Our Man in Tirana

IPS has another couple of articles on Albania. One looks at attempts to manage biodiversity , the other at efforts to manage waste disposal . A list of all the recent IPS articles on Albania with links is also available . BIRN has a summary of the state of play in the Presidential election as the next vote approaches, and a report on criticism from PAMECA , the EU police mission in Albania, of the recent sackings of large numbers of police officers - many of them trained by PAMECA. The South East Europe Media Organisation has added its voice to criticism of the fine slapped on Top Media. Finally the Times has the articles on the death of Prel Marku , an Albanian living in London, who was the innocent victim of a conflict between Albanian criminal gangs in the city .

In October 2006 the Albanian parliament announced an international competition to come up with a design for a new parliamentary complex. In January this year ten of the competitors were shortlisted for the second phase. On 28 June the jury made its final decision (only available in Albanian on the Parliament's website for the moment). The winning submission was made jointly by two Swiss architects, Mario Campi and Fabio Reinhart , and an Albanian architect, Agron Jano. Even though the photographs seem to have disappeared from the webpage containing the official announcement, they are available elsewhere, so here is the winning entry: This structure is built onto the Parliamentary complex on Blvd. Dëshmorët e Kombit, one of the two main buildings currently used by the Parliament. The aim of the competition, as stated in the original announcement is ...to select architectural, urban planning, and spatial ideas and solutions for the New Parliamentary Complex. The competition aims...

This makes the police's failure to deal with traffic accidents seem fairly excusable.

I was hanging around in the street watching the world go by when I heard a crunch. In a very Albanian kind of collision one of the pony-drawn carts that the Roma use had run into the back of a Volkswagen Golf parked nearby. The front right of the cart had hit the back left of the car damaging the bumper and the side panel. After a brief inspection of the damage the 'driver' of the cart climbed back up and took off as fast as he could, leaving the unfortunate owner of the car to deal with the consequences. This was bad, but what was really bad was that the policeman who was standing not 20 feet from me and no more than 60 feet from where the crash happened did absolutely nothing - he didn't go to the scene, he didn't talk to the man with the pony and cart, he didn't call anyone on his radio, nothing. Only when the pony man was a dot in the distance did he wander down to the car and have a look at the damage, though as far as I could see his interest was driven by cur...