cheese or old jam rather than honey. “First comes morality, then comes food,” my grandmother cheerfully said, and I had learned to agree.
Continue reading...Car was reversing erratically in pedestrianised city square in capital, Tirana, before dramatic leap through open window
A man has made a running jump, feet-first, through the open window of a moving car in Albania’s capital to stop the driver spinning erratically through the city’s Skanderbeg Square.
Footage captured by dozens of cameras set up to report on the country’s general election shows the car’s wheels screeching as it reverses in circles around the pedestrianised square.
Continue reading...Almost 10,000 new cases in India on Thursday as WHO warns situation outside Europe deteriorating
India reported almost 10,000 new coronavirus cases on Thursday, with hospitals swamped in the worst-hit cities of Mumbai, New Delhi and Chennai, and predictions that the infection rate will not peak before the end of next month.
The country of 1.3bn people now has the fifth highest number of confirmed cases in the world, at 286,579. Over the last 24 hours 357 people have died from the virus, bringing the official toll to 8,102.
Continue reading...Member states clear way for Balkan countries to join after concerns over corruption
The EU can start membership negotiations with Albania and North Macedonia, according to a draft decision by the bloc’s 27 member states due to be finalised this week.
If approved as expected, the agreement would end two years of delays and signal new momentum for all six western Balkan countries – Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Albania, Bosnia and North Macedonia – seeking to join the EU.
Continue reading...Opponents of the communist regime under her husband’s rule say an ‘executioner has departed’
Nexhmije Hoxha, the widow of Albania’s Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha, died on Tuesday aged 99, her son said, having fallen dramatically from grace following his death but remaining the staunchest defender of his isolationist regime.
Most Albanians view Hoxha’s 40-year rule, when the country was cut off from the world much as North Korea is now and a pervasive secret police clamped down violently on dissent, as a dark period in its history that caused widespread misery and triggered a massive exodus after communism collapsed.
Continue reading...Could this relic of Albanian communist paranoia become the country’s next tourist attraction?
For nearly two decades, Feti Gjici worked on a project that was so secret he was made to lock the plans away in a safe before leaving his office each evening. He never spoke of it to his friends or family.
Gjici was the chief planner of the town of Kukës, in northern Albania, working during the years of the country’s communist regime, led by the Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha. The paranoid and isolationist leader was terrified of impending war and built hundreds of thousands of concrete bunkers to defend his population against the threat of invasion.
Continue reading...Magnitude 6.4 quake strikes at shallow depth, bringing down buildings in Tirana and nearby
At least 16 people have died and 600 people have been injured after a powerful earthquake hit Albania in the early hours of Tuesday, causing damage along the country’s Adriatic coastline and in the capital, Tirana. Several buildings collapsed, burying residents in the rubble.
The 6.4-magnitude quake struck shortly before 4am local time (0300 GMT), the US Geological Survey said, and was the second powerful tremor to hit the region in two months. It was centred 19 miles west of Tirana, at a shallow depth of 12.4 miles. Scores of aftershocks included three with preliminary magnitudes of between 5.1 and 5.4.
Continue reading...Several people have died and hundreds have been injured after the most powerful earthquake to hit Albania in decades rocked the capital, Tirana, and surrounding region, causing several buildings to collapse and burying residents in the rubble
Continue reading...A 6.4-magnitude earthquake struck Albania early on Tuesday, killing four people and sparking panic in the capital, Tirana, and other cities. The epicentre of the quake, the strongest in the region in decades, was about 20 miles north-west of Tirana, according to the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre
Continue reading...Money sent home by relatives working abroad has transformed Kamza over the past decade
Driving out of Albania’s capital, Tirana, into nearby Kamza, blocks of communist-era apartments give way to a chaotic jumble of houses of different colours, shapes and heights. Many are half-finished or being rebuilt. Some are just exposed brick, while others are painted near-fluorescent greens, oranges or yellows.
“People pay a lot of attention to the aesthetics of the houses,” says Njazi Murrja, who lives locally. “They show the culture and the wealth of the family.”
Continue reading...Three PMs attend marketing sales event on how wealthy can snap up citizenship from $100,000
Three prime ministers took to a stage in the ballroom of a five-star London hotel this week offering the world’s wealthiest people “golden passports” and citizenship of their countries in return for hundreds of thousands of pounds of investment or flat “contributions”.
Allen Chastanet, the prime minister of the Caribbean island of St Lucia, told about 300 members of the super-rich elite and their advisers gathered at the Rosewood hotel for “global citizenship conference” that his country’s economic mission was “going after high net-worth individuals and giving them a comfortable place to live”.
Continue reading...Enver Hoxha’s villa in central Tirana, once sealed off by the Albanian secret service and home to party elites, is to be opened to the public
The interiors of Enver Hoxha’s cavernous three-story villa are mostly just as they were when Albania’s communist leader died in 1985. By then, Hoxha had led a Stalinist dictatorship in the country for four decades, turning Albania into one of the most isolated and repressive states in the world.
During the communist period, the whole area around Hoxha’s house in Albania’s capital city, Tirana, was sealed off by police and secret agents. Known as the Blloku, the district functioned as a kind of wall-less Kremlin in the heart of Tirana, reserved for the party elite and their families.
Continue reading...Anti-government protesters target Edi Rama's office, calling for his resignation over corruption allegations. Supporters of Albania's opposition parties have been holding protests to try to push the government to accept snap elections
Continue reading...Police arrest four people and question 40 over audacious runway heist at Tirana’s Mother Teresa airport
Albanian police have arrested four people and questioned 40 others after armed robbers stole millions of euros from an Austria Airlines aeroplane in a deadly heist.
Armed men broke onto the runway of Tirana airport on Tuesday and stole the money due to be transported to a bank in Vienna, police said.
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